Central Islip in the New York Times

The New York Times' Lawrence Downes writes about Central Islipin today's New York Times. This could be a huge opportunity for the Long Island Builders Institute.

Editorial Observer
In a Reborn Corner of Long Island, Blight Comes Creeping Back
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
The foreclosure crisis has created a continent’s worth of disasters, so it might seem unfair to pick one out from all the others. But this one hits close to home, and it hurts. The epidemic of bad loans is threatening to unravel one of the brightest stories of community recovery that New York State has seen in decades: the rebirth of Central Islip.

Central Islip is a Long Island community of about 32,000 people — a modest place, right off the expressway, about as un-Hamptons as Long Island gets, without a quaint downtown or a beach. Its best-known landmark, the Central Islip Psychiatric Center, was for decades both the engine of its prosperity and the catalyst of its devastation.

It was once the country’s second-largest mental hospital, and Central Islip was a company town for thousands of workers and their families. But when the hospital emptied out from the 1960s through the ’80s, the neighborhoods around it did, too. Blocks of tidy houses fell prey to abandonment and rot. Families moved away. Drug dealers and absentee slumlords moved in.

Homegrown institutions kept things from falling apart. One of the most important has been the Central Islip Civic Council, a little nonprofit that has acted as a form of community glue for more than 40 years — building houses, offering loan counseling, managing rental properties and running a food pantry and newspaper.

Its executive director, Nancy Manfredonia, has seen the area fall and rise as master plans have come and gone, bringing new homes and businesses to fill the hole left by the hospital. For years, things have slowly been getting better. A county courthouse was built in the early ’90s, then a federal courthouse. A law school set up nearby. The New York Institute of Technology repaired and occupied many of the old hospital buildings. Then came a ballpark for the Long Island Ducks, shopping centers and housing developments with aspirational names like Islip Landing and Courthouse Commons.

The biggest achievement was College Woods, once a blighted neighborhood called Carleton Park, which the civic council and Town of Islip rebuilt from the ground up. Hundreds of new homes were sold at subsidized prices to low- and moderate-income families. “We recycled the neighborhood,” Ms. Manfredonia said proudly.

But all during the boom, predatory lenders were descending on Central Islip, just as they were next door in Brentwood and Bay Shore and in Wyandanch, Hempstead Village, Freeport, Roosevelt and other working-class places across Long Island. They pushed people into taking loans they couldn’t repay, sold the bad loans into the securitized abyss and disappeared.

Now the bottom has fallen out. Central Islip is a hot spot for defaults and foreclosures. Ms. Manfredonia’s organization regularly surveys abandoned homes. Last year in one neighborhood, the number fell to a historic low: only 11. Now it is rising again. I drove around with her last week, our heads turning left, right and left as we spied the telltale plywood and broken windows. Willow Street in particular was badly hit. “Geez,” she said. “This is really gruesome.”

Ms. Manfredonia knows that not everybody should be a homeowner. She’s hoping the crisis shakes Long Island into filling its desperate need for rental housing — for single people, old people, poor people and now for the people ruined by the burst housing bubble.

Central Islip’s master plans never included significant amounts of rentals because nobody wanted them. That’s typical for Long Island, which is trapped in old patterns of segregation where homeowners see renters as problem people. But now that homeownership itself is under siege, maybe that will change.

The solutions won’t necessarily come from the top down. New York’s state and local governments have lots of other problems besides housing. No one knows how much federal money will eventually flow to distressed homeowners, though it already seems clear that it won’t be enough. There is a dire need for creative ways to keep people in their homes — and those, too, are in short supply.

Grass-roots groups don’t have the luxury of waiting for the crisis to pass. There are banks to haggle with, houses to repair, homeowners to comfort and advise. We’ll figure it out ourselves, Ms. Manfredonia says, voicing the optimism that housing advocates on Long Island choose, as an alternative to despair.