'We've Lost Individuals, We've Lost Dollars': How NIMBYism Is Stunting Long Island's Growth

Community opposition to new housing development is nothing new on Long Island, where the modern suburb was born, but the cumulative effect of anti-development sentiment on the Island has left it vulnerable economically as the generations shift and the perceived quality of life goes down.

“It's creating these conditions where housing is incredibly unaffordable on Long Island,” Steven Dubb, principal of The Beechwood Organization, said onstage at Bisnow’s 2023 Long Island State of the Market event. “So you've got a ton of people who live on Long Island who are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to afford to live here, who are angry.”

Long Island, which is filled with single-family homes, found itself at the forefront of New York’s discussions over housing supply earlier this year. Long Island counties were a vocal part of the pushback that toppled Gov. Kathy Hochul’s housing agenda, which included mandating new housing developments in every county in the state. But new rental housing is essential if Long Island’s economy is going to survive, developers said.

The dearth of rental housing means that young people who grew up on Long Island can’t stay as adults. While that pattern of exodus has been true for at least a decade, departures accelerated during the pandemic, industry figures said onstage at the Bisnow event, held at the Garden City Hotel last week.

The lost tax revenue from those departures and the lack of new housing will mean less funding for schools and declines in property prices, said Gwen O’Shea, president and CEO of the Community Development Corporation of Long Island.

“We've lost units, we've lost individuals, we've lost dollars,” O’Shea said. “I don't know what more municipalities — or residents, quite frankly — need to see to get behind supporting smart, planned development that makes sense for each municipality.”

Virulent opposition to development by vocal minorities in Long Island’s towns and cities is the most significant hurdle in the way of their growth, Huntington Community and Economic Development Director Angel Cepeda said.

“Many times developers will look at a plot of land somewhere and say, 'OK, it can be purchased. We could do this on it if we rezone, if we change it.' The problem is that if it's surrounded by single-family homes, you're going to get a lot of pushback,” he said. “It's got to be in an area where people will support the effort.”

But the second problem comes with the time frame that it takes to make plans materialize, developers said. Long Island has more than 100 municipalities and more than 1,000 zoning districts, meaning that developers have to extend timelines to deal with the additional red tape.

“In some of the smaller communities in Long Island, the political climate changes too often,” said Joseph Graziose Sr., RXR’s executive vice president for residential construction and development. “You go down a path with a certain group of council or mayor, and before you know it, they're gone for whatever reason. And now you're off to the next one.”

With the pricing volatility over the last few years, and in particular interest rate hikes over the past year restricting banks' willingness to hand out construction loans, projects that take several years to get approved may not be economically feasible by the end of negotiations, Graziose said. 

Some public opposition to new development comes from misinformation about what it would mean for their local economies, said Salvatore Coco, a partner at BHC Architects.

“People are afraid the property values are going to go down,” he said. “They're afraid their school district is going to be affected.”

School district revenues in particular are something that concerns Huntington’s Cepeda, who served on the school board in his community for six years. 

“Two-thirds of property taxes are driven by your school district,” he said. “My youngest daughter is no longer here on Long Island. We invest so much in our children's education, and yet we cannot keep them here on the island, because the economics don't allow it."

Part of the barrier to buying property on Long Island for younger generations is the tax burden. When overseeing sales, The Beechwood Organization’s Dubb said that he can sell properties in Charlotte, North Carolina, for over $1M with owners paying roughly $6K in property taxes per year — but selling a $900K condo in Nassau County means property taxes of up to $30K.

“It's bananas,” he said.

Building more housing boosts the local economy, taking the pressure off tax revenues — as recently demonstrated in Patchogue under Mayor Paul Pontieri Jr., O’Shea said. The economic activity generated by new residents and the boost to local business created more commercial tax revenue, reducing reliance on property taxes, she said.

"[The mayor] got to a point where he was able to say, 'I can actually decrease property taxes,'" she said. "He also says he didn't lower property taxes. But there was the opportunity, you know, to do that. It's a really important point is that it's a multigeneration of new resources from an economic development perspective.”

Elected officials should be doing more to cut red tape around zoning so that proposals can move faster, developers said onstage. But the other thing that can help is outreach to communities by developers themselves.

“We try to do outreach like it’s a political campaign,” Dubb said. “You have to try to do as much outreach as possible and as much education as possible, especially because in the age of the internet, there's so much misinformation out there.”

RXR’s own experience is testament to how far an enduring outreach effort can take a development.

When the developer first started with plans for a “56-acre Superfund site, blighted property that nothing could ever be done with,” it was met with vocal opposition from local residents, Graziose said. RXR set up an information center for people to learn more, went to public hearings and went into schools to talk about the environmental impacts of their plans. The project is a success today, he said, but only because of RXR’s persistence in trying to educate the community.

“We have got to get in front of this stuff and get the communities to understand the benefits and actually hear them, listen to them, and try to get them to participate in the processes that are standing in these public meetings being against the process,” he said.