Tim Sullivan: In Malverne, I’m an advocate of organic growth

Last September, we were proud to dedicate a new police headquarters in the heart of our quaint village. It was a culmination of multiple administrations and years of planning this historic investment in a top-tier facility and technologically advanced infrastructure for the men and women of our Police Department so they can continue to preserve one of the safest communities in the state.

We acquired and retrofitted an office building in our commercial district, but in doing so, we also lost tax revenue from the property. We pride ourselves on the strict standards we apply to our village budget, and had always planned on selling our former police headquarters in order to put that property back on the tax rolls, to compensate for the lost revenue from our new building and to utilize sales proceeds to offset the cost of completing the project.

Our village board authorized a request for proposals for the sale of the former building, and we were fortunate to receive bids that exceeded our expectations. We had left the RFP open so as not to dictate the proposed use or price of the property, because we wanted to let investors determine what its best use might be. The only use that was proposed, however, was multifamily housing.

As a real estate professional with a career focused on multifamily investment and development, that came as no surprise to me.

Throughout my career, demand for multifamily housing in the metropolitan region has far outpaced supply. Our communities have become unaffordable to live in, particularly for our young and senior populations. Historically high home prices, recent increases in lending rates and the general cost of construction have compounded the problem. So what can we do to solve it? We can promote a holistic approach to solve several needs in our community.

We need to rebuild our downtowns and retain businesses; we need to rethink and repurpose underutilized properties; we need alternative revenue sources in order to avoid passing large tax increases on to our residents; and we need to make it possible for our younger and older residents to afford to continue living here. One of the best ways to do that is by developing multifamily housing.

In Malverne, we cherish the small-town feeling of our downtown. It’s rare for any new ground-up development to occur, mostly due to the unavailability of developable land. We prefer small-scale, low-level, unique and attractive homes and businesses.
We do, however, have some relatively large residential and commercial buildings that are older than many homes in the village. So the idea of introducing alternative, more affordable or flexible living options isn’t a new concept in our community, or in our immediate area.

But it is the collective efforts and input of our village board (which also serves as the architectural review board), planning board, zoning board and neighbors that should determine when and where multifamily housing is designed, constructed and operated so that it best fits into the fabric of our identity. Recent efforts by Gov. Kathy Hochul, primarily through budget bills, to dictate far-reaching authority over land use for multifamily and accessory apartments in our area usurp the very essence of why we have local government. Without local control of land use, we will lose the attractiveness of our homes and the identity of our neighborhoods.

It is up to us to advance projects that add to our organic evolution to solve these important issues. The time is now, and the need is immediate. We should consider small-scale multifamily housing initiatives that will complement our community without subtracting resources. We have an underutilized Long Island Rail Road branch that can absorb increased capacity, fully capable public-service departments that would not need to be expanded, and where residents raise concerns about growth, we have the unique ability to address them.

My young daughter loves the Disney movie “Cars.” I only watched it recently, when she started to take an interest in it, and I’ve become fond of the song “Our Town,” which was written by Randy Newman and performed in the movie by James Taylor. If you listen to the lyrics, though, they’re more upsetting than uplifting: “Main Street isn’t Main Street anymore … In your town, nothing you can do.”

This is our opportunity to do something, and to write our own sweet lyrics to sing.

Tim Sullivan is the mayor of Malverne.