Suburbs look at 'smart growth' for their downtowns

Long Island is looking downtown to secure its future.

With increasing urgency, leaders are working to revive town centers - to reverse blight, broaden a tax base that now weighs heavily on homeowners, and add badly needed housing for Long Island's young workforce.

And they're having success. In Oyster Bay, preserving the history of the downtown has also filled storefronts and brought more foot traffic. In Patchogue, millions in public grants helped turn a shuttered theater, purchased in the late 1990s, into a performing arts center that now draws 130,000 a year. Now there's talk of a seven-story hotel. Glen Cove is working to restore its waterfront, and in Hempstead, an urban renewal zone is paving the way for mixed-use developments.

Their plans have echoed other downtown revivals from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore. In Mashpee, Mass., developers took a tiny strip mall and parking lot and turned it into a town center. In Rochester, Mich., a face-lift brought in more than 1,000 new jobs.

On Long Island, many planners say now more than ever, downtowns are the key to reversing some of its own troubling trends: fleeing young workers, soaring taxes and vanishing open space. Nassau has virtually nowhere left to build, and Suffolk's open space could be gone within a decade. Development pressures in the next 20 years will mount in the very single-family home neighborhoods Long Islanders have sought to protect.

"We don't have room to sprawl anymore," said George "Bucky" Starkie, mayor of Farmingdale, where studies are under way for Main Street revitalization and hundreds of units of new housing near its train station. "That's over."

To be sure, it's a tough sell convincing Long Islanders who fight fiercely to protect their single-family way of life and see higher density as the enemy, bringing in traffic, more demand on schools, and downtowns more Queens than quaint. But without so-called "smart growth" - lively downtowns with condos, rentals and town houses attractive to young workers and empty nesters, and the vibrant culture and spending power they bring - the tax and lifestyle consequences will be stark in the coming decades.

"It's your kids who are not going to be living here, it's you who are not going to be able to afford the ever-increasing school taxes if you have ever fewer families supporting the overhead," said Ann Golob, of the research nonprofit The Long Island Index.

Young adults move away

The numbers give a taste of things to come:

Between 2000 and 2008, Long Island lost 22 percent of its young adults who went looking for more exciting or more affordable places to live.

School taxes - the largest portion of property taxes - increased 72 percent from 1998 to 2006, while inflation rose 27 percent, according to a report.

Thirty-seven percent of Long Island's residents pay more than a third of their income on housing, a 2008 survey found.

Seventy-two percent of homeowners said they couldn't afford their home at current prices.

Without property tax relief and more affordable homes, the exodus of the young workforce will continue, and with it, the jobs and cultural and economic boost that defines the most successful communities. Still, demographers predict an increased population on Long Island over the next three decades. And with open space disappearing, those who can move onto and around Long Island will put development pressure on single-family neighborhoods.

Already, developers are using existing zoning to squeeze more houses onto lots in Long Island's single-family neighborhoods: In Nassau, before the recession, the county had seen a steady increase since 2000 in the number of applications to build two or three houses where one had stood before.

"Most of the time the neighbors are not happy. . . . We say to people every day that the development pressure will go somewhere and that's what we're trying to change," said Graham Long, manager of the Nassau County planning department's Community Visioning Program. Master planning for communities like Freeport, he said, steers development downtown and away from single-family home neighborhoods.

Whether to reverse dangerous blight, preserve the historic character, or inject new day- and nightlife into a transformed town center, Long Island's leaders are pursuing revitalized downtowns.

But there are significant challenges: securing investors and financing, lengthy review processes, inadequate infrastructure and outdated zoning. And changes are needed to some long-standing public policies: State and federal subsidies have favored roads and suburban-style development over sewers, transit, and mixed uses along walkable streets, many planners say.

But most critical is getting the support of residents deeply resistant and fearful about the impact of development and density. Leaders know the importance of addressing these concerns, saying they want downtowns that serve, not replace, the single-family neighborhoods that surround them. "Change is inevitable but the ability for a community to determine change for itself is invaluable," said Mayor Jack Martins of Mineola, where hundreds of units of apartments near the train station, including a nine-story high-rise on Old Country Road, are nearing approval.

And redevelopment need not mean big changes in density, said urban planner Sarah Lansdale, executive director of Sustainable Long Island, who is working with Centereach, Selden and Farmingville community groups on plans based on their own wish lists. "This is not a cookie-cutter approach."

But convincing homeowners that new multifamily housing won't flood schools with new students is paramount to gaining support for downtown change.

Proponents say studies and experience - in Mineola, for example - show that apartments and condos bring in far fewer children than single-family houses. Only 10 schoolchildren, including five who already were in the district, live in the 80-unit Copper Beeches town house development in Patchogue, according to Mayor Paul Pontieri.

And in suburban White Plains in Westchester County, a downtown revitalization campaign added 2,500 units in 10 large buildings since 2003 but only 20 to 30 schoolchildren, said Mayor Adam Bradley.

Beware of the pitfalls

While downtown development often requires inducements, some civic groups and environmentalists argue that too many tax breaks or density concessions, or proposals presented without a master plan, won't benefit existing communities.

"What we're seeing is high-density development contributing to sprawl, frequently without mixed use, and other times without being transit friendly," said Richard Amper, executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society.

When Brookhaven Supervisor Mark Lesko announced a plan last week to foster redevelopment of abandoned sites through tax incentives, sewer expansion and expedited approval processes, Amper said he feared it was an excuse to allow more density.

Bradley cautioned that in White Plains, revenue from downtown redevelopment hasn't met expectations. Because of extensive tax breaks and inducements for developers, the city didn't always recoup the cost of added demand for services and infrastructure, he said.

But adding new development may be the only way to stabilize taxes in the long run, say public officials like Ralph Suozzi, mayor of Glen Cove, where a master plan calls for more high-density development and a major waterfront project is under review.

"Some of the same people who argue against change will tell you they can't afford to stay here and that the taxes are too high," he said. "The tax burden on the people who remain here will be unsustainable without new growth."

Communities that have taken the time to produce master plans with community involvement may wind up with development that homeowners feel more comfortable with.

Different approaches work

Long Island has had successes with different downtown approaches. Oyster Bay's historic-preservation approach, for example, has helped reduce storefront vacancies from 18 percent to 9 percent since 2000 and added at least 30 jobs, said Isaac Kremer, executive director of the Oyster Bay Main Street Association. Mineola, on the other hand, has sought higher density residences to complement its commercial development and offices.

But wish lists share a "unifying quality of greater walkability in their downtown, more variety of retail stores, and opportunities for entertainment for families," Lansdale said, pointing to successful downtowns like Garden City, Northport, Port Jefferson, Great Neck, Huntington and Greenport.

Huntington and Port Jefferson, with restaurants and shops, were cited in a Long Island Index survey in 2008 as the two most popular downtowns.

In Huntington, business leaders attribute the success of their village to aggressive efforts to fix problems. When the recession began to cut into revenues in the usually robust restaurant businesses, "we put together a restaurant week and created a real buzz in the community," said Robert Bontempi, chairman of the village's Chamber of Commerce board of directors. "We used our Fall Festival as the kickoff to restaurant week and we drove 20,000 meals in to the 52 downtown restaurants."

Prosperous villages are often in prosperous communities, but newly revitalized downtowns can help boost their local economy: Greenport's revitalization helped raise property values and the tax base, not only in its once-rundown downtown but the entire North Fork region, said former Mayor David Kapell.

Other leaders hope their downtowns will eventually see the same benefits, despite residents' fears about change.

"The thing is," said Mayor Suozzi of Glen Cove, "what is the alternative?"