Alexander: Tackling long island’s affordability and smart growth

In Brief:

• Affordability remains the top concern for Long Island residents and businesses.
• Leaders call for securing Long Island’s fair share of state and federal funding.
• Smart growth, downtown development and local planning are key to reducing costs.
• The LI Smart Growth Summit gathers experts to shape cost-saving strategies.

Affordability is the leading issue on the minds of Long Island business owners, working class and middle class residents. Folks are struggling to pay for even their basic needs, from food, to energy to healthcare. Products and services have gone up exponentially over the last four years, largely due to inflation tied to COVID-19 policies and other external factors.

The widening gulf between wealthy folks, some upper middle class residents and everyone else has been trending for decades for a variety of reasons and has had a profound impact on local communities across Long Island.

What can we do to stabilize or reduce costs to make things easier for local residents and business owners? Let’s start with our federal and state governments working to secure Long Island’s fair share of tax dollars it sends to Albany and Washington but does not get back in services and capital projects. This requires a lobbying effort which shows that every dollar invested in Long Island is a positive economic generator for New York State and the nation at large, bringing growth and benefits well beyond Long Island’s borders.

We need economic growth and investment that brings commercial and housing development to our downtowns and commercial corridors. In order for more projects to move forward with public support, we need our development community to be charitable, provide public benefits, transparent in their process and directly engage with the public.

In recent years, over 40 developers across Long Island have taken these steps, as municipalities approved over 19,000 units of transit oriented development, mixed use and affordable housing. We can build on these successful examples.

We need our local governments to continue with quality of life initiatives, such as fixing dangerous roads, providing efficient services and public amenities, park improvements, downtown arts and cultural events. All of these services attract investment, bring tourism, and aid local businesses and Main Streets.

Most importantly, we need to rebuild local trust that has been weakened due to regional and national efforts which are highly political and polarizing. Efforts to remove local zoning from communities on housing, cannabis sitings and other initiatives have not helped.

Planning locally—which is the driving force behind economic growth in our communities—g oes a long way to rebuilding public trust and move projects forward without lawsuits and long delays.

Over the last 20 plus years, local governments across Long Island have kept services flowing, grown downtowns and approved housing, (including affordable housing projects) while working with local communities. The hyper local nature of Long Island works to its advantage. Long Island is not really a region, but a community of communities, which allows the public and local government to engage in a way that is meaningful and manageable.

This strong local leadership across Long Island is on display at the 24th Annual LI Smart Growth Summit, with over 1,000 attendees, consisting of 100 local elected officials, 300 community and small business leaders, and scores of development and transportation, clean energy and wastewater infrastructure professionals, environmentalists and human service providers.

This year’s mission is to amass recommendations to bring more revenue to Long Island and to reduce costs associated with redevelopment, governance, infrastructure and regulations while continuing to provide critical services.

We need your help as well. If you have ideas to make local communities more affordable, please email them to [email protected]. We will take your ideas, and those from the summit, and bring them to Albany, Washington, local corporations and our local municipalities.

There is no political agenda here–left wing, right wing, chicken wing –it doesn’t matter. If there are ideas, policies and projects that can make our communities thrive while making life a little easier for our working class, middle class, poorer residents and small businesses–let’s work together to get it done.

Eric Alexander is the director of Vision Long Island and founder of the LI Main Street Alliance.