A vibrant discussion about the past, present, and future of our region.
Tributes to acclaimed Long Island journalist John Kominicki, following his untimely death earlier this month, have rightly focused on his outsized impact – on journalism on Long Island, on colleagues at work, and on the rooms of people he captivated with stories, songs, and opinions. I had the distinct pleasure of knowing John for
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Amazon is accepting proposals on where it should locate its second corporate headquarters, a mammoth $5 billion office center that, when finished, will be a third larger than the Pentagon and employ 50,000 people in “high-paying” jobs. That would make it Long Island’s largest employer overnight, topping even county government. And Stop & Shop. As
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Nassau County’s plan to transform the acres of parking lots around the Coliseum into a hub for medical research and biotechnology is a great first step toward creating the well-paying, “knowledge industry” jobs that can transform the Long Island economy and keep young Long Islanders living here. But the County’s plan doesn’t make enough of
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A state review board has approved the Long Island Rail Road’s long-considered third track project, a $2 billion plan that will speed service, enhance reliability and eliminate dangerous traffic crossings along a 10-mile stretch of rail between Hicksville and the Queens border. Four major lines link up with the main track there, meaning the fix
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Imagine a new kind of housing stock that could accommodate both young professionals and older empty nesters, that was easy to zone, quick and affordable to build and came without appreciable environmental impact. No height or density variances required, thank you, and forget the usual traffic snarls and grousing by the civics. This is living
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Google plans to build 300 modular apartments for workers at its new Mountain View campus near San Francisco, where average rents for a 650-square-foot one bedroom now top $2,250 a month.
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History has anointed Bill Levitt the king of suburbia, but the crown might have as easily gone to Walter Turnbull Shirley, a Brooklyn-born song promoter and wannabe impresario who turned to selling Long Island’s pastoral charm to the masses in the late 1930s. As Shirley told the story, he smooth-talked his way into a meeting
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The Long Island Index, a project of the Rauch Foundation, today launched a new interactive map that enables Long Islanders to access easily an extraordinary array of data about Long Island and its communities. The map – available at www.longislandindexmaps.org – provides a wealth of information about the region, its characteristics, and key indicators –
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If you’ve tired of reading about projects that will break ground sometime after your last kid moves to North Carolina, here’s some good news. The towns of Babylon and Huntington are veritably skipping along on the Route 110 Plan, which, OK, isn’t actually called that and really isn’t a single comprehensive plan but rather a
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America’s first railroad was the Baltimore & Ohio, chartered in 1827 to compete with New York’s Erie Canal in the lucrative business of shipping goods westward. Baltimore was America’s third-largest city then – with designs on getting bigger – and the new railway was celebrated with parades and fireworks and a ceremonial groundbreaking at which
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Some of the most interesting genetic research being performed today – including work at our own Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Stony Brook University – concerns telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, those thread-like strands that store our genetic information. Very simply put, the longer and more vibrant your telomeres, the better
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Photo by Bob Giglione Originally Published in the Long Island Business News Mixed-use developments sprang up around train stations on Long Island more than 100 years ago. That’s where Long Island needs to go again. And two even older vehicles are perfectly suited to get us there: participatory government and the Long Island Rail Road.
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Long Island has a pressing need for housing, and the key question is: How can we address it quickly on a regional basis? There must be more varied housing options for all Long Islanders, but the challenge is to provide those choices Island-wide when zoning decisions are made locally. Hopefully, we can build a strong
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Vacancy rates for stores in Farmingdale are down to just 3 percent. There’s a new buzz of activity with family events and after-work concerts all signaling that this downtown is on the rise. It creates an infectious energy that underpins the growing appeal of Long Island’s latest downtown developments. For over a decade I’ve
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The key to Long Island’s economic future depends on denser development around train stations. It will enable us to attract businesses and young workers, ease traffic congestion, and reduce pressure to develop the region’s remaining open spaces. Ironically, this kind of development is essential to preserving the suburban single-family lifestyle for which Long Island is renowned.
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I’ve been involved in the effort to build affordable housing on Long Island for more than three decades–most of that time at the Community Development Corporation of Long Island. One of the most encouraging trends that I’ve seen is the increasing decline of the NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) attitude that has been far
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There’s significant medical news to report, and I’m not just talking about whether you should still floss now that it’s been revealed that the practice actually does nothing to prevent gum disease. (What did we expect? It is, after all, waxed string.) No, I’m talking about incredible research – much of it being performed right
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“Our young people continue to leave the region in droves, seeking affordable places to live elsewhere.”
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