Newsday Misses The Point

So Newsday's editorial today questions the wisdom of the Long Island real estate community spending $20,000 to fund a brutally important study by The Long Island Economic and Social Policy Institute at Dowling College but ignores the folly of Long Island taxpayers shelling out more than $1 billion to purchase land that can be put to tax-generating use. That's rich.

It also ignores how important housing is to the Long Island economy. Companies doing business on Long Island want to stay here but they can't stay if they can't grow and they can't grow if they can't keep young people as employees. Long Islanders between the ages of 18 and 35 are voting with their feet and leaving the Island in droves, mainly because they can't find the kind of housing that meets their needs. And they can't find the housing they need because the entrenched elite on Long Island have theirs and they don't want the next generation of Long Islanders to have the same opportunities they benefitted from back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Long Island needs more housing, not more vacant space.