Visit to a friend’s house led couple to a housing lottery, and they won
BY LORE CROGHAN
DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITER
Sunday, September 7th 2008, 6:58 PM
Joyce for News
Maria Pagan and Jose Jimenez with their daughter, Rachel, in their two-bedroom condo in the Melrose section of the Bronx.
Joyce for News
The view from their windows offers a change of scenery for the former Brooklynites.
Maria Pagan would never have known about the South Bronx apartment lottery if it weren’t for the street fair right outside a friend’s door.
Pagan, who lived in downtown Brooklyn, happened to be visiting the friend’s Melrose, Bronx, home that July 2006 weekend.
A booth at the fair offered info about the lottery for the Orion, a city-subsidized condo development at an urban renewal site on nearby Third Ave.
Frustrated after a recent round of househunting, Pagan and her husband Jose Jimenez decided to give it a try.
“It was my goal to be a home-owner in my 30s,” said Pagan, 35, a legal secretary in midtown. Jimenez, 33, is a staffer at Brooklyn Law School’s career services office.
They’d started prepping for a purchase five years ago by moving into the apartment that her dad, auto-parts store manager Rafael Pagan, rented in a landmarked former firehouse near MetroTech in Brooklyn.
The couple and their daughter, Rachel, who’s now 7, took the bedroom Pagan had as a teenager. The rent was $388 a month. They’d been paying $1,000 for space in one of her five sisters’ houses in East New York, Brooklyn.
Beyond the cheaper rent, they had a sentimental attachment to the former firehouse – it’s where they met and, during his teens, Jimenez lived there, too.
The couple used the savings from their lower rent to start paying down their debt of $47,000 in credit card balances and car and college loans.
By the time they closed on their apartment purchase, they’d cut their debt by $13,000 and saved the equivalent of three months of mortgage payments and two months of maintenance payments.
vJust before signing up for the lottery, they looked at houses on
Staten Island
, where another of Pagan’s sisters lives. They found a house they wanted for $370,000, but realized they couldn’t handle the down payment.
Apartments at the Orion were less of a stretch.
There were 60 condos for sale at the nine-story tower that Nos Quedamos, a community group; Procida Realty & Construction; L&M Development Partners; and Melrose Associates were developing – 46 at reduced prices for low- to moderate-income buyers, and 14 at full price for buyers who missed the income cutoff.
The two-bedrooms were $233,250 for families of three with incomes of less than $82,940 a year, and $269,000 for families of three with incomes greater than the limit.
For months, Pagan and Jimenez didn’t know whether they’d get picked. There were 598 applicants on the lottery list – and they were number 470.
As is customary with affordable housing developments that receive city grants and tax breaks, residents of nearby neighborhoods got first dibs, followed by disabled applicants, municipal employees and cops.
The vapplication deadline for the lottery was October 2006 – four months later they got a letter summoning them to an interview with Orion’s developers.
The developers ran credit checks to see if Pagan and Jimenez would qualify for a mortgage. Both had good credit scores of nearly 700.
With a combined annual income of $91,000, they didn’t qualify for a reduced-price apartment, but three full-priced two-bedrooms were available.
Opting for quiet, they picked an apartment in the back of the building based on architectural drawings. At the time, the Orion was just a “hole in the ground,” Jimenez said.
They made a 3% down payment with money borrowed from Pagan’s individual retirement account, then waited almost a year and a half for construction to finish. In the meantime, both got raises; their combined salary is expected to total $97,000 this year.
Also, Jimenez took a part-time job as a personal trainer at the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan that will bring in at least $8,000 a year.
Their monthly housing expense will total $2,000 – $1,600 for their mortgage, a 30-year, fixed-rate loan from Citibank at 6.25% interest, and $400 a month for building maintenance.
Last fall, they had a pre-housewarming party because they expected the apartment to be ready in October. It wasn’t. And friends kept asking when they’d be moving.
“I got to the point where I’d say, ‘Don’t ask me. I’ll send a massive e-mail,’ ” Pagan remembered.
Finally, in May – for the first time – they got to visit a two-bedroom unit at the Orion that had the same layout as theirs.
“It felt even bigger than we expected,” said Pagan, who’d studied photos of similarly sized apartments on craigslist to try to figure out how spacious their 916-square-foot condo would be.
The couple closed on their purchase in late July. They moved in the very same day. That first night, they slept on air mattresses, but still got a good night’s rest. “It was peaceful,” Pagan recalled.
The family has settled in and fallen in love with the view from their living-room windows of the Gothic spire of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, the classic outlines of the former Bronx Borough Court House – and the construction cranes at other apartment developments in the neighborhood.
The cranes are signs of the continuing renaissance of the South Bronx; as a homebuyer, Pagan believes she’s helping to bring change to the neighborhood, too.
“I’m coming from a different borough,” she said. “I’m taking a chance.”
lcroghan@nydailynews.com
