Author: Brett

Still stinging from our near-miss on a 3-bedroom Colonial in Port Washington, NY, we decided to switch gears and started looking somewhere we had always intended to check out, but had never quite gotten to: Bayside, Queens.

Bayside is sandwiched between the Clearview and the Cross Island Expressways and is cut in half by Northern Boulevard. It has a LIRR train stop which is about a 30 minute trip. Bayside has a suburban feel with the added bonus of city buses, parks, and low property taxes. The city public schools are exceptional, and as a former NYC middle-school teacher, this is not a phrase you will ever hear me bandy about. The neighborhood elementary schools, in fact, are so high-performing that they were exempt from the Dept. of Ed’s Orwellian standardized curriculum—a very good thing (art, music and recess, anyone?)

Ok, so there could be less cars and chain restaurants, but there are still oodles of affordable houses within walking distance to the train. It’s no wonder that “Time Out New York Kids” magazine touted Bayside last month as being one of the city’s best new neighborhoods for raising a family.

We have made two trips to Bayside so far—once on our own, and the other with an agent. On the first trip, we saw a roomy Center Hall Colonial for $768K on 205th St. The house had many great features—a sunny eat-in kitchen and outside patio, a finished attic bedroom, and 2 1/2 baths, along with a finished basement. The catch, of course, was that nothing had been updated in at least 15 years and it needed more work than we could possibly afford at that price. A great opportunity—for someone, but not us. Still, the same house would have listed for around $825 in Madison, here in Brooklyn.

Next, we drove to 213th St to see a newly gut-renovated Tudor in Bayside Hills, a leafy, section marked by stone pillars and green malls. This diminutive Tudor for $725 (price has now been lowered to $715k since we saw it last month!) had 3 tiny bedrooms, a barely-there kitchen with breakfast bar overlooking the dining room (dining square foot?) and a postage-sized backyard. What really made it a loser, however, was the basement. You could actually see the raw seams of the main floor as you descended to the “unfinished” basement. There, in one corner, someone had laid the tile for a second bathroom and had attached the door. So, this must have been what the listing meant when they said that there were 2 full bathrooms! Apparently not, since when we asked the listing agent, he replied that this was it for the bathroom—there would be no further work done on it. And I thought that after house-hunting for 3 years that I had seen it all….

After attending the open houses, we had lunch at Pizzeria Uno’s on Bell Boulevard, one of the main shopping streets, and also where the train station is located (at 41st ave). Normally, we wouldn’t bother with a chain, but since we had the kids along, we needed something family-friendly. We decided on our next trip that we would focus on looking at houses north of Northern Boulevard, to make it easier and safer to walk to the train and to shops. We felt like we had a better sense of home prices in Bayside and we agreed that homes were definitely more affordable here than in Brooklyn.

The question remained: Would we find what we were looking for?