How does our Island grow? Fundamental changes are key to the future.

SASWATO DAS

August 19, 2007

You've been living on Long Island and working at a decent job here for most of your life. You've always thought that your financial position was stable and things would continue to improve, slowly but predictably, and that setbacks would be temporary.

But now you're starting to worry. You don't know what to make of the headlines and nightly news about the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis - plunging stock prices, markets in turmoil from Wall Street to Tokyo, the bankruptcy of a top Long Island mortgage brokerage, predictions of a damaging ripple effect through the region's economy.

You look at the new McMansion that's gone up next door with no takers and the For Sale signs that are staying up longer and longer in the neighborhood. And you wonder whether this is an uncomfortable hiccup in Long Island's economy or something closer to chronic indigestion; whether our economy will offer good enough job opportunities for your daughter, soon to graduate from Adelphi, or whether she'll be forced to move away because it's too expensive to live here.

Should you really worry or sit tight and hope for the best?

Don't panic - yet

Right now, all evidence shows that Long Island's economy is strong and resilient enough to weather today's housing market crunch, much as it managed to get past the loss of its defense industry at the end of the Cold War. It adapted and replaced lost jobs through a spontaneous diversification: More small businesses cropped up, high-tech firms changed the face of manufacturing, and a healthy service sector grew to fill the void, responding to rising demand for health care, education and professional services.

But it would be foolish for you, your neighbors and everyone else living and working on Long Island just to hope for the best and think that nothing significant needs to change.

Long Island's economy faces serious future challenges. Unless Long Islanders understand the changes that must be made and commit themselves to making them - and press their leaders to help them in a complicated and difficult transition - the region's economy will face a slow but inevitable decline.

In short, for Long Island to maintain its standard of living and look forward to economic growth, it must change. The biggest source of concern among economists and planners is not that Long Island doesn't have enough jobs to offer. It does. But companies increasingly cannot find enough workers with the necessary skills to fill the available job openings. The region's low unemployment rate - less than 4 percent - may seem like a sign of economic health. On the surface it is, but it hides the seeds of future problems.

Put simply: In the coming years, unless some major initiatives begin to reverse this ominous trend, Long Island will have far more unfilled jobs than workers available to fill them.

You think that's good? Think again.

If a company with, say, a lucrative defense contract for sophisticated sensors or detection devices cannot find enough workers with the necessary skills on Long Island, and if it cannot recruit workers from most other areas of the country, because a move to Long Island is financially prohibitive, that company will move. It will resettle in the South, where it's easier to recruit workers, or it might go overseas. Multiply this problem by dozens of companies, and Long Island has a big problem.

This is not Chicken Little squawking hysterically. It's a real demographic time bomb, and it's a reflection of unsettling national trends. Based on census projections - assuming 20 percent commutation from Long Island to New York City and 130,000 reverse commuters from the city - jobs on Long Island are expected to grow from about 1.2 million today to more than 1.5 million in 2030. But the available labor force will stagnate in the same period from slightly more than 1.2 million to a little less than 1.2 million. That means by 2030 some 300,000 jobs will remain unfilled. But the projected loss of young workers would make this even worse. That's a recipe for stagnation, if not disaster.

Forget the ripple effects of today's credit crunch in the housing market. If Long Island keeps losing young workers or fails to attract new ones, we won't be experiencing a ripple on the surface, but a tsunami.

Keeping and attracting workers is a top priority for LI employers. So is ensuring that the Island's educational system makes changes to alert students, possibly as early as middle school, about what job opportunities are projected to exist for them in the region's economy, which skills will be needed and what sort of training they should plan for.

That may mean a lesser emphasis on four-year college degrees, a greater push for two-year community colleges to recruit and train students in technical fields opening up on Long Island. Career-based educational courses, even career academies, have been proposed as useful ways to proceed along these lines. There will be a need to rely more heavily on the growing number of new immigrants on Long Island, not just to cut lawns and serve in restaurants, but to get themselves - or their children - trained for more technically demanding work.

Meanwhile, local and county governments should push policies to offer incentives for the growth of desirable segments of a new economy, such as small electronics and high-tech manufacturing, or the practical industrial application of research in "green" energy alternatives produced by our sophisticated research centers, at Stony Brook University or Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Wanted: fundamental change

But all this, however essential, won't really work well enough unless the region makes fundamental changes to accommodate the need for new workers and persuade young people to stay.

And this is where you, your neighbors and friends come in, by beginning to change your notion of what Long Island has been and should still be.

There is a dire need for affordable housing to persuade young workers they can afford to live here. For that, localities will have to change sacrosanct land-use policies and hold down taxes. Communities must revitalize downtowns to offer stimulating amenities with good public transportation to lure young people and persuade them that living on Long Island is a palatable alternative to an urban center.

You must be able to tell your children they can graduate and get a good job here in a promising field, and tell them there are good places to live that they can afford on a starting salary - and have fun doing it. If you can say that, there is hope for Long Island to look forward to a healthy and growing economy.

Saswato Das received a graduate degree in astronomy and astrophysics from Stony Brook University.