NIONDALE, N.Y., Feb. 19 - One by one, the children of suburbia are leaving Long Island.Posted on 02/21/2004 12:01:46 PM PST by NYC GOP Chick
NIONDALE, N.Y., Feb. 19 - One by one, the children of suburbia are leaving Long Island.
There is the 24-year-old graduate student who moved to Washington State to study anthropology and found that it was cheaper to live in Seattle than Hempstead. There is the sheriff's investigator, Timothy Ortwein, who left and bought his first house, in West Virginia, at age 23. And there is Emil Soskin, 24, a third-year law student who is fed up with strip malls and subdivisions and longs for an apartment in Greenwich Village.
New York's suburbs have long struggled to hold on to young adults, but county officials and demographers say the problem is becoming a crisis. In Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester Counties, 18- to 34-year-olds are leaving the suburbs at some of the fastest rates in the nation, moving upstate, to the South and the West and into New York City.
Long Island, whose Levittown developments are shorthand for postwar suburbia, is a petri dish for the problem, development experts say. The young families and just-marrieds who once flocked here now balk at the soaring housing prices, high taxes and monochrome of suburban life.
"What is the incentive to stay on Long Island?" asked Ilyssa Lindner, a 23-year-old nursing student who lives in Oceanside. "The cost of living out here is absolutely outrageous. You graduate, you're making good money, and you can't afford anything. It's driving younger people off Long Island."
In the past decade, the number of Long Islanders between 18 and 34 years old has dropped 20 percent, a rate five times the national average, according to a recent survey of Long Island's population and economy. New York's northern suburbs saw an 18 percent drop in the same population over that time.
The pattern is gradually reshaping the suburbs, on Long Island in particular, said Carrie Meek Gallagher, who directed the survey, the Long Island Index 2004. As the average age creeps up and birth rates fall, county officials worry that an absence of young workers will cripple the suburbs' growth and economies.
"You're losing the talent; you're going to start losing businesses," Ms. Gallagher said. "It could change the whole face of the island, the whole face of the place in the next 10 years."
Some county experts said they have started to notice ripples of that change. Some companies bus in employees from Brooklyn and Queens, while other major Long Island businesses like Grumman or Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are struggling to attract talented young engineers, Ms. Gallagher said.
To stem the exodus, county officials said, they have to make Long Island both enticing and affordable - both difficult tasks. The Nassau county executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, said building denser developments and moderately priced housing in downtowns, poorer neighborhoods and old brownfield industrial sites is crucial to keeping younger people on Long Island.
"If we're going to grow, we're going to have to change our rules from when they were set up, in the 40's and 50's," Mr. Suozzi said.
For countless people, the cycle of suburbia has been a predictable loop: Grow up, gripe that there is nothing to do, attend college, move to the city, then move back home to raise a family and skate toward middle age. But conversations this week with a dozen young Long Islanders who have left - or want to - suggest that they have little interest in returning.
Mr. Ortwein, 24, the sheriff's investigator, is one of them. After growing up in Malverne and graduating from Elmira College with a degree in criminal justice, Mr. Ortwein tried to find a job as a police officer so that he could afford to buy a house in Nassau County, where the median home price is $405,000.
Instead of renting, he got a job with a sheriff's department in Virginia, and he and his wife bought a three-bedroom log cabin nearby, in Jefferson County, W.Va. His property taxes are $600 per year, compared with Long Islanders's taxes that average $3,000 to $4,000.
"I'm the only kid from our high school class who's actually been able to afford a house," Mr. Ortwein said. "We had to give up Long Island to be able to afford something. We're going to stay. The schools are great down here, and it's a great place to raise kids."
According to the Long Island survey, 53 percent of young adults in Nassau and Suffolk Counties are thinking of moving away, while only one-third of people in their 20's and 30's in the northern suburbs and New Jersey said they were considering leaving.
In the survey and interviews, those who want to go say that the cost of living and taxes are too high, that housing is scarce and overpriced, and that the available jobs do not pay enough to support living in the suburbs. Many said they need a car to get around, but do not want to pay high insurance costs and $1.80 for a gallon of gas.
"The average person 18 to 34 can't afford to live on Long Island," said Jon Teaford, a professor at Purdue University who studies suburban development.
The exodus happens in drips and spurts. Some go away to college and never return, while others go back to live with families in the suburbs after graduating, either to apply to graduate schools, plot their next move or save money on rent while they work.
In the upper-income Suffolk County hamlet of Dix Hills, Shelby Tancer, 25, lives with his parents and commutes to Ozone Park, Queens, to teach first grade.
His friends from high school have all moved, but Mr. Tancer said he hopes to stay."I thought more people would be around," he said, talking at his parents' home. "The money and the costs are just crazy. You can't be fresh-faced out of college and buy a house or rent a condo. It's tough. It's tough to stay around here."
Sounds like the town I grew up in, except for it being a fine place to grow up.
Monochrome of suburban life? Yeah, right. I'm sure worrying about that keeps young American families up at night!
Not in a big way, of course--but they are building.
Moved to Georgia 15 1/2 yrs. ago... still paying 1/4 of the taxes compared to NY.
I get disgusted seeing the area when I visit relatives. Traffic, litter, poorly maintained roads...ugh.
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