Smithtown calls for focusing future development on downtowns 

A proposed update to Smithtown’s comprehensive plan would encourage housing, offices, restaurants and shops in hamlet downtowns while leaving largely untouched the single-family home neighborhoods where almost all town residents now live.

"We just can’t continue the way we did in the 1960s," when the town’s last full development plan was written," said Allyson Murray, the town’s environmental planner. "There have been many changes in the types of businesses and in the way that the economy functions."

The draft plan, posted on the town website last week and scheduled for a spring town board vote, would concentrate future commercial and residential redevelopment in the downtowns, away from heavily traveled corridors, such as New York State Routes 25 and 347. The central business district zoning that now regulates all hamlet downtowns would be eliminated and replaced by hamlet-specific zones — allowing for denser, taller buildings near Kings Park’s Long Island Rail Road station, for example, but keeping lower heights on most of Lake Avenue in St. James. It would encourage mixed-use building, long a staple of urban planning but rarer on Long Island, in downtowns, the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge and on portions of Smithtown Boulevard in Nesconset.

The landscape of downtown Smithtown, particularly, could change under "transit village" zoning allowing buildings as high as four stories or 45 feet, up from two and a half stories or 35 feet now, in an area south of the LIRR tracks now dominated by parking lots. It would permit three-story buildings on Main Street, a change intended to encourage redevelopment by landlords seeking upstairs tenants.

The plan suggests closing all or a portion of Redwood Lane to allow space for development and converting Karl Avenue to a pedestrian-only "secondary core" of downtown. At the New York Avenue school district building, planners suggested a mix of residential, recreational and municipal facility uses like a community center. High density "is not envisioned," they wrote, a nod to a proposal for hundreds of apartments that was withdrawn in the face of community opposition in 2017.

Attempting to reconcile demand for new housing options with opposition to apartments and condominiums, the plan would create a new multifamily zone for low- and mid-rise apartment buildings of "appropriate scale in appropriate locations," subject to town board review. Portions of West Jericho Turnpike in Commack would fall in the zone; some parcels along the east side of Route 111 in Hauppauge could also be included. The plan would also rezone the Raleigh Farm/Gesuale area off Old Northport Road and Lawrence Road in Kings Park for clustered residential development

A local civic group condemned the plan, saying it did not reflect the wishes of most residents. "It unabashedly calls for much more density than the residents are comfortable with and seeks to transform the town from a suburb to Queens," said We Are Smithtown president James Bouklas.

Councilman Thomas McCarthy, the board’s liaison to the town planning and building departments, said that the plan could take many years to realize because Suffolk County health regulations prohibit much development without the sewers that are anticipated but not yet built in Kings Park, Smithtown and St. James. The county, he said, should "help us help our downtowns survive by giving us the relief now" and allowing expansion of existing septic systems.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.