'Build a Better Burb' winners announced

Organic farms along the Route 110 corridor in Farmingdale.

Accessory apartments in Levittown backyards.

Sophisticated carbon-capturing landscaping to address climate change.

Those were among the seven winning designs in the Long Island Index's "Build a Better Burb" design competition announced Monday.

Organizers said they sought "big ideas," some of which admittedly would take decades to be realized, if at all. But they hope the designs will "start the conversation" on how to redevelop the region's aging downtowns, which they suggest is critical to Long Island's future.

Five designs shared equally the $20,000 in prize money, after the competition jury decided they were all strong and declined to rank them. A student project on partnerships between homeowners associations, developers and local government for buying parcels and creating smart growth won a $2,500 award, and the "People's Choice Award" selected by the public went to a group proposing a wide-ranging series of initiatives.

The winners were revealed at the Community Development Corporation of Long Island's 40th anniversary gala, which drew more than 300 people from business, government, education and nonprofits.

"While you may never see some of these big ideas implemented as they are, I bet you will see so many of these elements in 10 or 15 years work their way onto Long Island," Long Island Index director Ann Golob said in an interview. "At least I really hope so, because we really need to be rethinking how we are developing here . . . We can't just keep recreating single-family house after single-family house and think that we are going to attract young people, or think that businesses will come here."

June Williamson, an architecture professor at City College of New York and competition consultant, praised some of the projects' complexity - noting, for example, that the People's Choice winner calls for "a complete restructuring of governing jurisdictions on Long Island. That's huge. On the other hand, it has pretty pragmatic ideas about how to retrofit on the scale of a failing strip shopping center and how you might repurpose the parking lot."

Nancy Rauch Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation, which commissions reports and polls about aspects of Long Island life and publishes the Index, said the next step "is try to make these ideas more real, to translate them into a picture" of what a particular place might look like if elements of the designs were used.

Lawrence Levy, dean of Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies, noted the reluctance of many communities to try new development ideas. Change, he said, "must start with finding a place where everybody from the neighborhood groups, to village trustees to an interested developer, a team of nonprofits [who] want to try it out, get it done and become the poster child for change." That might spark similar development in other communities, he said.