Mangano, Levy promote workforce housing

Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano, speaking for himself and his Suffolk counterpart, told an audience of sustainable community advocates last week that Long Island will develop a Fair Share Housing Plan to create mixed-income housing options in mass-transit-supported locations for everybody.

"Throughout Long Island [that] plan will undertake research, outreach and public education respecting the needs, benefits and impediments to increasing the availability of such housing options," he told his audience at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan on Friday.

Mangano spoke at a news conference announcing the New York State-Connecticut Sustainable Communities initiative, one of 45 federally funded studies around the nation to deal with economic development, housing, transit and environmental challenges, including climate change, facing densely populated areas.

Funded by $100 million through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the project put $3.5 million into the area study that does not include New Jersey.

New Jersey opted out of the group, sought its own grant but failed, said officials of the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy group that tries to help guide development of the metropolitan region, and through which the $3.5 million is funneled.

The bi-state consortium includes New York City, Nassau and Suffolk counties, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, four lower Hudson Valley cities, and four coastal Connecticut cities, plus five area planning groups.

Mangano, accompanied by heads of the Long Island Regional Planning Council and the Suffolk County Planning Commission, noted that he had incorporated into his comments remarks by Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who did not attend.

He said Nassau and Suffolk's efforts will include work to better promote workforce housing, downtown revitalization and open-space preservation.

Nassau also will conduct redevelopment studies focusing on three as-yet-unidentified LIRR stations, he said, while Suffolk will look at the "local transfer of development rights programs" to see how effective they are and work to improve them for better sustainability.