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We want to move because we don't want our kids to fall in the same trap. We know it would be impossible to own a house without having a husband or wife - both working, making ATLEAST 100K combined, and mortgaging themselves to the limit............Let alone they would end up living home until they were 30yrs old - what ever comes first.........
I see these nice young couples all the time living with the "in-laws".............or buying houses with $3,000 per month mortgages......working themselves to death and trying to figure out how they are going to start a family. I work with someone who has been married for a year- lives with her husbands parents in their basement - they want a baby but she doesn't want to start a family until they have a house.....And she is already 30yrs old. They both work hard................How is this ever going to happen???? Another just bought a house- mortgaged themselves to death and has a hard time with the payment every month - they just had a baby too.........
I too am sorry I was brought up here........When we leave,we are also leaving our families. I have family where we are going...........so it won't be that bad. Yes, family is important..............But sometimes you gotta look at the big picture.........It's not the same place it was 30yrs ago.
We live by the water. We have a boat.....we take it to the beach all the time..........we can afford to live here..........we live in a nice area....BUT does my husband have to work overtime? YES. Do I have to work full time and juggle after school activities with the kids everyday? YES. Do we get to save any money, or put money away for college? NO. Do we live in a district where the school taxes went up and everything taken away? Yes. I have to pay for a tutor for my son because the budget dropped all but one special ed teacher in the building to handle 50 children by himself in a day.
I used be proud of Long Island.........thought we lived in a great place (I still think it's nice)- But alot of New Yorkers think that New York is the center of the universe- and no place is better. No school anywhere could be better. Everyone is smarter here. We rule.............we know everything - and that any place else to live is like a step down.
The only reason anyone really lives here is the fact that they have family here............Or they have alot of money. Oh, ofcourse - because they really live in the city- and they have a house on the east end for the weekends.
The only reason anyone really lives here is the fact that they have family here............Or they have alot of money. Oh, ofcourse - because they really live in the city- and they have a house on the east end for the weekends.
If you can't afford Long Island anymore (or if you don't like what you need to do in order to keep it going) then get the h*ll out and get on with your life. Stop your belly aching already. Sheesh! Just move, someone will gladly take your place.
I think some people here are very cynical and very nasty. I think some of you forget that not everyone can make over $100,000 or have fantastic jobs so they can afford a decent (and I mean decent..not ghetto or run down) home here on Long Island.
I don't see WHY young people or 'not so young but not 'wealthy' people' should have to live in places like Brentwood or Central Islip because that is all they 'can afford.' Oh, as as for being white and not wanting to live in the 'hood' and send our kids to mostly minority schools...what's wrong with that? Why SHOULD we settle?
Long Island sucks in part to that attitude. People here on the whole are very disinterested in their neighbors/helping others/volunteering. They don't want affordable housing in "THEIR" neighborhoods. They just want to see another bagel place or fast food joint because they can get their shopping fix.
The lack of affordable housing and mind boggling attitude toward 'illegal' apartments that many people maintain in their homes to help pay their mortgages is a big, big problem. It's in 'someone's interest' to build senior citizen housing and develop huge houses while forgetting there is a huge segment of the population who cannot find a nice place to live.
As for moving, he** yeah, we've been trying to do it for awhile but given up with all the negativity of trying to find somewhere. If you read all these comments, everyone seems to want to escape to somewhere else.
I think Long Island must have once been a nice place but unfortunately it's not anymore. "Sorry for the bellyaching" but picking up and leaving (our only option come summer) is not 'as easy' as many people think.
By the way, someday your 401K and your money may ALSO be gone, so have a little sympathy for good people who just want a bit of the American dream.
Is it kids going to the schools, on their property tax dime? The additional cost of water, sewer, etc. services? Traffic?
It is really not feasible to have a "head tax"; but perhaps something could be worked out. Myself, I have no children, I don't drive. I don't have much of a residential "footprint."
I think some people here are very cynical and very nasty. I think some of you forget that not everyone can make over $100,000 or have fantastic jobs so they can afford a decent (and I mean decent..not ghetto or run down) home here on Long Island.
I don't see WHY young people or 'not so young but not 'wealthy' people' should have to live in places like Brentwood or Central Islip because that is all they 'can afford.' Oh, as as for being white and not wanting to live in the 'hood' and send our kids to mostly minority schools...what's wrong with that? Why SHOULD we settle?
Long Island sucks in part to that attitude. People here on the whole are very disinterested in their neighbors/helping others/volunteering. They don't want affordable housing in "THEIR" neighborhoods. They just want to see another bagel place or fast food joint because they can get their shopping fix.
The lack of affordable housing and mind boggling attitude toward 'illegal' apartments that many people maintain in their homes to help pay their mortgages is a big, big problem. It's in 'someone's interest' to build senior citizen housing and develop huge houses while forgetting there is a huge segment of the population who cannot find a nice place to live.
As for moving, he** yeah, we've been trying to do it for awhile but given up with all the negativity of trying to find somewhere. If you read all these comments, everyone seems to want to escape to somewhere else.
I think Long Island must have once been a nice place but unfortunately it's not anymore. "Sorry for the bellyaching" but picking up and leaving (our only option come summer) is not 'as easy' as many people think.
By the way, someday your 401K and your money may ALSO be gone, so have a little sympathy for good people who just want a bit of the American dream.
I don't think it's the fact that people don't understand that it's tough. It's that people that cannot afford LI make excuses and berate the place when the underpinning often times is that people are bitter b/c they can't afford it. If more people would say...man I wish I could stay but I just can't do it, then there would be less hostility. Remember, people take it personally when others say their hometowns and its people are crap.
As far as dense, affordable housing...the premise is pretty simple. Most people on LI moved out of the city b/c it was too crowded and the wrong types of people moved in. In NYC, most affordable housing is taken my people you don't want to live with, go to school with, etc. LI (and most suburbanites) would not want that to happen to their areas. I would say most people would support affordable housing if it was for people from the neighborhood and/or young familes with good jobs, etc. It's very different in that case.
Take my town, Garden City, for example. Why would people in Garden City want affordable housing to be available to anyone...like the people protesting from Hempstead. Hempstead is crap, GC is beautiful. Why should people be forced to denigrate their areas. Now, if the housing was for couples under 35 with 1-2 children and incomes for around $80K (figure even a cop and teacher could do this), then there would be much less resistance. But when you see people in tents ranting about it's a pity we can't live in Garden City...the, no, we don't want affordable housing ruining our neighborhoods and schools.
Now, I'm sure they'll be some backlash, but that's just the facts that apply to most people.
Is it kids going to the schools, on their property tax dime? The additional cost of water, sewer, etc. services? Traffic?
It is really not feasible to have a "head tax"; but perhaps something could be worked out. Myself, I have no children, I don't drive. I don't have much of a residential "footprint."
I think it's all of that, really. There are certainly practical reasons for it that are very important to consider. This all leads to a feeling on encroachment on people's quality of life...the kind of quality people moved to the suburbs for.
It is also an indictment (warranted or otherwise) of the types of people that may be living in those apartments. This, I would think, is a huge factor in people's apprehension. I would think if it's a decent person that does not cause problems, then it would be much less of a factor.
Is it kids going to the schools, on their property tax dime? The additional cost of water, sewer, etc. services? Traffic?
Illegal apartments have their good and bad points; it just depends on each person's point of view.
Upside:
GypsySoul22 is right -- Sometimes the illegal apt is the only way the homeowner can afford to stay in the house/meet the mortgage payment/etc. If the homeowner knows there's no way the Town is going to approve changing his house to a "legal two" .... or if the conversion would bump his taxes up from Oppressive to Stick A Fork In Me, I'm Done .... it's either put the illegal apt in, move elsewhere, or lose the house to foreclosure. For the homeowner, it's choosing the least of several evils.
Because illegal apartments are usually less expensive than their garden-apt or Legal-Two counterparts, they allow people who otherwise couldn't afford to move out of their parents', etc., homes into a place of their own, to do so. Also they're often on a month-to-month rather than a yearly-signed-lease basis as the typical garden or semi-highrise apartments are; thus, much more flexibility for a tenant.
Downside:
Depending on the kind of rental (one person in a converted garage or basement or Cape Cod second floor? Or a family of 2, 3 or more in the same space?) and the tenants themselves, it's very easy to have parking and noise problems that p*** off the neighbors.... especially in a neighborhood that is otherwise quiet.
I don't know how much the school taxes thing figures into it in other people's minds, to be honest. I'd assume the monthly rent on any apartment (legal or not) would reflect the taxes on the dwelling to some extent.
Illegal apartments are risky for a tenant, because (a) there's no guarantee that a DIY apartment was done anywhere near close to code, so there may be safety issues; and (b) there's no telling when a neighbor, either out of pique one day because the tenant's kids are causing trouble in the neighborhood or because the tenants' cars were partially blocking his own driveway AGAIN or simply because the homeowner/landlord said or did something that rubbed him the wrong way, will make a complaint call to the Town about the apartment and BAM! the tenant is told he's got a week or less to find another place to live.
There's a ridiculous amount of competition for decent rental housing on LI. A co-worker of mine who relocated here from Chicago in the late 1990s blithely assumed that it would be "no problem" to find an apartment "somewhere near work". She found out real quick that an ad in, say, the local Pennysaver for an available apartment will generate a torrent of calls and "if you snooze, you lose". Apartments that appeared in the Wednesday morning issue were already rented out by Thursday afternoon, sometimes even by Wednesday night... legal or not. It took her almost a month to finally get a place (living in a hotel meanwhile) and she was a single professional woman in her 30s from the Midwest, non-smoker, no pets. You'd think she'd be a 'dream tenant'; but landlords on LI can pick and choose because the demand is so high and the supply so low.
There was an illegal apartment in a house on three of the six Long Island streets I've so far lived on. In one case I never even knew there was a tenant until the homeowner sold the house and moved out! In the other two cases, everyone on the block knew Mrs. N. was renting out the downstairs to a couple with a young child but nobody had a problem with it whatsoever, and it was just as if they were another homeowner/family. In the third case, again, the tenants were never a problem UNTIL they moved out and a different tenant family moved in... entirely different behavior. Eventually one of the people on the street got fed up with the noise, parking problems, incidents involving one of the tenant's kids, etc, and had a heart-to-heart with the homeowner: "Either deal with this or the Town gets a phone call." Things got ugly between the homeowner and the tenant, the tenant got their notice, they left, and then the ex-TENANT blew the whistle on the homeowner as soon as the next tenant moved in!
Last edited by OvertaxedOnLI; 03-02-2007 at 12:04 PM..
I feel your pain, or should I say I felt your pain. We just relocated to Raleigh NC about a year ago and we feel like we truly jumped off the treadmill. We got out of Dodge just in time! My husband relocated his manufacturing business and we are all just resettling into a place that is like LI was 15-20 years ago. This area is voted one of the best places to live in Money Magazine and that is exactly how LI was rated years ago. My children are all making an interesting adjustment into the school system. My son, who is straight A's in all subjects in NY has been struggling with his AP Calculus and Spanish. The students here are way doing work way beyond what he encountered in NY. Watch your Math A and B, they are not preparing these kids for the college math as well as in other states. I guess the unions will keep that a great big secret. When your kids start showing you their SAT scores, look to see how they rank nationally and then within their own state. They will always be ranked higher in NYS than nationally. What does this tell you?
Quote:
Originally Posted by sandy11
We want to move because we don't want our kids to fall in the same trap. We know it would be impossible to own a house without having a husband or wife - both working, making ATLEAST 100K combined, and mortgaging themselves to the limit............Let alone they would end up living home until they were 30yrs old - what ever comes first.........
I see these nice young couples all the time living with the "in-laws".............or buying houses with $3,000 per month mortgages......working themselves to death and trying to figure out how they are going to start a family. I work with someone who has been married for a year- lives with her husbands parents in their basement - they want a baby but she doesn't want to start a family until they have a house.....And she is already 30yrs old. They both work hard................How is this ever going to happen???? Another just bought a house- mortgaged themselves to death and has a hard time with the payment every month - they just had a baby too.........
I too am sorry I was brought up here........When we leave,we are also leaving our families. I have family where we are going...........so it won't be that bad. Yes, family is important..............But sometimes you gotta look at the big picture.........It's not the same place it was 30yrs ago.
We live by the water. We have a boat.....we take it to the beach all the time..........we can afford to live here..........we live in a nice area....BUT does my husband have to work overtime? YES. Do I have to work full time and juggle after school activities with the kids everyday? YES. Do we get to save any money, or put money away for college? NO. Do we live in a district where the school taxes went up and everything taken away? Yes. I have to pay for a tutor for my son because the budget dropped all but one special ed teacher in the building to handle 50 children by himself in a day.
I used be proud of Long Island.........thought we lived in a great place (I still think it's nice)- But alot of New Yorkers think that New York is the center of the universe- and no place is better. No school anywhere could be better. Everyone is smarter here. We rule.............we know everything - and that any place else to live is like a step down.
The only reason anyone really lives here is the fact that they have family here............Or they have alot of money. Oh, ofcourse - because they really live in the city- and they have a house on the east end for the weekends.
The cost of living is not the problem. The problem is low level of ambition, education, and/or ability.
The two things I keep reading about Long Island is that it's too expensive and overcrowded. Apparently, if it's overcrowded then it must not be too expensive.
Last edited by Check123; 03-02-2007 at 12:11 PM..
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Illegal apartments?
