Litter Affects Neighborhoods, but Getting Better?

 By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

Litter.  Littering. Litterbug.  They would be almost cute sounding words were it not for their meaning and the deleterious affect they can have on our communities, neighborhoods and individual properties.

The issue of litter and its relation to real estate became abundantly clear to me a while back when I was driving to a house showing on a rather busy street, and the young couple I was accompanying told me to cancel the appointment even before seeing the property.  I thought the reason may have been that they preferred a quieter street. But that was not the issue. The female said, “I can’t live on a street where people just let litter lie there like that. Does the whole town have so little respect for the environment?” (And as it happens, they did choose another town that they felt was less littered.)

I don’t know how extensive the research is, but Keep America Beautiful tells us that houses for sale in littered neighborhoods usually don’t get the best prices, and littered towns have less chance of attracting new business, residents and tourists.

Because my property sits on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by roads, two of which are relatively busy, I believe that I have become somewhat of an expert on litter in the more than 30 years I’ve owned it.

What people discard from their cars or as pedestrians shows something how they live. And while the major offending throw-away in the 70s was cigarette butts, I would say that today it is mostly go-cups from slush machines, plastic containers for bottled waters and beer cans.

And, through the years, I’ve experience what I call serial episodes of littering.  For instance, for a period of more than 10 years, every single day, an empty pack of Parliament cigarettes in the hard box would be discarded on the corner of my property in exactly the same spot, accompanied by one cigarette butt.  Strange, huh? Surely, I thought, my property was targeted by some weirdo.

And while I like to think that I don’t possess a hateful bone in my body, I did start to hate the unknown perpetrator of this little crime (yes, it’s illegal).  I would fantasize about catching him (and, yes statistics reveal that most litterers are men) in the act, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and giving him a swift kick in his other butt.

And when his long-term daily deposit suddenly cased, all I could surmise was that he had moved to another community to fowl the air and the environment there. Gee, do I sound angry? 

Besides smokers, I think there must be a lot of overweight litterbugs out there because most of the packaging materials I pick up are either fromMcDonald’s or Burger King, always with a French fry container and a milk shake cup.  

The frustrating thing is that I’ve never once seen anyone actually discard litter on my property. I suspect they check first to make sure that nobody is looking or rid themselves of the refuse of their gustatory sprees in the dead of night when homeowners are fast asleep in their beds.

Keep America Beautiful also tells us that 75 percent of Americans admit to littering within the past five years (I’m in the 25 percent of those who never litter, and I’m sure you are too).  Most common litter offenders are men between the ages of 18 and 34 who eat in fast food restaurants at least twice a week, go out for entertainment at least once a week and drive more than 50 miles a day.  So, while we may never catch them, we know a little more about them.

To help individuals out, most towns have a clean-up day at least once a year. In my hometown of Yorktown, it usually takes place around Earth Day in April. This year, 668 people in 115 teams picked up 10 tons of roadside litter. Also in my town, as with most other towns, we have road sponsorships by local companies, which have varying degrees of success.  Bette Midler is a champion of sponsoring roads to remove litter in New York City.

While most towns have codes that classify littering as illegal and impose fines for businesses or individuals caught littering, do you know anyone who has ever been fined for littering? I don’t. In all these years I’ve lived in Westchester, only twice have I actually seen someone in the act of littering, but that was while I was driving in my car and saw a driver in front of me do it.

The first time, I saw a young man at a stoplight throw out a large soda cup, still filled with ice. I pulled alongside the offender (who incidentally had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth), rolled down my window and, perhaps venting years of frustration in not catching any of the guys who littered my own property, I shouted, “Pig!” His equally gruff response to me was to do something that I am pretty sure is physically impossible, at least for me.

But just recently, I had a better experience as a litter vigilante.  Again, I saw a young man in front of me toss out a wrapper of some kind from his car window, and again I was able to pull alongside the car. With the kind of moderation that comes with the years, this time I said, “You know, it would be really nice if you didn’t throw your trash on the road.” This young man, obviously embarrassed, said sheepishly, “I’m sorry, sir,” and got out of his car to retrieve it

Thankfully, the volume of litter around my own property and from what I’ve observed on neighboring properties and along the roads would seem to have lessened significantly in the past three or four years, don’t you agree?  Is it because the environmental message is getting across?  Or is it that consumers, beleaguered by a continuing recession, are spending less money on disposable goods? 

Whatever the reason, I’m grateful.

 Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (PrimaveraPR.com). He can be emailed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reached directly at 914-522-2076. Follow him on Twitter for housing market updates at Twitter.com/HomeGuruNY.

More Bedrooms Needed for Couples Sleeping Apart?

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

 Last week there was a lot of fuss on broadcast and online about the revelation by the National Sleep Institute that as many as one in four married couples sleep in separate bedrooms or beds. It came as a surprise to many who posted comments on line, some not believing the findings and others saying, so what’s new?  

At the same time, the National Association of Home Builders, perhaps riding on the coattails of the report, projected that 60 percent of custom homes will feature dual master bedrooms by the year 2015, according to a joint report by The New York Times and the Today Show.

“That’s pure poppycock!” exclaimed Barry Goewey, noted architect in Westchester. “I just don’t believe it, and I would never design a home based on couples who sleep in separate master bedrooms,” he continued. “The average homeowner cannot afford the additional square footage that would require.”

Another architect who works in the region, Michael Piccirillo, also found the report incredulous. “In all my years of designing homes, not one family ever asked me for two separate master bedrooms. If anything, people today want to downsize space, not increase it,” he said. “If you add 200 square feet for an extra master bedroom, it’s going to add $40,000 to $50,000 to the cost of the house.  And think about septic!  Many of us in this area are on septic systems, and the requirements for fields are based on the number of bedrooms in a house. It would screw up the whole works.”

Still the statistics are there to observe, ponder and question how these findings will affect the design of new homes in the next decade. 

 In our own lifetimes, we’ve already experienced the design modifications that accompanied our lifestyle changes. These include the diminution of the formal living room, the creation of the family room and the den, the development of the large granite-laden, brushed steel gourmet kitchen, the adoption of the home office and home gym, and the evolution from the Cape to the Colonial as the preferred home style, all of which dictated the need for additional square footage. But, now, separate master bedrooms for husband and wife?

Another consideration is the interior design of master bedrooms for male and female. Joanne Palumbo of Homestyling101 says, “Maintaining separate bedrooms is fine for living, if it suits you,  but once you put the home on the market, the homeowners really should distinguish one of the bedrooms as a gender neutral master bedroom and the other as a secondary bedroom. Showing a home with two gender specific master bedrooms conveys a feeling of discord in the home and will inevitably confuse the buyer.”

Most couples are loathe to talk about their personal lives to friends and families, particularly sleeping arrangements, even if it has nothing to do with intimacy, but they are more likely to share more honestly in an anonymous survey, as with this current report.

Personally, I wondered whether this is a reflection of the condition of the economy and the housing market. Greater anxiety might produce more volatile sleep patterns, or, it might indeed be an issue with intimacy caused by financial problems, the main reason that married couples quarrel. You know the old saying that when poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window.

In the Times, the reasons for separate sleeping arrangements seemed to be other than intimacy issues, but more weighted toward physical problems that were disturbing to bed partners, such as nervous leg syndrome and snoring, and to the practical accommodation of different schedules, like morning and night shifts between spouses. 

And, realtors have been noticing more cases where couples who list their homes for sale are planning to divorce but are still living under the same roof, probably in separate bedrooms, because neither party can afford to move until the house sells.

According to the Institute’s findings, the trend toward sleeping separately has doubled in the past few decades, and perhaps we were conditioned to this practice by the moral codes of the times before sexual liberation. 

When I was a kid, the Hayes Code dominated the movies in Hollywood and it demanded that on-screen couples not sleep in the same bed.  I always knew that this did not reflect real life because, unlike movie couples, my parents always wrapped themselves around each other in the same bed.  I know this because my mother would complain that my father’s muscular legs and arms weighted her down like a vice, but obviously she liked it because they slept together intertwined like a pretzel every night.

Before the adoption of the Hayes Code was the Great Depression when couples were lucky to afford a bed, much less two bedrooms. 

And if you want to go way back to Colonial times, there was little chance of sleeping separately for most folks, coupled or not. Beds were a luxury item at the time and many siblings and adults were forced to share beds, especially when traveling. Male travelers often had to share a bed with three or four other men in overcrowded inns. Sometimes even mixed sexes shared the same bed in an ingenious way, separated by a “bundling board” between them, but that was more a courting custom, to determine whether couples could be compatible all day and night, without being intimate before marriage.

In more recent times that more of us would remember, “I Love Lucy” featured Lucy and Ricky in separate beds (and how we wonder did she have that famous pregnancy under such conditions?), and we never questioned the propriety of these sleeping arrangements. In fact, I think we were all  surprised when on-screen couples finally did slip into the same bed, with the proviso that one of them have one foot on the floor (imagine?), a position that would certainly be a deterrent to achieving intimacy, save for the athletically gifted.

Of course, if we were to judge by what goes down on screen today, our younger generation would think that the bed is primarily for coupling and only incidentally for a good night’s sleep. 

While statistics may sometimes be skewed, they don’t totally lie, and if more of us need to sleep separately for whatever reason and can’t afford the space required, what is one to do?   Mike Piccirillo offers a simple solution:  “Get a great couch.”

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (PrimaveraPR.com). He can be emailed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Follow him on Twitter for housing market updates at Twitter.com/HomeGuruNY.

Moving On After the Tax Credit

Filed June 29, 2010

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

Whether we get our information about the state of the housing market from newspaper headlines or from a small gathering at an adult education seminar in a local public library, all of us considering selling or buying a home have been anxious to know what would happen after the $8,000 federal tax credit program expired on April 30. 

At the end of last week, when the Commerce Department reported a 33 percent decline in sales of new homes in May, compared with the month before, we got the gist of the matter.  But, not the whole picture.

As the  largest single decline reported since records have been kept by the Department, a span of 47 years, this announcement was certainly bad news, but somewhat misleading in that it focused on new home construction rather than existing home sales, which had not dipped as drastically. 

But still, the news was chilling, especially for those wanting to move on with their lives.

On the same day of the announcement, there was a small gathering of adults, mostly senior citizens, who had come to the reading room of the John C. Hart Public Library in Yorktown for an adult education seminar called “Real Estate 2010! State of the Market” with the subtitle, “Downsizing, Upgrading or Moving South.”  Considering the news, the topic was of timely relevance, and the questions from attendees, tinged with uncertainty, were telling.  Basically, they wanted to know, what could be ahead for us?

Housing analysts had hoped that the recent increased activity of the market, buoyed by the tax credit, would continue after its expiration.  This prospect was based on the adjusted sales prices of homes, combined with historically low mortgage interest rates which last week sank to 4.69 percent, the lowest in more than half a century. But obviously this good news was not enough to keep the momentum of home sales going.

The degree of disappointment varies with the region of the country. In our area, while we wait to see the results of this quarter’s report from the Westchester/Putnam Association of Realtors, those of us working with home sellers and buyers know that, while offers have slowed during the month of May and June, they have by no means fallen off the radar. 

Here, compared with last May, there is slightly improved activity in both the higher and lower ends but, as across the nation, prospective home sellers and buyers still remain largely on the sidelines. While sellers may be hoping that prices will appreciate once more, it doesn’t seem likely to happen soon, judging from historic cycles. And with prospective buyers, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of waiting until home prices drop still lower, but rather, one of concern about the state of the economy overall and the security of their jobs.

At the seminar, the mood was one of some concern, demonstrated by the prevalence of interest in the workings of short sales. But, while realistic, the presenters were upbeat. All associated with Coldwell Banker, they included Joe Monaco, managing broker of the Yorktown office, Denise Giordano, associate broker in the same office, and Jennifer Maldonado, licensed mortgage banker.

‘The state of the market nationally is unlike anything we’ve seen in many years,” Monaco acknowledged in his opening segment, “but there are good opportunities at the moment, particularly for buyers.”

For sellers, Monaco said they must price their homes realistically in accordance with conditions in a highly competitive marketplace. “And remember, what you might sacrifice in selling, you can win back when you buy again,” he said.

 For buyers, Monaco advised that there is an unprecedented opportunity to secure a home where all positive factors are in place with mortgage rates still at historic lows at the same time that “prices have come to rest at what many of us believe is the bottom of the decline.” 

“Some homeowners are considering riding out the recessionary market until things improve, and that’s fine if the home isn’t too expensive for them to live in,” he noted. “But, it will probably be a much longer recovery than we’ve experienced in former recessions,” he continued. “If it’s time for them to move on with their lives, then it all boils down to a lifestyle choice.”

For those wanting to sell, Denise Giordano advised that “your home must be marketed as a product to be sold. It must outshine all the others on the block to compete in the marketplace.” Giordano outlined the measures that can be taken to increase curb appeal outside and to properly stage the home on the inside.  “To get the advantage, your home must look like the brilliant diamond of the neighborhood,” she advised.

After a statistical review by Monaco of how the median price of homes in Westchester and Putnam has declined in the past two and a half years, attendees at the seminar, mostly retired citizens, were most interested in knowing more about how short sales work, which may or may not have been revealing that possibility for some of them. One man asked, “What can we expect going forward from here?” 

Monaco responded that the market will probably remain flat, with no real appreciation any time soon, perhaps taking as long as three, five or even seven years to recover. “However, we should experience an increase in unit sales as soon as we see real jobs being created and as the market absorbs the new flux of foreclosures and current inventory,” he concluded.  “We just must expect a slower climb back.”

 Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (PrimaveraPR.com). He can be emailed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Follow him on Twitter for housing market updates at Twitter.com/HomeGuruNY.

Stripping Wallpaper, Painting Walls and Letting Go

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

In preparation for the sale of my home, I decided it was time to “neutralize” my favorite, but most taste-specific and highly personalized room, my “man cave.” Considering that until very recently it featured flowered French wallpaper, dove white wall-to-wall carpeting, antique needlepoint samplers and Currier & Ives prints, it certainly didn’t look much like a man cave.

The reason for the room’s confused gender identity is that, after my daughter married, I commandeered her former bedroom. I never removed the decidedly feminine wallpaper, perhaps because I wanted to maintain a sense of her style around me. Instead, I adapted the room for my own use as my at-home computer space, my private entertainment theatre (when my wife wanted to watch certain programs like Project Runway), my gym, complete with Nordic track, free weights and large exercise balls, and as the repository for my collections of antique toys and large pieces of translucent minerals. (Yeah, I’m a weird collector.)

Visually it was a study in clutter, but I had grown comfortable with it. I write about it in the past tense, because I sit now in the same room, stripped of busy wallpaper, painted in neutral tones of teal and gold, the wall-to-wall carpeting gone, exposing the hardwood floors, still in excellent condition, and less than half of my personal collections in evidence. 

The needlepoint samplers and old prints are gone, replaced by a collection of nautical prints whose blues and greens create a monochromatic effect against the teal walls. It may sound good, but I’m feeling a conflicting sense of liberation and separation simultaneously. 

Maybe it all happened too quickly for mental adjustment. The complete job of the room’s transformation was done with great speed, but not by me. The talented service provider for quick-change was Joe Pascarelli of Garrison Restoration Systems.

Originally I had planned to do all this myself as I did with another big room in my house:  the main office space of my public relations firm. That job was accomplished with the business in full operation, but at night when my partner and assistant had gone home. I moved the furniture around and stripped the wallpaper wall by wall, and followed that up piecemeal with paint. Working steadily, about three nights a week, this job required six weeks to accomplish.

In the hands of Joe and two other able crew members, the same kind of job took less than two days! The work and time organization were seamless, considering the size of the room, 18’ by 20,’ and the amount of furniture, accessories and personal items that had to be moved, then set back in place.

I found Joe by responding to a call for help from a reader, a mature woman about to retire to the South, who also wanted to have her bedroom depersonalized with wall paper removal and painting. I called around and found that most painters refuse to do wallpaper removal. Joe was the one who said, “Yes, I do it all!” 

When he had finished that job, my reader called me enthusiastically, saying that she was delighted, not only with the beautiful paint job, but also with the careful removal and replacement of all of her furniture and accessories. “He even re-made my bed!” she exclaimed. 

“I think it’s important to show up on time and do what you say you’re going to do,” said Joe, a former fireman from Yonkers, but a painter for more than 20 years.

At my house, to remove the wallpaper, he used Dif, the product made expressly for that purpose. It was mixed with very hot water and applied with a commercial sprayer. Then he and his team went to work with broad blade spackle knives to remove the paper. When I told him how easy he made the process look, compared with my endless struggle in doing the same job, he modestly responded that “experience is the best teacher.”

From Joe’s example, I learned something important that I wish I knew years ago. After the stripping process and patching and sanding the walls where needed, a coat of oil prime must be used so that the wall is insulated from the new latex paint which can react in a negative way with direct exposure to plaster, sometimes bubbling.  He said that this in-between step is also needed for sheetrock which he said must be handled “more gingerly,” because it is “assaulted” by the water spray for paper removal.

“More people are looking to get rid of wallpaper – it seems to have lost its popularity,” Joe observed, “especially among older people who are getting ready to downsize. Some people who are upgrading their homes are now going into Venetian plaster and faux work, which can look like wallpaper but is more open and random.”

As for the cost of such a job, Joe told me that he is moderately priced, and judging from my own project, I definitely agree.

Now I sit in my de-personalized room that my home staging consultant tells me will appeal to a much broader audience. While attractive, the décor to me now lacks any distinct personality, but that was the objective to be achieved. 

For expert wallpaper stripping and wall painting, but not necessarily to make beds, I can recommend Joe Pascarelli for the job. He can be reached at 914-447-6836

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (PrimaveraPR.com). He can be emailed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Follow him on Twitter for housing market updates at Twitter.com/HomeGuruNY.