Dick Hubert’s Worldview: A Rye Brook real estate agent tells it like it is in a mailing!
March 21, 2024 at 12:12 a.m.
There’s a socio-economic wall around the Blind Brook School District that is both painful and necessary to discuss.
For the specifics, I’m turning to the Founding Agent of the Rye Brook Compass real estate office, Kori Sassower, who has been the #1 agent in Rye Brook since 2017.
She said she’s lived in Rye Brook “for the past 18 years with her husband, three children, and dog Snoop.”
Let me be clear: Sassower did not ask me to write this column, nor provide me with the data for it.
That information comes from a mailing she sent to homeowners and condo owners in the Blind Brook School District—of which I am one.
That a real estate agent would turn what could be called a solicitation for business into a brutal analysis of what the Blind Brook School District has become—a walled off garden for the financially privileged—stunned and impressed me.
First, there’s the cost of a home here.
Per Sassower:
Back in 2019, there were 101 homes that sold at a median price of $865,000. The average mortgage rate was 4.13%.
Last year, 2023, 89 homes were sold at a median price of $1,120,000. The average mortgage rate was 6.8%.
Second, and the real back breaker, there’s the taxes. Blind Brook School and Rye Brook Village taxes top the list. At the end of this month, you’ll be getting your County tax bill, which includes sewer district and Town taxes. The icing on the tax cake.
To quote Sassower’s mailing:
“In our village of Rye Brook, the taxes are always the # 1 reason sellers want to move. The carry cost just becomes too much. Taxes are a huge consideration for the buyers too. Buyers typically look at what they can afford on a monthly basis. If the mortgage rates and higher home prices are already elevating that number and then they couple that with a tax rate that is based off a full assessment (meaning your property taxes are based off your new purchase price) that combined monthly number is pricing out many new buyers from moving to Rye Brook. Low supply and the need for housing is fueling the market, but other factors like taxes and interest rates will shift where people decide to move.”
If you own your home outright, and your upkeep besides taxes are insurance, utilities, maintenance and, if you own a condo, association charges, the main question you have to ask yourself about moving is: where could you afford to go that would be less expensive after all costs are settled?
Some of our former School and Village Board members have moved far upstate, or out of state.
Others are hunkering down, with the inevitable sale coming from the deceased’s family who live out of state, or out of the immediate area, and are not planning to manage a rental property.
And who’s moving into our school district?
The answer: those with the income and capital resources who conclude that it’s cheaper to send their children to the equivalent of a private school masquerading as a public school and supported by steep community taxes than to pay for a private school education.
As for those in the poor and low- and middle-income population moving to Blind Brook?
As New York City’s late Mayor Ed Koch was fond of saying about any number of situations, “Fuggedaboutit.”
Blind Brook’s closed athletic fields
My Westmore News colleague David Tapia, in last week’s edition, laid out all the financially mind-numbing details of the position the Blind Brook Board is in now that their athletic fields have been shut down due to the dangers posed by decaying artificial turf.
That they are even considering replacing the turf with another turf field is, to my mind as a taxpayer and concerned citizen, absolutely mind blowing.
So, in advance of this past week’s Board hearing on what to do next, I bombarded Superintendent Colin Byrne with a must read and a must view.
The must view is one of the final episodes of HBO’s Real Sports, Season 29, episode 5, about 32 minutes in, available now on HBO Max, where they (and you) will find an absolutely stomach-churning report on the injuries and deaths caused by artificial turf among middle and high school athletes.
On top of that, I sent him a recent Washington Post investigation on the chemical hazards faced by anyone at any age playing on artificial turf.
Here’s the link to that article: https://wapo.st/3IAKdTW
One local governmental group that has gotten the message: the Town of Rye. They held a ceremony last Friday to celebrate the start of construction of new GRASS ballfields at Crawford Park, with the aid of a $200,000 state grant. Artificial turf was NEVER considered.
If the Blind Brook Board doesn’t vote to replace artificial turf with real grass, and someone gets hurt on that turf, remember this column item and send it to the attorneys who will be suing the Blind Brook Board on behalf of the injured (or worse) student and their family for every penny in the Blind Brook budget, and then some. Before that lawsuit is settled, every property taxpayer should decamp from the District if they can.
The Ron Belmont saga
I can’t forget the saga of former Harrison Town Supervisor Ron Belmont and his run in with the New York court system and his nemesis, current Harrison Town Supervisor Rich Dionisio.
You’ll remember Belmont won the election for Town Supervisor in November with write-in ballots even though his main opponent, Dionisio, placed a law on the ballot (which passed) limiting those serving as Supervisor to five terms.
Belmont said that law applied to his past five terms and that he’d be limited to five terms going forward. Dionisio’s attorneys said no, it applied to Belmont’s past service and thus he was ineligible to run as a write-in candidate.
I thought that was plain election stealing and said so in this column.
Belmont’s lawyers were even more apoplectic.
Sadly, neither of us knew the mentality of New York State judges.
Supreme Court Judge Lewis Lubell in White Plains, who counted the ballots in Belmont’s favor, ruled in December the term limits law applied to Belmont even though it was, in effect, retroactive.
Belmont’s attorneys lost the appeal to Lubell’s decision 4-0 at the Appellate Court, Second Division, in Brooklyn, and I wrote here that they needed that court’s approval to be heard at the highest appeals court in the state and would never get it.
Well, last week Belmont’s attorney Jeff Binder sent me a Mar. 13 Motion for Leave to Appeal he filed with The Court of Appeals in Albany.
He e-mailed me: “We have to ask permission to appeal, so here is our plea. We are not certain they will take the case, hopefully the disenfranchisement of over 4000 voters piques their interest.”
I wish Binder and Belmont well.
Up to this point, though, I can’t trust that our courts will make the right and honorable decision and hear the appeal and declare Belmont and his majority of voters actually won the election.
I welcome being proved wrong.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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