Why Amityville, amid an LI housing shortage, took a break from building

As new apartment complexes are planned and built across Long Island in a battle against a lingering housing crisis, the Village of Amityville has put the brakes on any new rental development, drawing a mixed reaction from housing advocates, builders and others.

The village is in the midst of a six-month moratorium, approved in December, that halts any new multiunit housing, including apartments, condominiums, townhomes and accessory units.

Building moratoriums aren't unusual on the Island as communities grapple with the best way to attract businesses and address a persistent lack of affordable housing while preserving a suburban character. But some say they can cause businesses and developers to shy away from a community, and housing advocates say any pause in building during a housing crisis is worrisome.

“They’ve got to strike a balance between what the developers want and what the community wants,” said Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. “They’ve got to get everyone around a table and agree on height, density. … This is all a dance.”

Amityville, which has about 9,500 residents, saw an explosion of nearly 500 rental units built from 2020 to 2025, including the 115-unit Village by the Bay and the 338-unit AvalonBay complexes. Each of those complexes had set aside about 10% of their units for affordable housing. In all, the two complexes account for more than a third of all of the village’s 1,416 rental units as of March, Mayor Mike O’Neill said.

O’Neill said the village wants to pause adding any more of these developments because questions and concerns from residents have emerged about the housing boom's impact on village services.

The mayor said the village, which in 2022 received $10 million in state Downtown Revitalization Initiative funding, is using the break to gather and analyze data from its police, fire and building departments.

A committee was formed consisting of nine current and former officials and department leaders as well as local business people and residents to examine the impact. The village earlier this year put out a request for proposals for a company to help collect and evaluate the data, but O’Neill said the committee ultimately decided it was able to keep that work in-house.

The committee is just weeks away from releasing an initial report on its findings, O’Neill said. Once finalized, the report will be presented at a public board meeting and residents will be able to review the information and submit comments.

“At the end of the day, I just want to make sure that if we’re going to move forward with a housing project, that we’ve done our due diligence,” he said. 

Eric Alexander, director of Northport-based Vision Long Island, a downtown planning organization that has worked with Amityville on its facade improvement program, said housing moratoriums aren’t as prevalent as they were 10 to 15 years ago, but when enacted they allow a municipality to digest the challenges new housing can bring.

“We like to see other tools, we don’t always like to see moratoriums, but municipalities determine what’s right for them,” he said. “Sometimes you need to do things that build up trust with the public.”

The fact that Amityville has been so open to new housing in the past reflects well on officials' intentions, Alexander and Levy said.

“If they had not built all this housing, working with developers and community groups in a responsible way, then I might think it sounds like another NIMBY stall to prevent housing from coming to the village,” Levy said. “What they did to bring in hundreds of units should be seen as a model for other villages.”

When his group visited the village 20 years ago, Alexander said, leaders at that time “did not want one multifamily unit.”

“So I see the growth, the trajectory of their openness,” he said. “Some communities are just completely not accepting of change, period. Amityville is not in that category.”

Some criticize the move

Some affordable-housing advocates criticized the move amid Long Island's larger housing crisis. One expressed worry about what it means for those already struggling to find a home.  

Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services Inc., a fair housing agency based in Bohemia, said in an email that a moratorium “should only be implemented when a municipality has clearly identified problems and needs a defined pause to address them.”

With Amityville, he wrote, “it feels more like a solution in search of a problem.”

According to a 2024 report by Construction Coverage, which analyzes data for builders and the real estate industry, Long Island’s rate of housing growth was among the slowest in the United States from 2012 to 2022.

The number of housing units in Suffolk County increased only by 2% during that period, while the number in Nassau increased by 2.7%. Those figures landed Nassau at 131st and Suffolk at 132nd place among 141 U.S. counties with a population of 500,000 people or more, according to the report.

That snail’s pace of growth is why even a temporary pause on new housing can have “real consequences,” Wilder said. “It restricts supply, increases competition, and ultimately drives up costs. And those impacts fall hardest on people already struggling to find safe, affordable housing — including many of the essential workers who keep Long Island functioning.” 

James Britz, executive vice president of the Long Island Housing Partnership Inc., an affordable housing organization based in Hauppauge, said the need for housing “far outweighs the inventory” right now.

“Obviously the need is large out there ... . Hopefully it will ramp back up [in Amityville], but there’s a lot of development happening in both counties right now,” he said.

While some argue over whether a village has a larger responsibility to a regional housing shortage, Amityville isn't an anomaly when it comes to enacting building moratoriums after a spike in new development.

The Village of Manorhaven enacted a yearlong pause on building in August. Mayor John Popeleski said that came on the heels of residents opposing a 49-unit complex that had been approved. So far, the village has updated its zoning map for the first time since 1988, planned an extensive traffic study and formed a committee to work on a comprehensive plan.

Popeleski said the village will be extending the moratorium, possibly for another year. “We’re looking at the future of Manorhaven,” he said.

The Village of Farmingdale, often seen as a model of downtown revitalization, instituted a moratorium just after hundreds of apartments came online within a few years.

“Residents were complaining and justly so because we had three or four developments in the village going on at the same time and it was cluttered,” Mayor Ralph Ekstrand said. The moratorium lasted a year, he said, and allowed “everybody to catch their breath.”

“If a developer is thinking of doing something, a year is not the end of the world,” he said. What Amityville is doing “appears to be very similar and very wise.”

Concerns for businesses

Some question whether putting the brakes on housing will impact local business owners.

Dina Rosenberg has co-owned Amityville Apothecary downtown for more than seven years and thinks the moratorium may have been premature.

“I understand the concept ... , ” she said. “However, I also feel a lot of the villages that surround Amityville . . . seem to be so ahead of us in terms of their revitalization that I feel like the village may have put a moratorium in place before we even really got started.”

Rosenberg, who served as village clerk-treasurer from 2015 to 2017, said she doesn't get a lot of customers from the new apartments but that other local establishments, such as eateries, could benefit from more multiunit housing.

Village business leaders had mixed reactions to halting building. Chamber of Commerce vice president Jennifer Ronzo, who is a real estate broker, said in an email she doesn't think the six-month pause will hurt future development.

“Our village is undergoing a transformation,” she wrote. “It is so important to keep our history and charm preserved, and while change is inevitable, taking a pause to evaluate and plan ahead makes sense to me.”

Real estate agent and chamber secretary Jared Garcia said the village is being responsible in trying to balance the needs of developers, business and residents.

“Me personally, I am on the side that more housing and more development could be good in some of the downtown areas,” he said. “But at the same time, you do want to read the temperature and also look at the implications of what you already did.”

The 'safety valve' of zoning

In 2022, builder Anthony Bartone’s company, Terwilliger & Bartone Properties in Farmingdale, casually pitched a mixed-use building for downtown with about 30 units and retail, Bartone said. Village officials weren't warm to his proposal, he said, but he appreciated the feedback before investing money into the project.

Bartone said the experience proves “you don’t need to have a moratorium in place” to stop development that a community feels is a bad fit. He said the village also has strong zoning laws in place that act as a “safety valve” to control development.

“When you deploy $10 million in DRI funds to a community to foster growth ... slamming the brakes and doing a moratorium I think is counterintuitive,” he said. Village by the Bay and  AvalonBay got built, and “the world has not come to an end. The traffic has not gotten notably worse and there is a little more foot traffic to support the businesses.”

Joan Donnison, president of the Bay Village Civic Association, told Newsday the new complexes put the village “at a tipping point” with development and issues like parking have become exacerbated.

“We had to,” she said of enacting the moratorium. “We’re only 2½ square miles. There’s only so much we can do.”

O’Neill said officials are walking a fine line to figure out how to continue to revitalize while maintaining that small-village charm.

“It’s a delicate balance between wanting to have new visitors to the village, but also not at the expense of the character of a 130-year-old village,” he said.

Experts said it’s what Amityville does after the moratorium is over that will matter most for the village’s revitalization efforts.

“If the village suddenly decides to stop being what so far is a relative model, the state may decide to claw back some of the [DRI] money,” Levy said. “Developers will obviously bring lawsuits, and that’s not going to serve anybody.”

O’Neill said he doesn’t know if the moratorium will be extended after it expires in June.

“I’m not looking to kick the can down the road on this,” he said. “That’s not beneficial to anybody.”