LI's present, future in sharper focus

At year's end, a customary time for self-analysis, two new views of our region have arrived to sharpen that reflection: an unusually detailed Census Bureau description of where we've been and how we're changing, and a plan for what we need to do in the next 25 years to keep Long Island livable and vibrant. Together, these insights can help us build on our many regional strengths and improve on our weaknesses. And we shouldn't waste that opportunity.

First, the Long Island Regional Planning Council rolled out its 2035 plan, offering 39 action strategies on everything from affordable housing to waste. This past week, the U.S. Census Bureau released five years of American Community Survey data, with information focusing on much smaller communities than the past one-year and three-year surveys.

Though the bureau's numbers don't present any breathtaking, holy- cow-level observations, they portray a region growing, changing and, in some important ways, struggling. They raise issues that we'll have to address, and the 2035 plan offers some good strategies for doing that.

Take median household income: As in much of America, it's stuck on hold. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Nassau's is slightly down since 2000, from $92,756 to $92,450, and Suffolk's is a bit up, from $84,074 to $84,530.

Our stubbornly sluggish national economy is a significant factor in that. So is the continuing polarization of the job market: too much growth in low-paying service-sector employment and too little in higher-paying technology jobs. That has to change.

One of the four major areas of the 2035 plan focuses on the economy. Its vision includes higher-paying and more abundant jobs and a more business-friendly environment. Its strategies for realizing that vision include better support for high-tech startups and more jobs in green energy, health care, life sciences, homeland security and redevelopment of brownfields.

The plan prescribes, as this page has, the development of some regional entity to better coordinate economic development. In addition, it lays out some useful ideas for reducing the high cost of doing business here, so we can better attract and retain companies. And it proposes a long-term "Buy Long Island First" effort, to market what we produce.

You can't get there from here

The community survey reminds us how heavily we still depend on traffic-clogged highways. Too many of us commute alone in our cars. Too few carpool or get on the bus or train. The public-transit percentages are higher in Nassau than in Suffolk. In Brookhaven, for example - larger geographically than all of Nassau - only 4 percent use public transit.

The 2035 plan's strategies on environment and infrastructure lay heavy emphasis on developing a meaningful suburban transit system. That may be the heaviest lift of all, given our love affair with our cars. We're also in love with single-family homes, a land-use pattern that doesn't produce the hubs of dense population that mass transit needs, or the fairly apportioned and wide availability of affordable housing that the plan also seeks.

Among its strategies for reducing congestion, especially the thundering truck traffic on the Expressway, is a deepwater port somewhere on Long Island Sound in eastern Suffolk. We rely too much on trucks and too little on rail to deliver all the goods we need. A deepwater port might reduce some of that truck traffic. The plan also calls for a sharp reduction in waste and an increase in recycling, to cut the number of trucks hauling garbage off the Island.

As to who we are, the Census Bureau's mirror shows that we are getting older. Nassau's median age is up from 38.5 to 40.7 in the past decade, and Suffolk's is up from 36.5 to 39.

And we are becoming increasingly diverse. The Hispanic population has increased from 10.5 percent to 13 percent in Suffolk and 10 to 12 in Nassau. Asians are also a bigger presence in both counties - up from 2.5 percent to 3 percent in Suffolk and 4.8 to 7 in Nassau.

Those numbers include continuing immigration, and the 2035 plan calls for an immigration task force, drawn from both government and the private sector. It would work to meet the needs of both the immigrants and the industries they serve. Given all the frictions of recent years and the unworkable solutions offered by town and county governments, it's time for a more regional approach.

The census data is full of daunting challenges, like the sharp drop in housing construction that has led to a loss of both construction jobs and local government revenue. And the plan has good ideas, like a new structure for regional management of our water and the development of ways to adapt to the coming impacts of climate change on our shoreline.

Now that the planning council has delivered its plan, it must choose doable priorities among its strategies. And it must push to make it a real action plan. That means local governments will have to get on board.

The challenge for all of us is to use both the data and the plan to make this a more economically, environmentally and socially viable region in the quarter-century ahead. hN