Downtown Westbury Isn't Selling Its Land. It's Leasing It, 99 Years at a Time

Walk from the Westbury LIRR station toward Post Avenue today and you cross at the corner of Post and Union, right where the sidewalk meets the tracks. In about twenty months, that crossing won't exist. The engineering team behind the new 184-unit building rising next door studied the intersection, weighed fencing it off against disrupting traffic flow, and settled on a third option: block the crossing entirely and send pedestrians 400 feet out of their way to a crosswalk near the station's ticket office.

That detail, buried in the minutes of a September 3 village board meeting, tells you something the median home price never will. Downtown Westbury isn't absorbing one new building. It's in the middle of a sequence, and the sequence has a mechanism behind it that most people comparing Nassau County downtowns have never heard of.

A Fourth Building, Not a First One

Village trustees voted unanimously on September 3 to approve a five-story, 184-unit mixed-use building on Railroad Avenue, steps from the Post Avenue corridor. The developer, GO Westbury LLC, is an affiliate of the Manhattan-based Gotham Organization. The site is a former MTA surface parking lot, freed up after the railroad built a parking garage across the street as part of its Third Track project.

This is not Westbury's first apartment building near the tracks, and it won't be its last. Over the past decade, the same few blocks around the station have absorbed:

1. Cornerstone at Westbury — a 72-unit, four-story building at Union Avenue, Railroad Avenue, and School Street, built on a former food-handling warehouse site.
2. The Selby — 237 rental units at 695 Merrick Avenue, which opened in 2022.
3. A 187-unit complex at Union and Linden Avenues, approved by the village in May 2025, with roughly 24 units set aside for households earning up to 80% of area median income.
4. The Railroad Avenue building now approved, which started as a 157-unit filing in December 2025 and grew to 184 units by the time it reached final approval nine months later.

That last detail matters more than it looks. In most zoning fights, density gets negotiated down between filing and approval, not up. In Westbury, it went the other way. The project gained 27 units during the review process, which tells you the village isn't reluctantly tolerating this pace of construction. It's actively steering toward it.

The Deal That Explains the Pace

Here's the part that doesn't show up in a listing description. The MTA isn't selling this land to Gotham. It's leasing it, for 99 years, under terms that include a $2.25 million payment during construction, a $500,000 one-time capital transaction fee, and base rent starting at $500,000 a year that climbs 12.5% every five years.

The MTA keeps the deed. Gotham gets a long enough lease to justify a $100 million investment. And because the railroad never actually gives up the parcel, it can run this same playbook again on the next surface lot it no longer needs, the way it already has three times in this same half-mile stretch.

This is the mechanism that matters for anyone weighing a purchase near downtown Westbury. A developer who buys land outright eventually runs out of land to buy. A landlord who leases surface lots one at a time, on a rolling 99-year basis, has effectively built a supply pipeline that refills itself. The scarcity argument that usually underpins downtown condo pricing, the idea that there's only so much land left near the station, doesn't hold the same way here. The land was never scarce in the way a buyer might assume. It was simply parked, waiting for the next garage to free it up.

The village's own policy history backs this up. In 2019, Westbury rezoned 52 acres around the LIRR station specifically to allow this kind of density, using part of a $10 million state Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant. That grant also funded the streetscape work along Post Avenue, from new sidewalks to LED lighting to the pedestrian plaza at Post and Union. Governor Hochul's office marked the initiative's completion by calling Westbury's downtown a model for transit-oriented development in New York State, and MTA Chair Janno Lieber tied the revitalization directly to the same Third Track project that freed up the Railroad Avenue lot in the first place.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it is likely to stop after one more ribbon cutting.

What This Means If You're Comparing Downtown to the Rest of the Village

Village-wide, Westbury's median sale price stood at $769,615 in July 2026, up 7.6% from a year earlier. That's the number most buyers see first, and it's accurate, but it flattens two very different markets into one line.

Downtown condo and co-op product, buildings like the Maple Arms, the Post House Cooperative, or the fifth-floor units at 242 Maple Avenue known locally as the Tiffany, tends to trade in a tighter band, roughly $429,000 to $889,000 as of July 2026, with typical marketing time around 52 days. Detached homes elsewhere in the village, in pockets like Westbury Hills or the areas closer to Carle Place schools, often carry a different price logic entirely, tied to lot size and school zoning rather than walk distance to the platform.

The gap between those two markets isn't just about square footage. It's about supply elasticity. Single-family lots in Westbury are fixed by geography. Nobody is rezoning a quarter-acre parcel on a residential side street into five stories of housing. But the land immediately around the station is a different asset class, one the MTA can keep leasing out in phases as long as it keeps building garages to free up the next surface lot. A buyer choosing between a walk-to-the-train condo and a house six blocks away isn't just choosing a lifestyle. They're choosing between a supply-constrained market and one that's been engineered, on purpose, to keep adding inventory.

That doesn't make the downtown option a bad choice. Plenty of buyers want the walkability, the retail underneath their building, the five-minute commute to the platform. It does mean the appreciation math works differently than it would in a neighborhood where new construction is genuinely scarce.

What to Ask Before You Buy Downtown

If you're looking at a unit within a few blocks of the Westbury LIRR station, a few questions are worth asking before you write an offer:

• Which of the four recent projects, if any, sits closest to the building you're considering, and has construction started yet.
• Whether your building's HOA or co-op board has weighed in on the pedestrian rerouting near Post and Union, since foot traffic patterns are about to shift.
• How the ground lease's escalating rent might affect the retail mix beneath any of these new buildings over the next decade, since rising base rent tends to filter into what tenants can afford to pay.
• Whether the unit you're evaluating is in an older cooperative structure, like the Post House, versus a newer condo, since financing and resale rules differ meaningfully between the two.

A Few Direct Questions

Will more apartment buildings keep getting approved near the Westbury station? Nothing is confirmed beyond the four projects already built or approved, but the underlying structure, an MTA that leases rather than sells and a village that has rezoned specifically to allow it, means the mechanism for more construction remains in place.

Does the ground lease affect property taxes for nearby homeowners? The lease terms disclosed so far involve payments from the developer to the MTA, not new tax assessments on neighboring residential parcels. Anyone concerned about their own assessment should check directly with the Nassau County Assessor's office.

Is a downtown condo still a reasonable buy given all this construction? It can be, especially for someone prioritizing walkability and low-maintenance living. The point isn't to avoid downtown Westbury. It's to walk in knowing that the supply story here is different from a neighborhood where land is genuinely running out.

Westbury's downtown is changing block by block, and the changes are coming from a specific, repeatable deal structure rather than random chance. If you're trying to figure out whether a downtown Westbury condo, a co-op, or a house on a quieter street fits what you're actually looking for, that's exactly the kind of local detail worth talking through before you start touring. Michelle Norris has been tracking how this corner of Nassau County is built out, one ground lease at a time. Let's connect.