SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Governor Hochul's "Ambitious Goal"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

In announcing her New York Housing Compact in her “State of the State” address at the start of this year, Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled a plan setting what she termed “the ambitious goal” of building in the state “800,000 new homes over the next decade.”

Under the plan, “every single locality across the state will have a target for building new homes. Upstate, the target is for the current housing stock to grow by 1% every three years. Downstate, 3% every three years.”

She said “many localities are already hitting” state housing targets. “This is not a one-size-fits-all approach,” she added. “Local governments can meet these targets however they want and shape the ways they expand building capacity, such as redeveloping old malls and office parks, incentivizing new housing production, or updating zoning rules to reduce barriers.”

The governor said “localities will get help from the state to accomplish this shared objective. We will offer substantial new funding for infrastructure like schools, roads, and sewers needed to support growing communities. And we will cut red tape to allow projects to move forward quickly while still protecting the health, safety, and environment of our communities.”

“But,” she declared, “when communities haven’t made good-faith efforts to grow when proposed housing projects are languishing for no legitimate reason, the state will implement a new fast-track approval process. Because to do nothing is an abdication of our responsibility to act in times of crisis.”

“Today,” said the governor, “we say no more delay. No more waiting for someone else to fix this problem. Housing is a human right. Ensuring enough housing is built is how we protect that right. There’s a saying, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ And we will not waste this opportunity. We just need everyone and every community to do their part. Solving our housing crisis would be a huge step toward making New York more affordable.”

This intervention by New York State government with a “new fast-track approval process,” if there is what the state considers a lack of action, became a huge sticking point instantly. 

Everybody agrees that we have an affordable housing crisis in New York State. But there is major disagreement in government as to how it should be met. 

Local and state lawmakers have been pressing for incentives, not mandates. 

But will simply incentives work? A headline last month of an article in “The Real Deal,” a publication covering the real estate industry, was: “Incentives won’t make dent in housing crisis, groups say.” It began: “The suburbs prefer carrots. That is, incentives to grow their housing stock, rather than mandates that trigger penalties if not met.” And following the Hochul announcement, the piece noted, the State Legislature advanced a measure that “offers carrots—$500 million for municipalities that meet certain housing growth targets—rather than sticks.”

Cited in the article was a 2020 report by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a joint center at the at NYU’s School of Law and the NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. The Furman Center in summarizing its report, titled “Ending Exclusionary Zoning in New York City’s Suburbs,” said: “New York stands alone among its peer states—coastal states with high housing costs and healthy regional economies—in giving its local governments such broad authority over local land use. The result is a state with fewer homes, more expensive rents, and starker segregation than it would otherwise have. By some measures, New York has the most exclusionary zoning in the country.”

Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services, based in Bohemia, which says its “mission is the elimination of unlawful housing discrimination and promotion of decent and affordable housing,” supports the governor’s plan.

The “current system,” says Wilder, “gives a developer the ability to build a 13-bedroom home”—a megamansion—“but makes the builder of a 13-unit affordable housing development jump through years of expensive legal requirements to build. Yet the local officials continue to defend the home rule zoning scheme that fails to serve our communities.”

“My experience working at a housing counseling agency is that nobody comes to us looking for home rule zoning, they are looking for a home. Recently I had two experiences that drove that home. I know a young entrepreneur who sold his business on Long Island and moved to Florida so he could realize his goal of owning a home by age 25,” said Wilder. “I also was at a beach cleanup recently and came across two of my neighbors discussing how an entry level worker cannot even afford a basement apartment.”

“We cannot solve our housing problems by relying on the tools that caused them,” Wilder comments. “Governor Hochul has looked at the tools that other states have developed already to increase housing and forged them into a plan to address our housing crisis.” 

Also backing the plan is Michael Daly, affordable housing advocate from Sag Harbor. “The New York Housing Compact will not take away local control but give local officials the tools they need to tackle the housing crisis that is happening in every town and village on Long Island. Elected and appointed officials locally are handicapped today by the overly restrictive zoning rules that they inherited from previous administrations. Almost everyone says they need to do something about housing but loud and angry NIMBYs object to local zoning changes. The officials should appreciate the New York Housing Compact for the leverage it gives them to tackle the housing crisis,” said Daly, founder of East End YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard).

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Affordable Housing Crisis

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

What everyone agrees on is that we have an affordable housing crisis.

It’s not simply a problem. It’s not just a situation. It’s a full-blown crisis impacting on many people.

One window I have on it is as a professor looking at the faces and being engaged in discussions with scores of young people every week—and when the conversation turns sometimes to housing, their expressions and comments turn gloomy. They wonder how they will ever be able to afford a house on Long Island now with the mean cost of one in Suffolk County at more than $500,000? How will they ever be able to afford a house in Nassau with a mean cost there of more than $600,000?

In both counties, that’s a payment of more than $3,000 a month—more than $700 a week—on a 30-year mortgage with a 6% fixed interest. And that’s before property taxes and costs of utilities and upkeep.

For those who dream of owning a single-family home—the housing standard for better and worse on Long Island—that requires a salary of $1,000 a week or more than $50,000 a year just for housing.

My students from New York City who figure that they’d be living in an apartment someday wonder how they could ever afford the average rent of an apartment in the city now at more than $3,000 a month.

The crisis has overtones that hark back to the Great Depression. Consider the important Riverhead-based homeless services initiative Maureen’s Haven. It provides at houses of worship in Suffolk County, free, seven nights a week, shelter for homeless men and women. (Our synagogue, Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, participates in it. My wife is among those who cook meals for folks cared for by Maureen’s Haven.) But the program only runs from November 1 to March 31. An article last week by Express News Group reporter Michael Wright in the Sag Harbor Express was headlined “With Spring’s Arrival, Homeless Lose a Lifeline.” For one participant in the Maureen’s Haven program, the piece began, “this past Friday was probably the last night for some time that he would sleep in a bed.”

Where will he and others now go? Will many sleep in the woods on Long Island? Yes. Their plight is a modern-day variation on “Grapes of Wrath.” 

What a comment it is on our society today!

Housing is a basic human need. 

In her “State of the State” address in January, Governor Kathy Hochul declared that “we must improve the quality of life for New Yorkers. But you can’t really talk about quality of life without talking about cost of living. With inflation soaring, prices are going up on everything families need to buy. And on top of that, paying the monthly rent or mortgage— it’s just overwhelming. So let’s talk about everyone’s largest expense: housing.”

“Over the last 10 years,” said the governor, “our state has created 1.2 million jobs—but only 400,000 new homes. Many forces led to this state of affairs. But front and center are the local land use policies that are the most restrictive in the nation. Through zoning, local communities hold enormous power to block growth.”

“Between full-on bans of multi-family homes, and onerous zoning and approvals processes, they make it difficult—even impossible—to build new homes.”

“Between 2010 and 2018,” she said, “Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Putnam Counties, each granted fewer building permits per capita than virtually all suburban counties across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Southern California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Northern Virginia.”

The governor spoke about how “too many of our people are struggling to find a place to call home, and they are looking to us for bold leadership. Decisive action is called for now.”

“Today,” she said, “I’m proud to introduce the New York Housing Compact, a groundbreaking strategy to catalyze the housing development we need for our communities to thrive. For our economy to grow. And our state to prosper. The compact pulls together a broad menu of policy changes that will collectively achieve the ambitious goal of 800,000 new homes over the next decade. The compact sets clear expectations for the growth we need while at the same time, giving localities plenty of tools, flexibility, and resources to stimulate that growth. Every single locality across the state will have a target for building new homes. Upstate, the target is for the current housing stock to grow by 1% every three years. Downstate, 3% every three years.”

More next week on the affordable housing crisis.  

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : F14 Tomcat A Walk Down Memory Lane

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s amazing how history bends and turns. In recent days, with tension between the United States and Iran heating up again, this time in Syria, I thought of the fighter jet which has been a mainstay to the Iranian Air Force—the F-14, built here on Long Island, in Nassau and, yes, Suffolk County.

F-14 Tomcat (Wikipedia)My mind went back to 50 years ago when there was a press event at the Grumman facility in Calverton, a manufacturing and the final assembly plant for Bethpage-based Grumman as well as its site for test flights.  

Reporters were invited to be there as U.S. Representative Otis G. Pike of Riverhead was to take a ride on what was a prize new product of Grumman, its two-seater F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jet. (It’s the plane featured in Tom Cruise’s 1986 movie “Top Gun.”) Pike, outfitted in a flight suit, who represented the lst Congressional District from 1961 to 1979, was no stranger to warplanes. During World War II he served as a Marine Corps dive bomber and fighter pilot through the war in the Pacific. 

Walking into the huge Grumman plant, I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of F-14s with U.S. Navy markings. Grumman for the decades following its founding in 1929 as Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation by Leroy Grumman and partners, it became a prime manufacturer of airplanes for the Navy.

But I was surprised to see a bunch of F-14s with strange markings. 

They were being produced for Iran. Indeed, Iran was the only foreign nation to which the F-14, considered a highly advanced fighter in its time, was ever sold.

In fact, the sale of those jets to Iran was considered pivotal to Grumman. It was “the contract that really saved it,” relates David Hugh Onkst in an exhaustive 640-page Ph.D. dissertation on Grumman history presented in 2011 at American University. (It is online.) “In 1974, the Shah of Iran signed a $2 billion contract for eighty F-14s.” It “would be” the “contract that rescued the company” at that point deep in debt, he related.

But then came the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the ouster of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian hostage crisis after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized that year with 50 Americans held hostage for 444 days. Relations between the U.S. and Iran have never, to say the least, been the same. From allies, the countries became enemies.

Meanwhile, Iran has through the decades been using those made-on-Long-Island F-14 jet fighters. “The F-14 Tomcat is the Backbone of the Iranian Air Force,” was the headline of a 2019 article in the publication The National Interest.

The article provided background for the interest of the shah in the F-14. He “wanted weapons. And not just any weapons. Himself a former military pilot, the king wanted the latest and best U.S.-made warplanes, with which the Iranian Air Force might dominate the Persian Gulf and even patrol as far away as the Indian Ocean….The administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon was all too eager to grant the shah’s wish in exchange for Iran’s help balancing a rising Soviet Union…That’s how, starting in the mid-1970s, Iran became the only country besides the United States to operate arguably the most powerful interceptor jet ever built—the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.” 

The piece continued: “It’s fair to say American policymakers quickly regretted giving 

Iran the F-14s….The Islamic revolution transformed Iran from an American ally to one of the United States’ most vociferous enemies….For the next five decades, the United States would do everything in its power—short of war—to ground the ayatollah’s Tomcats. But the Americans failed. Through a combination of engineering ingenuity and audacious espionage, Iran kept its F-14s in working order—and even improved them. The swing-wing fighters took to the air in several conflicts and even occasionally confronted American planes. Today Iran’s 40 or so surviving F-14s remain some of the best fighters in the Middle East.”

Despite efforts to prevent replacement parts for the F-14 from getting to Iran, they’ve  gotten there. “The parts war escalated after the U.S. Navy retired its last F-14s in 2006…In 2007, U.S agents even seized four intact ex-U.S. Navy F-14s in California—three at museums….Even so, the underground trade in Tomcat parts continues, with shady companies scouring the planet for leftover components.”

“Five decades in, Iran’s F-14s are only getting better and better,” the article concluded.

Back on Long Island, an F-14 has just been fully restored to be displayed at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City. (The restoration costs were covered by Northrop Grumman. In 1994 Grumman merged with Virginia-headquartered Northrop.)  “We are the keeper of the legacy of Grumman,” the museum’s president, Andy Parton, has said. It is the 711^th of the 712 F-14s built by Grumman on Long Island. 

Yes, Long Island’s F-14 still hangs on in these parts—and in Iran.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: New Faces Coming To The Legislature

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

There will be new faces on the Suffolk County Legislature next year and, if he is elected in November, a familiar face, Steven Englebright of Setauket, who was a leading environmental champion on the county’s governing panel from 1983 until his election to the State Assembly in 1992. 

However, Democrat Englebright after 30 years in the Assembly, in which on the state level he continued as an environmental leader including as chair of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee, lost his Assembly seat in an upset last year to Republican Ed Flood, a lawyer from Port Jefferson.

Still, at 76, Englebright has decided to seek to return to the Suffolk Legislature. Long a professor at Stony Brook University, he will be facing Republican Anthony Figliola of East Setauket, a former deputy supervisor of the Town of Brookhaven.

However, his election is not assured. Republican candidates did very well in contests for the Suffolk County Legislature in the last election, in 2021, for positions on the county’s 18-member governing panel. It now has a Republican majority after years of Democratic majorities.  

Will that GOP muscle continue this year in the bi-annual election to the panel? 

Meanwhile, the legislature’s term limit for members of 12 years is resulting in two major Democratic figures on the panel having to leave: Kara Hahn of Setauket and Sarah Anker of Mount Sinai. 

Hahn served as the panel’s Democratic majority leader from 2016 through 2019 and was chosen its deputy presiding officer for 2020 and 2021. It is for what will be her open seat that Englebright and Figliola are now competing. 

The candidates for what will be Anker’s open seat are Mount Sinai Democrat Dorothy Cavalier, Anker’s chief of staff, and Rocky Point Republican Chad Lennon, an attorney who has been an aide to U.S. Representative Nick LaLota, a GOPer from Amityville.

LaLota was boosted in his win last year in the lst Congressional District by the vote for governor of Republican Lee Zeldin of Shirley in Brookhaven Town—a pivotal geographical component of the district. And likewise, the Englebright upset has been tied, in part, to the coattails of the vote in Brookhaven Town for Zeldin.

The most prominent race this year in Suffolk will be for county executive with the incumbent, Democrat Steve Bellone of North Babylon, needing to leave after 12 years also because of term limits.

The Republican candidate to replace Bellone is Ed Romaine, the supervisor of Brookhaven Town and previously a Suffolk County legislator and county clerk. Will a strong showing for Center Moriches resident Romaine in Brookhaven Town impact negatively on the votes for Englebright and Cavalier? Still, Romaine’s Democratic opponent, Dave Calone, a former chairman of the Suffolk County Planning Commission, is from East Setauket, also in Brookhaven Town. Might this affect Romaine’s Brookhaven showing?

There are many questions this year in Suffolk politics where geography has long been a big factor—with voters so often balloting for candidates from the towns where they reside.

In the meantime, on the East End, in surprise moves, two Democratic legislative incumbents have decided not to run for re-election.

Legislator Bridget Fleming, a Noyac Democrat and former member of the Southampton Town Board and an assistant Manhattan district attorney, is departing for what she describes as other opportunities. She told me last week that this will include legal activities. And Al Krupski, a Cutchogue Democrat, has decided to leave the legislature to run for Southold Town supervisor. 

Krupski has provided a unique perspective to the legislature as a fourth-generation North Fork farmer. Suffolk is still among the top agricultural counties in New York State. 

Running for what will be Fleming’s open seat is North Sea Democrat Ann Welker, a member of the Southampton Town Trustees. She is first woman elected as a member of that body, which has major jurisdiction over town waterways and wetlands since it was created in  1686, and an ardent environmentalist.

Welker is facing Springs Republican Manny Vilar, chairman of the East Hampton Town Republican Committee and a retired New York State Park Police officer.

The candidates for what will be Krupski’s open seat are Baiting Hollow Democrat Catherine Kent, a former Riverhead Town Board member, and Riverhead Republican Catherine Stark, an aide to Krupski and previously an aide to County Executive Robert Gaffney and also to Jay Schneiderman when he was a county legislator. Her father was the late Riverhead Town Supervisor Jim Stark.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Part 2 LI Water Reuse Action Plan

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“Water reuse has been increasingly recognized as an essential component in effective water resource management plans,” says the “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan” unveiled last week. “The United Nations formally acknowledged the importance of water reuse in 2017,” it adds. 

“The benefits of water reuse have long been recognized and embraced in other parts of the world,” it continues. And now in the United States, “approximately 2.6 billion gallons of water is reused daily.”

But in New York State, “large-scale water reuse projects have been limited. There are a few projects in upstate New York and one on Long Island,” the “Riverhead reuse project” which started in 2016 “to redirect highly treated wastewater, as much as 260,000 gallons per day” from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant to “irrigate the nearby Indian Island County Golf Course” instead of, as had been the practice, dumping it into Flanders Bay. 

“Reusing water, for some other valuable purpose, provides numerous benefits,” the “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan” goes on. “These include protecting public wells and water supplies from salt water intrusion.” It calls for highly treated wastewater to be used for a variety of purposes here with additional irrigation of golf courses but also of sod farms and greenhouses, lawns and fields at educational and commercial sites and—highly important—to deal with “over-pumping.”

Indeed, a lesson for all of Long Island is how Brooklyn—on Long Island’s western end—lost its potable water supply more than a century ago: by over-pumping and consequent saltwater intrusion, along with pollution, notes John Turner, senior conservation policy advocate at the Seatuck Environmental Association. 

So, Brooklyn began getting its water from reservoirs built upstate. There has been talk in recent years of Nassau County buying water from those New York City-owned reservoirs. But they are near capacity, says Turner, so the city “has not been welcoming Nassau County with open arms.”

For Nassau and Suffolk Counties water reuse is critical.

The “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan” was presented this week at an event at the treatment facility of the Great Neck Water Pollution Control District in Nassau County. Nassau is a case study of how the Brooklyn lesson has not been learned. In Nassau, which is 85% sewered, its sewage treatment plants dump wastewater through outfall pipes into nearby waterways and the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound—and as a result Nassau’s water table is dropping.

An announcement for the event said that it “serves as a kick-off for a new way of thinking that could revolutionize the way in which our community protects its most precious natural resource.”

The “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan” charting a course for Long Island to reuse water from its underground water supply, its “sole source” of potable water, was created by Islip-based Seatuck working with the Greentree Foundation and Cameron Engineering & Associates, and a Water Reuse Technical Working Group of 28 members.

Suffolk County is about 25% sewered. Some water treatment plants in Suffolk recharge treated wastewater into the ground but plants also do what Nassau has been doing, sending wastewater out to adjacent waters or the ocean or Long Island Sound through outfall pipes.

There has been action through the years on pollutants in the water supply, on quality of drinking water, in Nassau and Suffolk. There must be a parallel emphasis on quantity.

“Major Action Plan Recommendations” in the new plan, include: “Develop Water Reuse Regulations/Guidelines…Convene a Long Island Water Reuse Workgroup to develop and implement strategies…Conduct engineering studies on the most feasible projects…Engage Long Island Golf Course Association in plan development…” 

The members of the “Water Reuse Technical Working Group” for the plan included: Anthony Caniano, hydrologist at the Suffolk County Department of Health Services; Christopher Gobler Ph.D. of the Stony Brook University School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences; Chris Class, marine scientist at The Nature Conservancy; Joseph Gardner, president, Long Island Golf Course Superintendent’s Association; Christopher Schubert, program development specialist at the New York Water Science Center; Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment; Suffolk County Public Works Supervisor Madhav Sathe and Deputy Suffolk County Executive Peter Scully.  

Projects for water reuse considered in the Town of Smithtown in the plan include: Kings Park High School and Whisper Vineyard. Projects in neighboring Huntington Town include at: Kurt Weiss Greenhouses in Melville; White Post Farms in Melville; Deckers and Van Cott Nurseries in Greenlawn; Northport High School and Harborfields High School in Greenlawn; Holmes Farms in Huntington; and Del Vino Vineyard in Northport. 

For more information on the plan visit https://seatuck.org/water-reuse/

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.