John Fox, a gray-haired man from Centerport, can hardly hold back his tears. His eyes are moist as he explains why he opposes the Matinecock Court affordable housing development that’s been proposed for East Northport since 1979. Tonight he’s expressing his frustration at a public meeting held by the Town of Huntington at Northport High School. Earlier in the week, he was outside Huntington Town Hall with about two dozen people protesting AvalonBay’s planned apartment complex in Huntington Station chanting, “No way, AvalonBay!”
“It breaks my heart,” Fox tells the Press. “We’re overcrowded already. We don’t want Queens or Brooklyn or whatever here! When I was 18, you could jump in your car and drive wherever you wanted. Now it’s bumper to bumper!”
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That attitude is deeply rooted here and the effects are widely felt.
Get out a map of Long Island, close your eyes, and jab it with your finger. Chances are you’ll land on a neighborhood where legal apartments are hard to find and decent houses are out of reach for those who earn less than, say, 80 grand a year.
You’re a recent college graduate who wants to live close to where you grew up so you can keep an eye on your folks. Or just found an entry-level job in your chosen field but the pay sucks and the commute is an hour of hell each way. Perhaps you’re ready to finally settle down with your significant other, so you want to rent while saving for a down payment on your American Dream. Maybe you’re retired and want a smaller place that’s just as nice as where you raised your kids—and still be close enough to watch your grandkids grow up.
Scenarios such as these are all-too-often unattainable on Long Island. Despite the recent passage this week by the Suffolk County Legislature of $3.5 million for two developments in Riverhead and Bay Shore, our region’s crippling shortage of affordable housing is well-known and it may be worse than most people think.
It starts with the lack of apartments. Take a look at other high-cost counties in the New York area, and you see how bad the disparity is here: Westchester has 38 percent of its housing stock in apartments; Bergen in New Jersey has about 35 percent; Fairfield in Connecticut has almost 30 percent. On Long Island, it’s roughly 17 percent.
“That is not normal,” says Marianne Garvin, shaking her head. She is president and chief executive officer of the Community Development Corporation of Long Island, one of the leaders in affordable housing programs in our region. “I attribute it to the history of who moved out here. My parents came from Brooklyn. Our parents—I’m talking generations now—lived in the city, and when they came out here, they wanted their single-family homes.”
They got them by the bushel: Practically overnight the farms were gone and a new crop of capes, colonials, ranches, split-levels, you name it, sprouted in their place. The residents got the suburban zoning they wanted to keep it that way (we’ll leave our discussion about the race-restricted covenants like the ones in Levittown for another time). And we get to reap the harvest of land-use problems we see today.
How Did We Get Here?
“A lot of people blame the builders but the builders were building what the zoning allowed to be built,” says Matt Whalen, president of the Long Island Builders Institute and vice president of development for the Long Island territory for AvalonBay Communities, Inc., which specializes in high-end apartment complexes. “If you came in and said, ‘You know what, I’d like to preserve 10 acres there and do 10 homes of higher density right here next to that,’ the towns would say, ‘No, it’s too dense.’ So then you build on the whole 20 acres, and you wind up not preserving land.
“I don’t disagree that the real estate industry, left to its own devices, can create a lot of problems for itself,” he grins. “We get going we can’t stop ourselves; it becomes a feeding frenzy. But on Long Island that’s never going to happen. In 2009, we built less than a thousand housing units on an island that has almost 3 million people. That is unbelievable.”
Calling itself a “leader in the multi-family industry,” AvalonBay is a publicly traded company worth about $10 billion. The real-estate investment trust (or REIT) is a luxury-rental builder, owning 65,000 units across the country; 2,000 of them are on Long Island, with another 1,000 planned here. About 20 percent of the rental units are designated “affordable,” which means they’re made available below the prevailing market rate to renters who earn less than the area’s median income.
On Long Island, the median household income as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is $103,600. Just for the sake of comparison, as of April the median price of a house in Nassau was $397,495, and $318,000 in Suffolk.
“I happen to be in the rental sector that most of my competition has been scared away from trying to do,” says Whalen. “I’m not an ‘affordable housing developer.’ I’m a market-rate developer who happens to build inclusionary housing developments.” (Inclusionary refers to dividing the units between market-rate and affordable, usually an 80-20 split.) “It’s a great model and it’s worked all over the country.” The developer makes a profit and the people who need a break get a place they can afford.
“Almost half of my renters are under 35, so I’m renting to the young person we’re actually trying to keep here,” continues Whalen, 43, who once captained the U.S. Rugby Team and today still looks like he’s not afraid to go head to head with any opponent. He’s had his hits and misses. On Long Island, AvalonBay has built in Glen Cove, Melville, Long Beach, Smithtown and Coram. But after a protracted scrum with Oyster Bay, AvalonBay couldn’t break ground there.
“I think there was a group of civic leaders [in Oyster Bay] who would rather see nothing than progress,” Whalen says, “and they unfortunately had a closed mind to seeing any kind of development scenario on that site.”
He’s hoping for a different outcome in Huntington Station, where the town board will vote July 6 on AvalonBay’s proposal to build 490 units (25 percent affordable) on a 26-acre tract within walking distance of the train station. More on that battle below.
Getting municipalities to warm up to the idea of supporting affordable housing has “actually become easier,” says Jim Morgo, the current economic development coordinator for the Town of Brookhaven and founder in 1988 of the Long Island Housing Partnership, a not-for-profit developer and multi-service program provider, which will screen applicants for Avalon Huntington Station.
“There’s not as much of a stigma as there used to be,” Morgo says, “because people can go to see affordable homes. They can meet the people who live in them, and they can see that they’ve had a positive impact on the communities. The problem is, like so many other things on Long Island, you can’t get any uniformity in approach because land use is controlled by every individual village and town.”
On the issue of affordable housing, Morgo’s a reluctant realist about the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) attitude. He admits that there are “plenty of folks around who are completely against it. They still have visions of poorly maintained public housing projects that haven’t been built on Long Island for 40 years.”
Lawrence C. Levy, director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, is less sanguine.
[...] of a planned affordable housing project rallied outside Huntington Town Hall as a part of the “Yes In My Backyard,” or YIMBY [...]
If you walk up to my front door today and hand over $500,000, I will sign over the deed to you, regardless of race, creed, color, or perversion of choice.
The affordable housing lobby is populated by con artists like the Long Island Association, whose interest is 100% concerned with plentiful cheap labor, and 0% concerned with whether you have to install bars on your windows.
Look at Elmont. Murder and overdose deaths this week alone.
That’s the kind of neighborhood they want yours to become.
@ silly in salem
We already have legalized segregation on Long Island and it has been immensely successful.
The less affluent have already been collected and quartered into surprisingly few towns as it is. However, more to the point; this article concerns the lament of formerly middle class Long Islanders; who have had to watch their children move to other states to survive and/or prosper.
Silver, Bloomburg, Schumer and their like, have destroyed New York. They have chased away the wealthy. They have decimated the middle class and they have given all to the poor to hold onto their power.
I think we need legalized segregation. Hey all of you all feel that way so why not? Put all the dirtbags in a few towns and don’t allow them to buy anything anywhere else on the Island. Problem solved then you can live in all the areas with pretty houses and 10000 + taxes a year. I vote for segregation!!
Affordable housing is a joke.
The people who have to resort to this kind of program should just leave rather than endure the government intrusion in their lives.
Besides, Long Island is turning into a ghetto.
Why do you want to stay here? You already know who is taking over, don’t you?
[...] Affordable Housing on Long Island [...]
Better do their homework on this project, I’ve seen this all before in other places … then, it is too late.
@George Mason
Islip township has managed to stabilize some areas using these programs, but due to the nature of these programs; such places never get to excel. I’ll explain….
These programs are created to develop islands of decency in the midst of decay. The hope being that once established the decency will attract new investment and spread the decency further and further from each epicenter.
However, in reality; once the original occupants of such homes serve their time under the programs incentive, most move out. The programs are set up to encourage turn over of these homes. Because nobody expects to live there for a lifetime, they act more like renters than home owners. They do the bare minimum to get by. As these folks have little incentive to invest in the future of the town, they don’t.
It is the nature of such programs that the house prices be artificially suppressed keeping them affordable well into the future. As such, residents have great incentive to leave as quickly as possible and those who might otherwise invest in the community do not.
As the town becomes unable to attract individuals who could afford to pay more and invest in the future growth of such communities, the profit motive is removed because the return on investment is insufficient to attract those willing to stay long term. The neighborhood/town never gentrifies.
Besides, these “affordable” neighborhoods are forced to remain so because there are no other communities which can house those who wouldn’t be able to afford the higher prices of a gentrifying community. Such a town thus remains undesirable and becomes a kind of permanent ghetto.
A perfect example is Central Islip. This community has shown the most success following one of these programs. This is due primarily to generous incentives offered to business to set up and invest in the area early in the program. But, this is also due to the large infusion of investment from the two colleges, federal and county courts and the ball park. The problem is that once those one-off investments stopped, so has much of the progress.
There are in fact, several very large areas in this town that would otherwise be very desirable. For example, the horse country area bordering the state park, Islandia and the College Park section of the town bordering the Carleton corridor south of the main fire house.
So why isn’t that this town with many very desirable areas prospering??? Not because it isn’t a nice place in a nice location, bit rather because the township of Islip has divined that Central Islip will remain forever; the affordable town within the township.
The fact is that by continuing to load these programs into the least affluent towns, you perpetuate the town as a ghetto place no one with means would like to live and invest in. If you expect to live in a place for 5 years versus live in a place for 30, how much are you going to invest to live there?
If these programs are to succeed, they must be equally placed around the county so that affordable homes can be found in every town, not just a select few. The problem is that nobody wants something that is going to suppress their home value and so out of necessity they keep putting these places in the towns which can least afford to have them.
These programs can accomplish quite a bit, but not if they continue to place them all in the same few towns.
If these programs are to succeed, they have to be set up to encourage people to want to live there; not to keep churning the inventory.
Let’s face it, these programs don’t address the basic problem.
The basic problem being that people want affordable housing available in the town in which they live. They’re not going to move into affordable housing in somebody else’s town, particularly if that town isn’t that desirable to begin with.
Funny, housing prices crashed — how can they still be so unaffordable? I love how nobody proposes to put this type of housing (or any kind of public facility, like a landfill or jail) in the Hamptons. And there’s never any attempt to link this kind of dense development with public transportation investment.
Can somebody please tell me one, just one instance where projects, aka low income housing aka affordable housing as worked? All these places go down the hell hole when certain element comes in. WAKE UP!
There is plenty of affordable housing on Long Island now.
The problem is that nobody wants to live in “those” neighborhoods.
Why would we create more in such places?
I noticed none of these developments go into Dix Hills or the Hamptons.
Couldn’t the zoning just as easily be altered in such communities?
Problem is “those” people don’t want to live with “them” people.
This is a form of legalized descrimination, plain and simple.
This is why Long island remains so segregated.
I personally spoke to Jim Morgo when he was head of the Long Island Housing Partnership some years back. He specifically told me that the #1 reason why apartments couldn’t get built on LI (affordable housing or not) was due to the Teachers Unions and Education establishment. You see, their bread and butter is the taxes that homeowners pay, whose pockets they can keep their collective hands in. They can’t do that as easily with renters because if it gets too expensive, they simply move. Look how many homes are for sale on LI. Few can sell because the houses just aren’t worth what they’re asking, plus every new year brings about more and more taxes that continue to devastate LI’s real estate market. You see, no matter how loud people threaten to move, the UNIONS DON’T CARE because you have to sell your house first…… to another sucker who gets extorted every year by the municipal teacher’s unions. Either way, the unions win. What a freakin racket, and most LI’ers are totally blind to it.
when you have all the section 8 abuser people movin in then it becomes affordable. i hope they do not build. there will be another neighborhood gone down the toilet due to the crap that will move in and trash the streets.
most of these “affordable apartments” are not affordable! it is the price of a mortgage /month which does not included utilities, etc.
It all sounds nice until you realize the reality of the “affordable housing” model on Long Island.
Most of the afforable housing complexs have had very negative effects, suppressing housing prices, promoting continued segregation and allowing private builders to ignore people who need housing.
All of these efforts are aimed at sustaining the status quo for builders, realtors and others who earn a living from the current system.
The fact that some people are able to buy a house because of these programs is secondary to commerce.
Affordable housing developments sustain ghettos.