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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The headline you could conceivably see in a New York tabloid, "Governor Kathy Hochul to New York, Build More Housing." The governor is promoting a plan, as many of you have heard, that includes a goal to build 800,000 new homes across the state over the next decade.

In New York's slow-growing suburbs, multi-unit development on this scale has been, to say the least, elusive. This, of course, is in pursuit of affordable housing for the region. Though Hochul's plant doesn't single out the suburbs, that goal of 800,000 new homes is a statewide goal. It's set off a debate about what new developments would mean for sprawling suburban communities, especially in Westchester and on Long Island.

These are areas which have allowed for relatively little new housing over the years, and the politicians, some of them from the suburbs, say the very existence of the suburbs as we know them are at stake. This is very front and center right now, because the governor's plan is one of the key issues holding up New York's budget negotiations. The annual budget was due April 1st.

Here we are on the 17th, and this housing plan is a major reason why. We'll talk now about what's actually in the governor's plan and the arguments for and against the governor's housing plan as it affects the suburbs with Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. Larry also spent decades previously as a reporter for the Islands Newspaper Newsday.

Hi Larry, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Larry Levy: Hey, Brian. It's always great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite you to make your case for or against this plan if you live on Long Island or in Westchester or the other lower Hudson Valley suburbs. Rockland, you can call. Putnam, you can call, too. Orange County, but should your town build new housing, 212-443 WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Larry, remind everybody what Governor Hochul has demanded of the suburbs as their share of this housing plan.

Larry Levy: In her budget proposal, she wanted, as you said, to build 800,000 statewide. There's nobody in the state, not even on Long Island, where you're getting probably the most pushback, disagrees with the need for new and even affordable housing. There's not a serious official Republican, Democratic, you name it, on Long Island, who doesn't acknowledge that we do need more housing to keep some of our young knowledge workers, so to speak, to help elderly baby boomers still stay on the island.

Everybody needs it. White, Black, whatever background demographic they are. The problem for a lot of officials on Long Island is that, to them, is a mandate that if they don't do what she says, which is to increase by basically a 1% a year and in a certain area of their village or Hamlet, the state can come in and take away their zoning powers.

They see this as a threat to the concept of home rule, which is something that a lot of people move to the island for whatever motive because of. They want to live in a place where they have more say over what happens in their backyard. They want to be able to reach out and touch their local officials. Whatever political persuasion they may be, they don't want anybody outside to come in and say, "No, you have to do it a certain way regardless of what you think."

In their mind, they might as well move back to the city. By the way, the fastest growing cohorts of population on Long Island are Black, Latino and Asian. We're not talking about only white people finding this appealing and coming out to Nassau and Suffolk and Westchester. These are people of color, and these are also people not of color.

This is something that a lot of people, for various reasons, jealously guard, and they see Hochul's proposal as a threat.

Brian Lehrer: Again, this plan doesn't actually single out the suburbs. In fact, under the proposal, New York City would have to boost development too. A lot of neighborhoods in New York City don't want to see it. There's plenty of NIMBY in the five boroughs as well. Tell us exactly what it does in that respect.

Larry Levy: Most of the development would take place, or is asked to be taken place within half a mile of a transit hub. We're really talking about Long Island railroad stations. Again, there's no disagreement among regional thought leaders, influencers, elected officials, that this is where to build the housing. The problem is that it comes across to a lot of local leaders-- Again, from neighborhoods up to village halls and town halls and county seats as one size fits all that in a place like Huntington, which is a very big village, or a place like Rockville Center, which, again, is another big village with a downtown around a train station.

You're not going to impinge on a typical suburban neighborhood by continuing to what we call densified. There are other places where the train station is yards from a single-family neighborhood where people did make investments and maybe their entire life savings is in their house. They're afraid, whether it's justified or not, that it's going to affect their housing values and affect the quality of life in their neighborhoods to bring in more people, whoever they are, white, Black, brown, it doesn't matter.

You have a feeling that you're trying to take 120 villages, all of which have zoning power, and saying, "This is the way you've got to do it." At least, this is how it's being perceived, and, "This is where you've got to do it. If you don't do it, we're going to just take away your power to stop us to zone and apply building codes and architectural reviews and all those things that suburban villages hold dearly. We're going to force it down your throats."

There are some folks out here, people who would legitimately call themselves 'affordable housing advocates', who realize that this proposal, certainly in the short run, can do more harm than good because a lot of these people have realized that affordable housing on Long Island is a war of attrition like the trenches in World War I, you've got to fight it village by village, because again, it doesn't matter if the county executive and a town supervisor and the head of the Long Island Association or Larry Levy from Suburban Studies, thinks this is a great idea. You've got to get the approval of the little village board and the mayor.

There are 40 or 50 proposals already working their way through the village process that are going to be stopped cold and developers aren't going to make investments because of the uncertainty and will be in court for five years. A lot of other people thinking that, "Let's do this, but without the sticks, only carrots." Give the incentives that the governor has proposed, hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives that really will move the dial, but without threatening them to change the way they've done business for 100 years.

Brian Lehrer: You say it would be in court for five years because if the legislature does pass this provision where the state could take over the zoning for all the villages on Long Island and in the other New York suburbs, then it's going to get challenged in court. That would probably freeze the development process for that period of time, is what you're saying.

Larry Levy: Including audit developments that are already on their way.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a model for successful town-by-town politics, I guess you'd say, of increasing development? It's interesting that you say it doesn't matter what the county executive thinks. Tom Suozzi, back when he was the Democratic County executive for Nassau County, he talked a lot about this.

He was very much for development around Long Island railroad stations in particular. He was on the show back then and talked about how he thought the future of Long Island was at stake because people were growing up in these single-family homes. They either couldn't afford it or there weren't jobs there, or people didn't want that suburban lifestyle so much anymore.

Long Island was depopulating and the future of Long Island was at stake. Now, we have Bruce Blakeman, the conservative Republican Nassau County executive. He came on the show just the other month and said, yes, he doesn't like Hochul's idea to force it down the county's throat, but he's for development and he's always been for development around train stations, too.

There seems to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, because this stuff is a lot better than I do, there seems to be a democratic and republican unity of thinking at the county executive level, but that doesn't make things happen in the towns.

Larry Levy: Actually, there's a unity of thinking right down to the village square level on this. When Hochul came out with a proposal on something called Accessory Dwelling Units a year ago, you had Democrats and Republicans standing shoulder to shoulder, so to speak, in opposition. Without going into a lot of detail, some people are calling this latest proposal, the son of ADUs. It would allow people to create auxiliary apartments that they could rent out in neighborhoods, and the villages couldn't stop it unless they could show you a good cause.

The irony in all this is that the folks who oppose Hochul and who, in fact, don't like the idea of affordable housing really anywhere are-- The irony is that they're saying that this will destroy suburbia, but as you pointed out, as Tom Suozzi pointed out, that if you don't make it possible for people to live here, the folks who the Brookhaven National Lab, Hofstra University are trying to hire, you're going to destroy suburbia anyways. You're going to turn it into an economic backwater.

We do have to find a way to do this. What the proponents or people in between the opponents and the proponents are saying, "Hey, we can have our--" Again, not to throw up a cliche, "We can have our cake and eat it too." We can encourage development where the villages are ready for it, and there are plenty of proposals working their way through it, without risking years and years of court battles by just try the carrots first. If that doesn't work after three years and we haven't made the progress, then you start to consider the sticks.

Brian Lehrer: Bruce in Yonkers, you're on WNYC with Larry Levy, Dean of Suburban Studies at Hofstra. Hi, Bruce.

Bruce: Hi, Brian and hi, Larry. This is a great conversation and thank you for covering the topic. I live in Yonkers. I'm a big proponent of developing affordable housing. There are couple of very specific problems in our region that you run into. One is, say what you will about Bronxville, if you make this requirement you're going to capture about three-quarters in the land mass of Bronxville.

You're going to wind up doing very similar things in other small communities that the railroads pass through. The things that Professor Levy has been saying about an incentive-based approach and doing it at the county level, to me just makes huge sense. There's another reason that I feel strongly about that is that this local control concept that's built into the way New Yorkers think about things.

I grew up in Virginia and lived in Illinois for much of my life. The local rule or local control has basically just created New York's version of Jim Crow by having everything controlled at the extreme local level. You have the best schools in Westchester County, which are some of the best schools in the world that are very high percentage white. You have communities like Ossining and Port Chester, to some degree Yonkers, where the school funding is horrible, and the school body is very heavily majority minorities--

Brian Lehrer: Bruce, I'm going to leave it there for time, but thank you for raising that last point. Larry, I've said on the show, if I had to propose one constitutional amendment, it might be to outlaw the using as a basis for funding your local school's local property taxes, because that has created in the United States exactly what Bruce was just describing, a wealthy town next to a small town in the wealthy town, because they can charge a lot in property taxes for the schools, and the residents will agree to it and vote in those property taxes, are so unequal in the resources compared to average-income towns or not to mention lower-income towns.

When he says Jim Crow, we have to ask the blunt question about all of this. How much of this is really about 'lifestyle' and how much is really about race and class, keeping people of color out, keeping lower-income people out, because the current homeowners or a percentage of them think it's going to be 'bad for the neighborhood'?

Larry Levy: Clearly, race and class plays a big role in the history of opposition to affordable housing. When I was an editorial writer at Newsday, I killed a forest of trees writing about the need to desegregate and eliminate all of the ills that come with it. One of which you mentioned, Brian, which is the unequal education systems, which we used to call at Newsday 'the shame of the suburbs'. On Long Island, you've got 124 school districts, 80% of the Black and Latino students go to 20% of the schools, and they are by and large the poorest performing, and their kids are forever trying to catch up if they ever can.

The question is whether this proposal will actually help proponents make a dent in that. If you're talking about constitutional amendments, I'd go farther. I would say eliminate these little school districts and let's go to a town-wide system like you have in the suburbs of Washington DC, in Maryland and Virginia, where you don't have a concentration of wealth and poverty yet, you do have high achievement, high property value, and frankly, relatively low taxes.

Brian Lehrer: We have a lot of calls on this, and I want to get to a few more, but Larry, let me follow up on the last caller and what you just said in one particular way. Do carrots work, because you said this might not actually even produce the goal of building a lot more housing in the suburbs if it gets passed with the state takeover provision because it'll get tied up in court the next five years? Better to do it with the carrots and not that stick. Are there carrots that have been shown to work? Are there carrots in this bill that you think could work?

Larry Levy: That's a great question. We're always looking around the country, particularly at the so-called National Center for Suburban Studies for examples. There's nothing, because Long Island, you hate to use the word 'unique' about any particular place, but Long Island is so unusual that it's hard to find an apple to apple. I'll give you some examples of where carrots work.

The industrial development agencies, for example. Anytime the number of units that have gotten built on Long Island, almost only because the IDAs and the tax assessors were able to give tax and other breaks to developers has been behind a lot of whatever we've been able to do. When the state housing agency goes to an affordable housing developer, they've got programs to make it even less expensive and more affordable.

In that case, carrots are working. I have no doubt that putting a billion dollars in a fund to help villages that talk in millions of dollars about infrastructure, I think it's going to get their attention, especially in places where developers have come to understand that you can't get things done by just trying to ram something through by buying a lot of tickets to political events.

You've got to go to the civic associations. You've got to spend a lot of time in the community to win them over personally. Developers who have done that have succeeded. You look at places again, like Huntington and Patchogue and others that have become the poster child for the benefits of putting denser housing in the downtown.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, when we look at the overall picture, we have to say whatever the status quo efforts have been have failed. There's an article in Slate that has a few stats that, for example, New York, I guess that's statewide, has created only a third as many homes as jobs over the past decade. The population's growing, housing is not keeping up with-

Larry Levy: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: -the ways that people are trying to do it town by town. Also, that article goes on to say, "New York suburbs build less housing per capita than their peers around Boston, San Francisco, and Washington DC, and it's not particularly close." It says Nassau in particular is one of the slowest growing suburbs in the country. Just to say that whatever carrots have been in place, whatever good relationship-building you've been describing in Huntington or Patchogue or some pro-housing models, it's not nearly widespread enough, right?

Larry Levy: Oh, absolutely. You're absolutely right about that. We are way behind, we need to find a way to build much more housing. It ought to be in the downtowns where you'll attract people who really don't want to become part of the culture out here. There's no question about that and I don't hope that nobody in the last half hour hears me as an opponent of affordable housing. I've devoted much of my journalistic and academic career in writing reports that have supported it.

What I'm saying is that's the best way and how does this proposal help further those goals? I think that there are legitimate questions about whether we ought to recognize that we do have home rule, that you're going to create unnecessary friction, and let's try the carrots first. We have had nothing in terms of carrots to the point you were making before, like what's on the table now? In the assembly and the negotiations behind closed doors has put even more on the table and slightly lessened the sticks that would be brought to bear on the villages.

Brian Lehrer: That's important. Let's get a few more phone calls in here.

Larry Levy: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie in Babylon, then we're going to go to John in Wantagh and see if we can get Adam who's a home inspector on Long Island. Debbie in Babylon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Debbie.

Debbie: Hi. Long-time listener and member. I just want to say I will vote against any of this stuff until the day I die. I'm Black, I live on Long Island, I came back to Long Island. I raised my children here. Both of my children are now-- one's a homeowner, one is buying a house, and neither one of them want a $3,500 studio apartment near a train station. That's number one, and they're both professionals.

Brian Lehrer: How would it hurt them or you if there are $3,500 studio apartments near train stations?

Debbie: Most of them that are and I do-- In Babylon, there are a couple of centers that they have them. However, people, particularly young professionals in the 30s and 40s who you want to stay and add to the economy, want a home. They want a house. If we wanted to have affordable home ownership, then that's what we should be looking at. Within a stone's throw, there are those apartments, but there's nothing else. When they do these apartments, they don't put restaurants and such other than Huntington and Farmingdale, but the others don't have it come. Huntington, you can't get a parking space. Nobody goes.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie, I'm going to leave it there for time. Thank you very much. Please, do call us again. I'm going to go right to John in Wantagh next. John, you're on WYNC. Hi, there.

John: Hey, guys. I'm a long-time listener. I haven't talked to Larry in a long time either. How you doing, Larry? Amongst this political pushback, some of these rallies in the background, you can see the thousands of, like the woman said, luxury apartments in Rockville Centre. It's a juxtaposition that leads me to point out, if you go to Queens, visit Forest Hills, and then visit Woodside and say which one took the careful planning. There's a lot of people planning a lot of stuff, but this political football, attention to this is really squashing the need.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you very much. Larry, to one of Debbie in Babylon's points, excuse me, are the apartments that are springing up around the train stations not even affordable? Are they luxury? That defeats half the purpose if they are.

Larry Levy: It's a mix. If you want a zoning change, you need to designate a certain percentage of the apartments as affordable. It's based on a calculation involving area median income. It doesn't meet the need, it doesn't come close to meeting the need but for certain. I have to respectfully disagree with Debbie. For certain, wherever they've built apartments in the downtown, energy, excitement, new blood has followed. People are on the streets, people are walking to restaurants, and folks who normally wouldn't come to the village and spend their money there are doing so.

Rockville Center has 4,000 apartments, and it has become a center for restaurants, people come from all over South Nassau County to Rockville Center, and it's doing quite well. Huntington up on the North Shore is a model downtown which also has, within walking distance, thousands of units. The more the merrier. One thing, by the way, somebody mentioned about-- I deal in statistical reports, you have to be careful when you look at the rate of increase in places.

Nassau County is as well-developed with as little open space as Queens, basically. When you look at the Washington DC suburbs, for example, once you get a few miles outside of the district, you still have a lot of open space. It's much easier to expand out towards Dulles Airport. The same with a lot of other suburbs. Not so much Los Angeles, not so much Chicago, but you just have to be careful of making sure that you're comparing apples to apples. I'm not a defender of the people who want to [inaudible 00:26:18] the ladder. but I'm saying that you got to be careful-

Brian Lehrer: I understand.

Larry Levy: The local people are saying, don't paint the broad brush, be-

Brian Lehrer: Another example of how the pushback is bipartisan. You probably saw the guest essay in Newsday recently from the former Democratic Nassau County executive, Laura Curran, who got defeated by Bruce Blakeman, who wrote, "I'll save you the math. The new zoning would allow 25,000 housing units within a 10-minute walk of just about every Long Island railroad station in Nassau County. It would allow a village like Cedarhurst one square mile with an LIRR station right in the middle to more than triple its population."

As we run out of time, Larry, where's this headed? Do you have the tea leaves? It seems like the budget for the whole state for the next fiscal year hangs on the resolution of this question.

Larry Levy: Based on my reporting and what I've read in published reports, this is, as you pointed out along with the whole bail reform debate, the two biggest sticking points. There is some movement of increasing the carrots, slightly lightening the sticks in exchange for protection for renters that New York City assembly and Senate delegations want, but if it still includes those sticks, you'll continue to hear pushback and it still might amount to what, at least one Democratic lawmaker out here called an extinction event for local Democrats along with an MTA tax and even the slightest threat to zoning. It'll make it very hard for Democrats out here to get elected or reelected.

Brian Lehrer: There are no democratic members of Congress left on Long Island as it is, right?

Larry Levy: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: Larry Levy, Executive Dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, former reporter for the Island's newspaper, Newsday. Larry, we always appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Larry Levy: Oh, you're welcome. Anytime.

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