Affordable housing doesn't have to mean projects

August 5, 2007

Countless acres of trees have given their lives to enable this paper to carry news stories and editorials about the lack of affordable housing on Long Island. They died in a noble cause.

Now we'd like you to talk back, to share your ideas on what it would take to provide enough housing at reasonable cost, so that young families with middle-class earning power will want to stay here, or move here from elsewhere.

Beyond the price of housing, one big rap on our Island is that there's no there there - just a sprawl of single-family houses separated by strip malls lining traffic-choked roads. That raises the big question: How do we preserve the single-family lifestyle that's here already, but create vibrant downtowns where young couples will want to live in a condo or an apartment and later buy a larger, traditional single-family home? In other words, how do we put the there there? A lot of corollary questions also need answering. But first, a little history.

This is not a new issue for Newsday, which has grappled with it since the end of World War II, when this was a baby newspaper. Following the earlier great conflict, World War I, there had been a tide of movement from cities to suburbs. But the Great Depression and World War II had slowed home construction. Then, when the war ended, millions of returning veterans came back, looking for a place to live. And Newsday played a pivotal role in getting the Town of Hempstead to change its laws so that William Levitt could build his assembly-line houses - without basements - in a place that came to be called Levittown.

Same problem, new ingredients

Today, the primary problem is not returning veterans, but fleeing young people. In the 1990s, the Island lost about 20 percent of them. Only the Rust Belt in Western New York said goodbye to as big a phalanx of its future.

And the lack of housing that working families can afford has been a major factor in that departure. If you bought a home 20 or 30 years ago, ask yourself whether you - or your kids - could afford to buy it today at its current market value. Probably not.

What's happening? One of the major factors is the escalating price of a basic commodity in home construction: the land. In western Suffolk County, a building plot can easily cost $250,000 to $300,000, long before a carpenter drives a single nail. That is one major reason why you can find so few new homes costing less than $400,000 or so.

The median income here for a family of four is $93,800. The rule of thumb is that a family should not try to carry a mortgage of more than 2 1/2 times its income. So this median family should find a house with a mortgage of no more than $234,500. Lots of luck.

Of course, a lot of young singles and couples earn less than that median at the start. When they get home from college, they can find neither apartments - which make up a smaller portion of the overall housing stock here than elsewhere - nor small houses that they can afford. So they leave.

Does it really matter?

That brings us to the first question: So what? Why should it bother us?

At the most emotional level, ask those whose children - and therefore, grandchildren - live a long plane flight away. What does it feel like when they see a 1-year-old grandson for the first time in several months, because they can't fly more often, and he flinches and refuses to hug them? What does that do to the bond of family?

Like distance, excessive closeness can also strain family bonds. A 2003 AFL-CIO study showed that one out of two people from age 20 to 34 in our area were living with their parents. You want your adult kids living in the same area, but do you want them under the same roof for long stretches of time? Probably not so much.

On a more pragmatic level, the lack of skilled, willing young workers is now sapping the strength of our businesses. It's getting so hard to recruit and retain a strong workforce that housing is the top priority of our leading business group, the Long Island Association. They've set up a Web site on the issue: nextgenerationhousing.com.

The site's mere existence shows how seriously our business community takes this issue. Visit it for facts and photos of typical affordable homes - like the ones we have included on this page, thanks to the Long Island Housing Partnership. Notice its name. It's a reflection of the search by housing advocates for a term that doesn't feed stereotypical thinking. Next-generation housing sounds as if it's about our kids. And it is. Workforce housing sounds like a place for hard-working people, like teachers, cops and firefighters. And it is. The broader phrase, affordable housing, means those same things. But it also evokes reactions of fear and - let's be honest - racism.

Many Long Islanders hear "affordable housing" and see in their mind's eye a ramshackle public housing "project," filled with people they fear - usually blacks and Hispanics - from a place they left behind: New York City.

That fear has fed too many political campaigns warning voters that Nassau County could become the "sixth borough" of New York. And too many public officials are nervous about affordable housing because they detect - and, sadly, also nurture - this fear in voters.

In recent years, more people have begun to see housing as an issue affecting them, their families and their businesses. That's not to say that opposition based on racism has died. But there's now a broader embrace of the need - at least in theory. Still, formidable roadblocks impede individual projects.

It's all about density

One of the major obstacles to affordable housing is our aversion to density. If builders are limited as to how many houses they can build on a site, they'll just sell them at a price high enough to cover their costs and make a profit. If a municipality allows them greater density to build more houses, they can afford to sell some of them at affordable prices. The place to get that density, advocates agree, is in existing downtowns, rather than on unbuilt virgin land. The downtowns often have what's needed to support increased density, including sewers and transportation hubs.

You can already see successful groups of affordable homes near the Long Island Rail Road in Huntington Station, Bay Shore and Patchogue. And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is meeting with local officials about the feasibility of transit-oriented, mixed-use development near stations such as Hicksville and Ronkonkoma.

One reader - Walter Greenspan, formerly of Jericho, now of Montana - even suggested that we look into housing that uses the air rights above the LIRR's right of way. That's an idea worth exploring - and out-of-the-box thinking that's worth applauding.

This lack of affordable housing is not an easy problem to solve, but there's a growing consensus that we must. What we need is political will and good ideas.

We await your suggestions.

WRITE US We'd like to hear from you:

How has the housing issue on Long Island affected your family or business?

Should new developments be required to include a certain percentage of affordable units?

Should we establish housing goals for communities?

Let us know what you think. A selection of responses will be published next week in Opinion. Send e-mail to LIFuture@newsday.com or letters to LI Future/Opinion Dept., Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY 11747-4250. Please include your full name, town and telephone number.