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Itching for a downtown life

Ellis Henican

January 23, 2008

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Ann Golob certainly loves her children, ages 18, 26 and 31.

"But that doesn't mean we wanted them living at home with us forever in Port Washington," she said. "My husband has made that very clear to them."

Leonie Huddy loves her house in Huntington Station. "But I've actually been thinking of moving to Huntington Village," she said. "I'd like to do it for the entertainment, the restaurants, the cafes, walking around. I'm ready for a change. I'm in the demo."

And right there yesterday, in those two women's lives, we got an instant brush with two massive social trends that are undeniably taking hold on Long Island.

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Trend No. 1: Young adults are struggling to find a house for themselves in a daunting housing market.

Trend No. 2: Baby Boomers are thinking maybe the time has come to trade the big house for a condo or an apartment a little closer to town.

Who says the broad-lawned, high-taxed, subdivision-situated, unattached, single-family home will always be King of the Sprawling Suburbs? People at both ends of the Long Island life cycle are suddenly shrugging and saying, "Maybe not."

That's the most fascinating nugget in this year's Long Island Index. How this early trend unfolds will have a profound effect on the future of life around here.

Quite possibly for the better.

And we have the perfect tour guides.

Golob, an anthropologist refugee from Guardian Life Insurance and Chase Manhattan Bank, now directs the Long Island Index for the Rauch Foundation. Huddy, who runs the Center for Survey Research at Stony Brook University, oversaw the massive data gathering and analysis this year. And talk about convenient statistical intersections: Both women find themselves living the issues they're trying to make sense of.

"There is this desire," Huddy said, "to live a different kind of life in the suburbs."

"There was a lot of talk on the Advisory Committee," Golob laughed, "about the difficulty people have getting their kids out of the basement."

Hey, you hold up a mirror! People are going to recognize themselves!

Currently, single-family houses rule Long Island. By the Index count, they make up 85 percent of all living units in Nassau and Suffolk counties.

But what happens when the price of a house is too high for most starting salaries? What about all those people who don't need four bedrooms, high taxes and grass that has to be cut any more? Up until now, Long Island hasn't had an adequate supply of alternatives.

Zoning laws hostile to rentals. Downtowns left to wither and die.

But what if Long Island's central business districts - 100 of them, by the Index count - were energetically nourished and grown? And what if their re-imaginings included condos, apartments and clustered cottages, along with restaurants, bars, theaters and shopping people could actually walk to?

Wouldn't that help to generate a new kind of buzz on Long Island? Would it give people - the old and the young especially - a reason to stay around here and another way to live?

"Downtowns are the key to Long Island's survival," Golob said. "They have the potential to provide half of the housing units Long Island needs to retain young workers and retirees, both essential to the region's economic and social future - and without changing the communities' appealing character."

Honestly, who wants to drive everywhere?

And if some of these downtowns in some ways resemble the old city neighborhoods that today's suburbanites (or their ancestors) once fled - well, life is a circle, isn't it? Things keep coming around.

By necessity or by choice, lifestyles are changing.

People need some way to live.

Few kids can afford the houses they grew up in.

Something has to give. The Index shows people are open to new ideas.

Just as Ann Golob's children or Leonie Huddy's friends.

This sounds crazy, I know, to say on Long Island. But maybe I'll see you downtown.