Islip grants $5.1 million in tax breaks for planned assisted living facility
Benchmark Senior Living plans to build the two-story complex where the East Islip Lanes bowling alley, above, is located. Credit: Joseph Sperber
Islip Town is giving a senior living provider up to $5.1 million in tax breaks to build East Islip’s first assisted living facility, which is expected to house about 100 seniors, including those with conditions such as dementia, according to a town contract and the developer.
Benchmark Senior Living, the company behind the proposal, plans to build the two-story complex at 117 E. Main St. The four-acre property is currently home to a bowling alley, East Islip Lanes, which is still open but will be razed to make way for the new construction.
In an email to Newsday, Benchmark vice president Eric Gardner described the project as a 90-unit “assisted living and memory care community” that will house residents “who need assistance with activities of daily living, like help managing their medication or getting dressed.”
It also will serve “those with Alzheimer’s and dementia who need a secure living environment,” Gardner added in his email. He noted that the facility will be the third Long Island complex for Benchmark, which also operates Whisper Woods of Smithtown and Orchard Estate of Woodbury.
A spokesperson for the company said rent is expected to start at around $5,000 per month.
The assisted living complex will be East Islip’s first, according to John Walser, the executive director of Islip’s Industrial Development Agency. U.S. Census data from 2023 shows that more than a quarter of that hamlet’s 13,700 residents are at least 60 years old.
Gardner said Benchmark homed in on East Islip because of that gap in the local market.
“There is a growing need for housing and services for the large number of aging baby boomers across the country but particularly in East Islip, where there are currently no assisted living communities,” he wrote to Newsday.
Islip’s IDA board, which is identical to its five-member town board, voted unanimously last month to approve $2.3 million in sales tax breaks, up to $300,000 in mortgage recording tax breaks and another roughly $2.5 million in property tax breaks for Benchmark’s project.
Benchmark and the company it is partnering with on the project, National Development, will make payments in lieu of regular taxes on the property over the next 17 years. In total, the developers will pay about $6.4 million during that time frame.
Islip’s IDA primarily focuses on giving tax breaks to businesses in order to create and retain jobs. But Walser said the agency also subsidizes certain residential projects like Benchmark’s.
“We do senior housing, 100% affordable housing, market rate housing in certain areas or for certain reasons, like in defined downtown corridors. … And assisted living facilities,” he said.
Benchmark’s East Islip facility is expected to create 46 full-time and 41 part-time jobs, according to Walser and the IDA’s contract with the company.
Gardner said construction of the complex is expected to begin next year and that the facility should open in 2027, once it obtains the appropriate operating licenses.
Sam Kmack covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and previously worked as a city watchdog reporter in the Phoenix metro area, as well as an investigative journalist at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.
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