Listen to this articleOnerous legislation, lengthy approvals processes, and an uninformed public are the biggest obstacles to creating more housing on Long Island.
That familiar refrain was the takeaway from a panel discussion Thursday at a Real Estate Institute event on the region’s housing crisis.
More than 200 real estate industry professionals packed the Heritage Club at Bethpage State Park for REI’s Spring Luncheon panel titled “Long Island Housing Development: Challenges and Opportunities.”
Moderated by Kevin Law, executive vice president and partner at Tritec Real Estate and chairman of Empire State Development (ESD), the panel included developer Anthony Bartone, managing partner of Terwilliger & Bartone Properties; Farmingdale Mayor Ralph Ekstrand; Brookhaven Supervisor Dan Panico; Cara Longworth, ESD regional director; and David Pennetta, executive managing director of Cushman & Wakefield Long Island.
Bartone, whose firm has built transit-oriented developments in Farmingdale, Lynbrook and Westbury, railed against legislative impediments like New York’s scaffold law, which he said raised insurance rates three times higher than anywhere else, the one-month limit on security deposits for apartments, prevailing wage mandates and the proposed Good Cause Eviction law, which would add protections for tenants, including capping annual rent increases to 3 percent.
“The challenges here are so deep it’s almost untenable,” said Bartone, who also serves as president of the Long Island Builders Institute. “You can’t come out with laws like these. I’m so tired of having unintended consequences.”
Pennetta stressed the need to educate elected officials and municipal appointees, along with the general public to advance housing developments.
“There’s an education problem and before that there’s a human problem. Our elected officials don’t necessarily have any real estate experience,” he said.
“There needs to be a group that goes to all the townships to talk to the supervisors and the mayors, the county execs, even Hochul’s office, and explain the cost and effect of all this stuff.”
The elected officials on the panel, however, have been some of the most progressive on Long Island when it comes to housing development. Since Ekstrand became mayor, the Village of Farmingdale has added 500 apartments in nine projects.
Ekstrand said the village planned ahead and did the state-required environmental review for its master plan to determine what it could build and what it couldn’t.
“Local government does everything very quickly,” he said. “We can get a shovel in the ground in 120 days.”
Panico also touted the entitlement process in the Town of Brookhaven, where the planning board was eliminated to speed things up and projects can get a hearing for a zone change and site-plan approval at the same time.
“We have TODs that are very large. We’ve brought on thousands of housing units,” he said, including Tritec’s ongoing Station Yards project in Ronkonkoma. “If our economy is going to grow and we are going to keep people here, you need to create housing.”
Longworth acknowledged that the lack of housing impacts Long Island’s economic development. She pointed out that between 2009 and 2019, the Island lost 98,000 people between the ages of 35 and 55, the prime working age.
“That’s impacting our companies,” Longworth said. “In the last 20 years, we’ve created 62,000 more jobs than housing units.”
However, ESD’s regional director said the housing shortage is a priority for Gov. Hochul, who has been taking steps to advance development by providing funds to villages, towns and cities that qualify as pro-housing.
“The governor is incentivizing municipalities to create housing and she’s doing it with a carrot. Seventeen municipalities have become certified pro-housing, and we have another 10 that are in the process of becoming pro-housing,” Longworth said. “The governor has proposed in the budget this year another $100 million for municipalities for capital projects that support housing.”
Still, resistance to increased density from officials and the public at large remains one of the biggest challenges in creating more housing.
“There’s a general feeling that developers are greedy,” Panico said. “They need to go out and explain the math to the community. We need to show why three units to an acre won’t pencil out. The math doesn’t lie.”
Pennetta agreed and reiterated that education is critical. “It’s just mixed in a big pot of negative and positive, but we need to sort of accentuate the positive and make it overwhelm the negative.”
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