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.

Washington’s New Tack: Helping Homeowners

The New York Times presents some interesting insight as to what's happening in Washington to help stimulate home buying across the country. Click here to read the article.

Thriving In Real Estate

As a change of pace from the downbeat of bad news so pervasive today LIBI presents the gems linked below. As Mr. Citarelli likes to say, "When life hands you a lemon, make a lemonade." A cliche? Of course. But true nonetheless.

Click here to read Marcelle Fischler's story from yesterday's real estate section in the New York Times about Lawrence Citarelli and his aggressive real estate plans.

Click here to view the upbeat outlook presented by R. Donald Peebles, real estate maven and adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, on how he's finding opportunities in this vexing economy.

What Else Don't We Know About?

Governor Paterson is making a clarion call to anyone who will listen that New York State is in desperate financial straits. Mayor Bloomberg is making a case that New York City needs to skirt the law calling for term limits that will force him out of office because the city needs his guidance through the financial difficulties that lay ahead. Elected officials at the county, town and village levels are singing the blues.

It would seem to make sense that they are. Everybody is hurting - why shouldn't government be feeling the pinch?

Then you read a story like the one Juan Gonzalez wrote in today's Daily News. Apparently the New York City Board of Education sees nothing wrong with spending $5 million in 2008 for private couriers - more than double the messenger tab before Schools Chancellor Joel Klein took over in 2002. Apparently the couriers are paid to pick up the tests from all schools and deliver them to the Department of Education's computer center in Queens. There is no explanation as to why using an overnight delivery service is not good enough.

There is also the $80 million contract NYC DOE awarded to CTB McGraw-Hill a few years ago to design all of the new assessment tests and score them. Or the $80 million contract to IBM for ARIS, the new computer database that will track all information about students, including all those test scores.

The point is this: Is anyone in government paying attention to spending that's going on? What other out-of-control spending is going on that we don't know about?

In business you watch every dime because what goes out the door comes out of the owner's pocket. Not so in government. The LIRR's disability scandal is another case in point. LIRR officials claim to be outraged that this is going on, but nobody would have done anything if the New York Times hadn't looked into the situation. And Newsday's probe of attorneys and elected officials helping themselves to state pensions that they should not be entitled to is also quite scary.

Don't even get me started about the state, the county and the Town of East Hampton lining the pockets of Dick Cavett to the tune of $18 million - buying property that no private developer would touch.

Who's looking out for the taxpayer? Who in government is going to recognize that we the taxpaying public can no longer afford to just keep feeding the cash trough? When will the we the taxpayer rise up as one and say ENOUGH!

I can only hope that this difficult economic climate we are enduring right now will result in greater scrutiny of government spending. It is incumbent upon us as taxpayers to demand the same lean and mean operations from government that we are required to maintain as business people.

The Truth Shall Set Us Free - or At Least Shed Some Light on the Situation

Good morning!

There was some interesting reading over the weekend pertaining to the home building and home remodeling industries.

First was this week's Long Island Business Newscover story: "sex, lies and property taxes". David Winzelberg's well-researched piece debunks the notion that housing development equals over-whelmed school districts. It's must reading for anyone planning to seek approval(s) for a housing project in the near future.

The second article "Debating How Green to Go" was written by Marcelle Fischler and appeared in the real estate section of the Sunday New York Times. It draws attention to Southampton's well-intentioned-but-flawed attempts to became the first town in the nation to tie HERS ratings to the size of the house (in other words, the bigger house the more energy efficient it has to be).

The third article was by Mark Harrington in Newsday. It reported on a study issued by the Network for New Energy Choices. The study examines how the trend toward local municipalities demanding more energy accountability is further encumbering the permit approval process.

Hopefully these articles will help shed some light on the realities of home building and remodeling on Long Island. LIBI members strive to do the right thing - especially when it comes to energy efficiencies. Sometimes the "right thing" gets muddled in the process, however, especially when other factions' idea of what the "right thing" is impossible to achieve.


I would to hear your comments on these pieces.