Development dominates forum

New apartment buildings, parking and traffic concerns and Valley Stream’s general evolution were the topics of the night at Trustee Vincent Grasso’s open forum at Sip This on Oct. 26, which drew about a dozen residents.

“These forums have been great for addressing the rumor mill,” Grasso said at the meeting’s start, before launching into one of the village’s most contentious issues. He reiterated a focal point of his United Community Party ticket’s platform from the village election in March — that the village does not have enough rental housing that young and working class people and senior citizens can afford.

An imbalance between an abundance of single-family homes and scant multi-unit rental buildings have left the village’s 20-somethings who want to remain in Valley Stream, and seniors who want to downsize, with scarce options, Grasso said. He cited the four-year waiting list at Monica Village as evidence that seniors face a choice between remaining stuck in houses that are too much for them to maintain, or leaving the village where they have spent their lives and raised their families.

It’s part of the “full life cycle” of a community, he said, in which single-family homes provide families a place to raise children, who can move into affordable rental units as they enter the workforce, buy their own home as they seek to raise their own families, then downsize from their empty nests — all without ever leaving Valley Stream, should they prefer not to.

Resident Michelle D’Ellia, a Bronx native, said she moved to Valley Stream to leave the busy city behind for a suburban lifestyle — a common sentiment throughout the village. “I think that’s what people are irritated by, the fact that now there’s all these apartment buildings around all these residential, single-family homes,” D’Ellia said.

David Sabatino, owner of Sip This, responded: “Those are the same people that would say, ‘I love Rockville Centre, why can’t we be like Rockville Centre?’ but ignore the fact that they have thousands of more rental units.”

Resident Donald Miserendino said that had the post-World War II generation homeowners moved away as they aged, properties would have opened up for newer residents.

“They didn’t do it. Their kids couldn’t afford to buy a house next door…Lately I’ve been studying the millennials. Now I’m looking at my attitudes of N.I.M.B.Y. [not in my backyard], to a certain degree, and it’s affecting how you approach the new people moving in — the potential market moving in. Maybe it’s us — we’re not getting the answers; we have artificial fears. Are we going to stay at the party too long?”

Miserendino added that other local communities, including the rapidly redeveloping city neighborhoods that many left behind, would be five to 10 years ahead of Valley Stream as the village looks to compete for the young professionals whose residency drives business and brings vitality to their business districts.

Doug Zapart, another village resident, said that the village’s abundance of single-family homes contributes to illegal renting and other problems. “Change has been coming for years, because everybody that’s bought a single-family home in Valley Stream 30 years ago has expanded and dormered or done mother/daughters and everything else, so individually they’ve already expanded up,” he said. “Why can’t the village expand up on five properties? The amount of people that are moving in in controlled, taxed locations is a lot less than everybody that turned around and took a single-family house, and turned it into a mother/daughter under permit, and these permits are now having two-generation families that may have kids…and they’re not being taxed school-wise the same as you would be in some of those others, and they’re putting more kids into the school system.”

The appearance of the Sun Valley Towers apartment building, which Grasso said was in the “late stages” of construction — which the building’s project manager said back in February — was also a topic of discussion. D’Ellia asked about the beige bars that were recently installed on the building’s windows, which Grasso said were the result of a change of plans from the building’s original design, which had included sliding glass doors with balconies. The bars were an aesthetic replacement for the balconies, Grasso said, one of several changes that went along with the buyout of the building by one of its two original developers.

He said that the split between the men was the reason for the construction delays.

Grasso emphasized that Sun Valley Towers and other mixed-use, multi-unit buildings’ unofficial classification as affordable is not a euphemism for below market rate, pointing out that the 39-unit building under construction on Gibson Boulevard would give first consideration to first responders and the village’s seniors.

“Any time someone says workforce housing or affordable housing, people freak out,” Grasso said. “Maybe justified, maybe not.”