Newsday - August 31, 2001
A WOMAN AMONG MEN

By Nancy a. Ruhling
‘THIS IS A FRIENDLY neighborhood for raising children” says Susan Barbash as she drives her Volvo station wagon through The Villages at Huntington in Melville.

While children are filling their tin buckets in the sandbox, mothers are pushing carriages and seniors are strolling through the 155-acre development, Barbash points out the amenities: The Village is right by the Northern State Parkway and Long Island Expressway, making access easy for commuters, but it is quiet enough to hear birds chirp. In addition, to a large part, there are several strategically placed mini parks. The playground, her favorite part of the project, is designed to blend into the landscape and the sidewalks give it a small-town feel.

“In ten years”, she says, “this will be tree-lined streets and it will be like one of the old neighborhoods of Huntington.” For Barbash, Long Island’s only high-profile female developer and a lifelong Bay Shore resident, that’s what matters: the future – her future, Long Island’s future. And that’s why Barbash says he makes it a habit to periodically revisit her developments, like The Villages, her newest project where she is preparing to add 259 units, bringing the total to 507 attached and detached homes.

Barbash, president of Barbash Associates of Babylon Village, and her developments have grown up together. She has been in the building business for two decades, taking a position at her family-owned firm right after she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Colleges.

“I recognized that developers were going to be changing the environment and seeing how my father was able to really preserve what was beautiful about Long Island’s landscape, I felt I could continue in that vein,” says Barbash.

Nationwide, Barbash is also among an elite class: Only 3 percent of the country’s residential development companies are headed by women, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders, a Washington-based trade group with 60,000 members. “There are a lot of husband-and-wife teams out there,” smaller builders of 10 or fewer houses a year, said NAHB assistant vice president Donna Reichle.

Barbash, however, has leaped to another level, now building about 80 units a year.

In addition to the Villages, she has built Maple Court, a 12-unit homeowner association project of town homes in Babylon; Village Commons, a 54-unit condo development in Babylon Village; Village Oaks, a 20-unit homeowner association project of town homes in Babylon Village; Hidden Harbour, a 13-unit waterfront homeowner association project of town homes in Baby Village; Dunewood, 10 detached waterfront residences on Fire Island; Sunscape Sections I and II, an 81-unit homeowner association project in West Bay Shore planned with Brookhaven National Laboratory that was the first passive solar town home community in the Northeast; and The Club at Bayberry Harbour, 39 waterfront-unit homeowner association town homes in Islip.

Barbash’s developments are known for incorporation of the natural beauty of the landscape into their designs, a concept started by Maurice Barbash, known as Murray, who was a pioneer of cluster zoning in the 1970s.

“My father was always pushing the envelope,” Barbash says of Murray, who still keeps his hand in the business while remaining active in the Island arts scene, with his wife, Lillian. “We have been fortunate in finding the right properties to develop, and we have a sense of what the market wants. If it is a beautiful site, we try to save every possible tree and sweat every location.”

Barbash is particularly proud of the Village Commons in Babylon. “It was a giant parking lot, all asphalt and gravel,” she says. “Now everything faces on a green, a commons. The homes are traditional, row house style. We stacked the units one over one to maximize space.”

If Barbash projects are singular, so is Susan Barbash.

“She really is a woman among men,” says Jim Morgo, president of The Long Island Housing Partnership, a nonprofit affordable-housing group. “If there is a another woman out there, I don’t know of her. She is an outstanding member of the profession who has a real social conscience.”

Growing up, Barbash never had any intention of being a builder. On college, she majored in Spanish history and Spanish literature. “MY father encouraged me to go into the business,” she says, adding that her brother and sister did not follow in her footsteps. “The appeal of the business – it hit me out of the blue – was being self-employed and juggling my goals, which included marriage and children. I could not see how I could do it on the corporate ladder.

Her juggling act worked: For the most part, she works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., finding time for her three children, ages 12 to 17. And when he time gets tight, her husband, Eric Katz, a philosophy professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, is able to adjust his schedule so he can work from their 1920s cottage-style home.

I’ve been able to pretty much have it all – I have a family, I have time to enjoy it and I have a career,” says Barbash, who received the New York State Senate Woman of Distinction Award in 1998. “The job is very satisfying. It is always interesting because each project is different.”

Barbash say she has been successful partly because she entered the business at the right time; in 1977, women’s roles in society were changing, and the feminine movement had opened the way for them to enter previously closed professions. She started out as an apprentice and spent a year at construction sites learning first-hand how the business worked.

“By 19809, I was pretty much running the company, she says. “The men were great. They all had daughters my age, and I used to have to sit and listen to them talk about their daughters. Once they realized I was signing the checks, I never had a problem.”

But she acknowledges that it was easier for her to enter he field because everyone knew her father. “I would be nowhere if I didn’t have my father as an entrée,” she says. “Being my father’s daughter really opened doors for me. It was kind of like having an older sibling in high school who had been a good student. I had to keep up his reputation.”

Still, at some point, “you’re either good at it or not,” she adds. “And if you don’t have it, you get out of the business. I’d like to think I got pretty good at it.”

That’s an understatement, says Bob Wieboldt, executive vice president of the Long Island Builders Institute. “She has built some of the most innovative stuff on the Island,” he says. “She’s got a good reputation and holds her own with everybody.”

Marilyn Larsen, president of Lane Realty in Jericho who has worked with Barbash for two decades, echoes Wieboldt’s praise, adding, “She’s recognized as a quality builder. She gives a lot of thought to what’s she’s doing. She’s hands on. She really cares.”

Although Barbash has a solid reputation in the field, she is perhaps best known to the public for spearheading the restoration of Bay Shore’s Second Avenue Firehouse, which has been placed on the New York State Register of Historic Places. The project, which won the New York State AIA Special Citation for Design Excellence and the Long Island Archi Award for Excellence in neighborhood. It is gratifying because it really has turned the neighborhoo around.” Architecture, was part of a broader project to the circa 1900 firehouse and to buy and restore five homes on the street.

“These were rentals, and we are trying to bring owner occupancy back to the block, which is the key to stability,” she says. “The firehouse is the anchor, and it has become a community center for the
It also has turned her career path in a different direction. “My interest will be directed to rebuilding existing communities, not new development,” she says. “There will be more restoration work. It won’t be particularly lucrative. It’s more of a civic commitment, not a pecuniary one.”

Her decision reflects not only her changing interest, but also Long Island’s changing landscape, where, she says, “there are fewer opportunities to build on large tracts.”

Labor shortages are also likely to affect the building industry, contributing to construction delays,” she adds “But that is only one factor in the delays; it takes a long time to get a piece of property approved for development. In our Huntington development, for example, people were customizing more than we anticipated, so it took longer to get it finished. But new construction always takes too long.”

Before she starts another restoration project, Barbash says she must finish up the housing units and clubhouse at The Villages at Huntington.

“We have to do something special with the clubhouse,” she says, adding that it will be quite visible to those who travel on Pinelawn Road. “We are planning an Arts and Crafts-style lodge, and there isn’t a whole lot of that around here. It will be fun to build.”