Long Island needs more housing
There might not be a topic that the editorial board returns to more often than housing.
That’s partly because of its importance to the region. Housing determines where and whether you can afford to live on Long Island. It determines the quality of your child’s education. It determines the racial composition of communities. And it is the source of perhaps the greatest controversies in local zoning and planning board meetings when residents rally to fight proposed developments.
We also write regularly about housing because there is such a shortage of it on Long Island. Specifically, the region lacks housing that is affordable to the young and old and to laborers and minimum-wage workers, especially rental housing. Long Island lags well behind other New York City suburbs in apartments.
Views on housing are an important part of the criteria by which we judge candidates for public office. And we have written extensively about the role of housing in downtown development and at the Nassau and Ronkonkoma hubs, about the importance of incentivizing its construction, and about discrimination by real estate agents.
Most recently, we used a proposal to rejuvenate the Sun Vet Mall in Ronkonkoma to talk about the potential to add housing to troubled malls all over the Island. “What about a few apartments over some of those businesses, or a small complex of townhouses at one end?” the board wrote. “Adding residents could provide more life and character. A little less mall-y, if you will.”
Long Islanders seem to agree. nextLI, a project of Newsday Opinion, recently asked residents of the region to identify struggling or empty commercial and retail spaces - such as malls - in their communities and to suggest ways those places could be repurposed. Not surprisingly, some of the suggestions included housing.
The editorial board also made a recent plea to the state to simplify its cumbersome bureaucratic process for approving inclusive housing for people with developmental disabilities, which was holding up a 400-unit affordable housing project in Suffolk County.
We went to bat for an East End ballot referendum that would help towns build more affordable housing via a new tax on real estate sales. It passed in East Hampton, Southampton, Southold and Shelter Island.
And we have supported the building of more permanent and affordable housing for veterans, pairing that with the kinds of support services our veterans need.
Housing is an essential human right. And we’ll keep working to ensure everyone can get it.
- Michael Dobie
