Hostra gifted $4.2 million Garden City house for University President

                                                                                    

From Zillow.com

Pretty nice digs for Hostra President Susan Poser.

The university announced on December 15 that Hostra had acquired a "presidential residence" in Garden City through a "generous donation" from a member of the school's board of trustees.

Hofstra did not identify the residence nor name the trustee. 

However, sales listings in the area and records from the Nassau County Clerk indicate that this house was sold to Hofstra on Dec. 14 for $4.2 million. Its a pretty good guess this is the Presidential residence, not a dorm for out-of-state students.

The land records do not indicate who the generous trustee was but the talk around town is Peter Kalikow.

One question, of course, is why did Hofstra acquire a home for its president in Garden City and not Uniondale or Hempstead Village.

Hofstra, after all,  is located in Uniondale with a small section in Hempstead Village.

But maybe a prestigious  Garden City address is considered more presidential.

Another point to make is that this will likely take the house off the tax rolls since Hofstra is a tax-exempt institution.

According to Nassau County, the house this year paid more than $14,000 in property taxes, with a "home improvement" exemption of $1,921.

Don't know how much in village taxes will be taken off the roll.

The property description on the county assessment roll, by the way, says the house has six bedrooms and 3-1/2 baths, not eight baths as claimed in the above photograph from the multiple listing service.

Finally, Poser's objections to a casino at the HUB takes on a new look since she is talking as a Garden City resident as well as a university president.

She recently wrote an op-ed for Newsday where she expressed concern about gambling effects of students. But she also worried about traffic through her new hometown.

"With a casino at the Hub, Garden City, Westbury and other local villages will be coping with daily caravans of buses passing through their neighborhoods," she wrote.

"A casino at the Hub is not about the future, and it would not be an engine for economic and social prosperity. It would be dangerous for adjoining neighborhoods, and create a nightmare of traffic and pollution, not to mention anti-social behaviors that often crop up around casinos." 

However, her educational neighbor Nassau Community College, which is also located in Uniondale, welcomes the proposed casino development and has proposed a joint learning platform for some of its students.

In her op-ed, Poser instead backed the idea of a "mixed-use development" at the HUB that could "answer Gov. Kathy Hochul's call to build more affordable housing on Long Island."

More affordable housing on the largest undeveloped tract of land in Nassau County?

When Mitchel Field was developed back in the 1980s, Uniondale residents were essentially promised their streets would be paved in gold from all the new commercial taxes generated by the office development. They were also told that new lanes would be added to Meadowbrook Parkway to ease the traffic congestion and improvements would be made to surrounding roads.

Instead the new buildings received seemingly endless tax abatements; there were no new Parkway lanes and Uniondale endured increased traffic, higher property taxes and a very strained underground public water supply.

Affordable housing requires subsidies. Will Uniondale pay those subsidies? Will Garden City?