The 234 Apartment

By Mike Smollins Village of Lynbrook officials are mulling a proposal by development company Mill Creek Residential to build a luxury apartment complex on Rocklyn Avenue, near Merrick Road. Hot Skates, Fun Station USA and Hi Tech Security now occupy the three-acre site. “Today’s apartment residents are craving a downtown living experience along with convenient access to a mix of urban and suburban lifestyle experiences ,” Russell Tepper, a senior managing director at MCR, wrote in an email to the Herald. “Lynbrook’s new residential community would serve all types of residents … so that they may take advantage of the luxuries of suburban living , without sacrificing the trappings of an urban, modern lifestyle.” MCR acquires and operates high- end rental communities across the country, and has built complexes in West Hempstead, Mineola, Yonkers, Westchester County and New Jersey. Tepper said that the company would create a transit- oriented residential community — a walkable nei...

Along Florida's Turnpike in South Miami -Dade, where potato farms and fields of row crops stretched all the way to the visible horizon at the time when Hurricane Andrew struck , it’s virtually all rows of close-packed houses and townhomes today. Now the unavoidable noise walls are going up to forever block vistas once among the most beguiling in South Florida. Along South Dixie Highway , where scraggly lots, small farm fields and vegetable- and fruit-packing houses once mixed it up with used-car lots and budget motels, the landscape is a cornucopia of strip malls, Publix and Wal-Mart stores and fast- food chain restaurants . And everywhere there is traffic, backed up one way in the morning, when three-quarters of all employed adults in South Miami - Dade head north to downtown Miami , Coral Gables or even Doral to work, and the other way when they drive back home in the evening. Lightning struck as thunderstorms swept through the ruins of Homestead in the days after Hurricane...