Report: home shortage nears

Valley Stream was one of three communities used as case studies in an analysis released earlier this month that warned of a wide gap between Long Island’s projected population growth and its projected available housing in the next 15 years.

The study, “Long Island’s Needs for Multifamily Housing: Measuring How Much We Are Planning to Build vs. How Much We Need for Long Island’s Future,” was a product of the Long Island Index, an initiative by the Rauch Foundation, which “invests in ideas and organizations that spark and sustain systemic change,” according to its website.

Long Island could face a shortage of as many as 94,000 housing units, the study claimed, with as many as 158,000 new households projected for the region. Only 64,000 new units would exist for them, according to the most generous projections.

“Long Island’s existing shortage of affordable rental housing is keeping young adults from striking out on their own and causing many to leave the Island,” the report stated.

More than two-thirds of the new residents are expected to prefer walkable neighborhoods that are a mixture of residential and commercial properties, rather than the single-family neighborhoods that Long Island is known for. The report took into account 26,000 planned multifamily housing units in such walkable mixed-use areas, which it said would leave a shortage in those areas of 72,000.

The study cited Valley Stream’s downtown as having “multiple recent and under-construction transit-oriented development projects,” namely the Hawthorne Court apartments, completed in 2015, and the Sun Valley Towers building on Sunrise Highway, which has reportedly been in the final stages of construction for the past year.

The report noted that while multifamily housing is on the rise in the village, it is mostly unaffordable. “Valley Stream is experiencing a surge in high-end, transit-oriented mixed-use developments, yet rents are unaffordable to many local residents,” it stated.