The Journal News from White Plains, New York • Page 97

Suntajj $ournaHNfeus jbueai TATE Housing sales H7 Real estate classified 19-22 ROCKLAND COUNTY, N.Y., SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 1987 HI 1 ON THE HOME FRONT Donald Trump is building a new skyline BY LEW SICHELMAN A i I A primer on house-hunting homework WASHINGTON Although real-estate professionals consider location to be of the utmost importance in buying a home, it's surprising how few buyers give more than passing consideration to where they will live. Other buyers check out the immediate neighborhood, but fail to consider the entire community, town or county. Then they buy a beautiful house in a beautiful section of a market that's riddled with crime or taxed to the hilt. To be an informed home shopper, and to keep such surprises to a minimum, it is necessary to do your homework before you start hunting for a house. Then, when you decide on the general area in which you want to live, you can begin looking for specifics.

Start by determining your priorities. Do you want to be closer to work? Are you looking for a better school system for the children, or do you want to be near the golf course and tennis courts? You want to gauge not only the amount of time it takes to get to and from, but also the cost in gasoline or carfare, as well as the aggravation you'll have to put up with. Take some test runs. Also look for access to public transportation, if you plan to use it. If schools are important, find out how the various systems stack up against one another.

Compare the annual expenditure per student, average class size and the ratio of teachers to students. Also look for top quality curriculums, average achievement scores, the percentage of graduates who go on to college and special programs such as those for gifted children, the handicapped or slow learners, who tend to slow down entire classes unless they get special attention. Even if you don't have children, schools should be an important consideration. If you eventually want to have children, it won't be long before they're ready for school, so you might as well look for the best now. However, property taxes are sometimes higher in jurisdictions with the better schools.

To compare property taxes, you'll need to know more than just the rate. You'll also need to find out at what percentage of market value houses are taxed. For example, a $100,000 house may be assessed at 50 percent of value in one county, but Sat 75 percent in another. So, even if the rate is "'higher, the tax could be lower. Also, don't forget other taxes.

Besides the "county property tax, there may be state personal-property taxes, town taxes, employment levies or even special school-district taxes. Another "tax" home buyers tend to forget is settlement charges. Frequently, closing costs are higher in one jurisdiction than in another. It is impossible to list all the possibilities when considering particular locations, but some of the others should include proximity to shopping and recreation not just regional -facilities but local, neighborhood facilities, too. Even after you find the house of your dreams, you have other territorial situations to consider.

If you don't, your dream could become a nightmare. Above all, find out what's planned for the area. It may be something you can live with, but it may not. The woods behind the house could be earmarked for an apartment complex, for example, or the dead end down the block could be connected to the on-off ramp of a projected super highway. rJli ini tiiiii ii idMfff---nmiiir mini i wit ri i mi I mi iWimrfl The son of a Brooklyn housing baron carves his name into Manhattan Los Angeles Times News Service NEW YORK On the 31st floor of what was once the Barbizon Plaza Hotel is the gutted shell of a future multimillion-dollar apartment.

Electrical wires hang from the ceiling, a cold wind slices through empty window frames, and a rickety wood plank leads to a terrace the size of a tennis court overlooking Central Park. It is here that a wealthy European businessman, who spends three days a month in New York, will build a pied-a-terre: a duplex with extra rooms for his pilot, chauffeur and secretary. To Blanche Sprague, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, which is overseeing the conversion of the hotel into luxury condominiums, the sale of this apartment in what is now known as Trump Pare is a testament to the magic touch of her boss, real estate developer Donald Trump. In less than four months, nearly half of the 340 units have been sold, with no model and some at prices as astronomical as $1,700 a square foot. Standing on the terrace, wrapped in mink, the fast-talking 41-year-old executive commands a spectacular panorama.

To the north, skaters can be seen gliding across Wollman Rink, which Trump recently refurbished for the city. Across the street is the St. Moritz Hotel, which Trump bought two years ago for about $30 million. And to the east, through a forest of office buildings, glimmers Trump Tower, the sleek Fifth Avenue edifice where the developer both lives and works. "We're not selling apartments," says Sprague, transfixed by her own hype.

"We're selling sex and dreams. We're selling a piece of Donald Trump." MORTGAGE UPDATE RATES OF AREA LENDERS empty as part of his conversion of the adjacent Barbizon Plaza Hotel, he initiated eviction proceedings and, tenants charged, failed to make repairs and allowed security to lapse. At one point, he even proposed moving homeless families into vacant apartments in the building. The dispute was settled in December, on terms highly favorable to the tenants, but the city is continuing to press harassment charges. In another case, which has received little attention, tenants at Trump's Shore Haven apartment complex in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, have gone to court to overturn a policy requiring them to pay $47.50 to $60 a month for parking spaces in a dilapidated garage whether or not they have a car.

The tenants say they had no choice when they were told at lease signing that getting an apartment hinged on accepting the garage agreement. "It came up real sneaky," said Rosemary Bombelino, who is wheelchair-bound due to multiple sclerosis. Bombelino says the managing agent assured her she could sublet her space. But in fact, the garage lease forbids subletting. The image of Trump squeezing $50 a month from tenants in Bensonhurst, or trying to evict people on Central Park South, doesn't particularly suit a man who fashions himself an inspirational leader of the city's economic resurgence, and who likes to talk about solving the most pressing issue facing mankind today the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Trump's plan to build a 150-story building on Manhattan's West Side a building so tall it would cast a 25-block-long shadow over Riverside Park has stirred opposition among those who maintain that the neighborhood can't absorb development on that scale. His proposal to build a domed stadium in Queens, approved by state officials but probably doomed for want of a football team to play there, has aroused the wrath of Willets Point businessmen who would be forced to move. And his decision some years ago to jackhammer two Art Deco panels on the facade of Bonwit Teller, which he was razing to make way for Trump Tower, hardly improved his standing among New York's culturati. But what irks his critics most is his vision of New York or, more precisely, his lack of vision. "He doesn't have any vision of society," says Kenneth Frampton, chairman of the division of architecture at Columbia University.

"His vision of what is a desirable social contribution is totally compromised by his greed is maybe too crude a word but by totally ruthless calculations and ego." People who work for Trump, or do business with him, often describe him in glowing terms. "He's an absolute genius," says Sprague, the executive in charge of Trump Pare. "I feel like I'm in the middle of a tidal wave that's washing over New York and changing the face of the city." "Trump really is as brilliant as he appears to be," adds Anthony Gliedman, former city housing commissioner and now an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. "He sees things that others don't, and he has the assets at his disposal to make happen what he sees. It's very exciting." Gliedman has more than one reason to enjoy being on Trump's team.

A few years ago, when he was working for the city, he was personally sued for $10 million by the developer after he denied him a tax abatement on Trump Tower. The suit was dropped Please see TRUMP on page H3 few months, capped by his purchase of a controlling interest in Resorts International, has made him the dominant player in the casino business. For a developer who, only a dozen years ago, was best known for his association with a middle-income housing project in Coney Island, the rise has been meteoric. He turned the $40-million fiefdom of his father, Fred Trump, a Brooklyn housing baron, into an empire worth more than $1 billion. He rocketed from obscurity to celebrity, his every move closely watched by gossip columnists, politicians and rival developers.

Recently, he even played himself in the television miniseries "I'll Take Manhattan," parts of which were filmed where else? at.Trump Tower. But Trump's ascent has not been without controversy. Although he has managed to stay clean, according to law-enforcement sources, in two of the dirtiest industries on the East Coast New York City construction and Atlantic City gambling his success rests on more than mere business acumen. He has curried favor with politicians, giving more campaign contributions to members of the Board of Estimate more than $300,000 since 1981 than any other contributor. He has hired or retained influential government officials, including former New York City Housing Commissioner Anthony Gliedman, former Deputy Mayor Stanley Friedman and Louise Sunshine, the chief fund-raiser for former Gov.

Hugh Carey. And on many occasions he has used the courts to retaliate against opponents. Trump has sued the federal government for accusing him of race discrimination in the rental of apartments in Brooklyn and Queens ($100 million); the city of New York for initially denying him a tax abatement on Trump Tower ($138 million); The Chicago Tribune for publishing a scathing review of his proposed 150-story building ($500 million); a rival attorney in a landlord-tenant dispute ($105 million); a rival developer who put up a look-alike building across the street from Trump Plaza ($50 million); a rival casino company ($100 million); and, along with other United States Football League owners, the National Football League ($1.69 billion). All of these cases were either thrown out of court or dropped as part of a settlement, except the last, the antitrust suit against the NFL, in which Trump won a Pyrrhic victory that netted him, as his share of the jury's award, a total of seven cents. Trump has also, according to lawsuits brought by tenants in Trump-owned buildings, engaged in harassment and unfair practices.

In one much-publicized case involving tenants at 100 Central Park South, a rent-controlled building Trump wanted to Bank down Rate Points Term Century Capital 10 8.75 2.5 30 Chemical 10 9.625 3 30 Comfed Mortgage 5 8.875 2.25 30 First FederalSuffern 25 9.125 2 15 First Nat'lHighland 20 9.5 3 30 Greater Met. Fin. 10 8.5 3 15 Man. Hanover 20 8.5 2.5 A 130 Peoples Mortgage 10 8.875 1.5 15 Sav. Bank Rock.

.10 7.5 2 A 130 Southern Mortgage 20 9.375 2 30 There are plenty of pieces of Donald Trump around. Over the past decade, the 40-year-old developer has left his mark on New York's skyline and its psyche. He helped reverse the fortunes of East 42nd Street by transforming the rundown Commodore Hotel into the glitzy and hugely successful Grand Hyatt. He put his name in two-foot-high brass letters over the revolving doors of Trump Tower, his $190-million monument to conspicuous consumption; chiseled it in limestone on the facade of Trump Plaza, a luxury building on Third Avenue where Lee Iacocca, Phyllis George and Dick Clark all have apartments; and wrote it in floor-to-ceiling script on a billboard outside Trump Pare on Central Park South. He bought a football team, fixed a skating rink in five months that the city had spent six years trying to repair and recently threw a parade up Fifth Avenue for the America's Cup crew.

Now Trump is gearing up for a $5-billion megadevelopment on an old freight yard on Manhattan's West Side 7,600 apartments, television studios, an enormous shopping center, a garage and the world's tallest building. And he is extending his reach beyond New York to West Palm Beach, where he recently bought (and hoisted his name atop) a bankrupt condominium tower; to Aspen, where he plans to build that ski resort's largest hotel; to Los Angeles, where he made an unsuccessful bid last year to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel and is looking actively for other properties; and to Atlantic City, where a series of bold maneuvers over the past NOTE: Conventional mortgages only, unless otherwise indicated. A Adjustable mortgage loan. Some banks may offer other types of mortgages in addition to those listed. Data compiled 32087 by HSH Associates, Riverdale, N.J.

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