Well...boo hoo...I guess.
The “blue collar working class” of Long Island voted for Rats overwhelmingly who then brought in tens of millions of people to compete with them for jobs and space.
The result was easy to predict: Said Working Class got pushed out.
Apparently they were too stupid to make the connection between mass immigration and skyrocketing land prices, reduced wages, and Affirmative Action preferences for anyone with a skin tone biased towards the Southern climates.
So they can kiss Sag Harbor goodbye and say hello to South Jersey. Still got cheap houses in the swamps.
I grew up on the Island, and I visited there frequently until my father passed away two years ago.
I left for good in 1968, when my friends and I used to shoot .22 rifles in my Dad’s backyard - in Nassau County!
My recent impressions are that the Island is a big fat mess. And it’s somewhat creepy, and sad, that, like California (another wonderful place to be a kid in the 1950s and 1960s) - that maybe places set up to make it “wonderful to be a kid” don’t create lasting results, that if it’s wonderful to be a kid somewhere, you are generating self-centered middle aged people who don’t grow up, who kill their babies, and who allow invaders to come in to mow their grass.
Big hair, gum chewing broads.
When was Long Island ever affordable. As far back as 1985, my house in western NY, worth $75k, would have cost $250k on Long Island ...
I left LI in 1995. At the time I paid $4,500 RE taxes per year on a 1200 sf house - built in 1950 - on a 50 x 100 foot plot in a good ‘blue-collar’ neighborhood. Sold it for $145K. My last job on LI took me 45 minutes to drive 9 miles to work. That’s not a typo. 45 minutes for 9 miles!
When I moved, for $172K I bought a 2300 sf house on a 175 x 225 foot plot in a considerably nicer ‘white-collar’ neighborhood. $2,300 taxes at the time...they’ve climbed to $4,800 recently. 20 miles to work, takes me 25 minutes.
Well, I couldn’t afford the Denver metroplex anymore about 10 years ago. Not due to the expense, due to the crappy living conditions given the crimes and the traffic.
Much better now on the western slope.
I had a 28K condo in SC back in the mid 80’s, taxes went from 1600 to 4K, that was the warning shot. In the latter 80’s I was gone. No more 4 hr time to the office and back to 1400 in taxes way up state where I had a 5 minute drive to work. One of our family members who retired and stayed on L.I. was “only” paying 18K in TAXES for a 3br split! For years I had this feeling of a band aid around my forehead. That feeling left after we moved to Northern NY, it must have been the weather? I really didn’t think it was worth staying on L.I., for what? Tension? The LIE can only compete with those damn highways in the SF area of CA during rush hour. I hate that place too, but I go visit my kids there on occasion, but no longer, I just don’t want to step in Sh!t anymore. On the farm its fine but not in the city street and sidewalks.
Why don’t they build some housing projects or get some safe injection sites to keep the price of real estate down?
Like most places near a city, LI was a blue collar town. A lot of people worked in the defense industry, lots of multi generational cops and firefighters were the backbone of the area. Lots of vets, all my friend’s fathers were vets. One of my friends lost his dad in Vietnam. Late 80s was when the creep started. I left in 1993 because it was too expensive and you had to plan your life around traffic.
I miss it and I wish my kids could have grown up in that place.
This 1993 article about Long Island is hilarious (to me at least!). I have re-read it over the years a few times and it always makes me laugh. Anyway, almost 30 years later, I still think it sums up the Guyland like nothing else I have ever read. (If you are young and miss some of the references to people in the article, Google them for extra laughs.)
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/22/magazine/the-devil-in-long-island.html
I know. $24 in glass beads doesn’t go as far as it once did ...
Not counting the invasion of the M13 gang children.
I thought all those city-folk were supposed to be so smart. Guess they read all the wrong economics & political science books in college.
Some of the finest people I have ever met are from Long Island. Great conservative, common sense people living in a filthy communist dunghole for a state.
Not too expensive for all those gang members living there...
Born and raised on long island (N. Babylon) got my first boat at 12 years old spent my teen years commercial clam digging great south bay had a great life. Miss those times but not the high taxes, and cold winters. trying to live there, left in 82 moved to Florida enjoying the good life being retired.
I smell the old leftist Gentrification.