It’s easy to find public expressions of nostalgia for the Long Island, N.Y., of a few decades ago–middle-class family life, payroll jobs and simple suburban pleasures. That Long Island continues to disappear, as a Newsday accounting of new building projects–mostly in the central part of the island–makes clear, sometimes unwittingly.
For instance, the lede is buried in the story: “Healthcare and social assistance has become a major employer of Long Islanders and driver of the region’s economy. The sector reached a record 277,200 jobs on Long Island in September. Okoye Davis, a public information officer for the state Department of Labor, told Newsday in an email, ‘The healthcare and social assistance sector saw the greatest job growth in the last 20 years.'”
Long Island–like other such jurisdictions around the country–is increasingly a place for property-rich households, many of them of seniors, and a poorer wage or welfare class. Paychecks, either large or small, come from the medical industries that have grown to care for those seniors, above all.
Governments are also an ever-bigger employer, whereas private industry lacks a big driver like the aerospace plants that once thrived. Now many industrial sites are logistics related (serving those affluent consumers) or demand sizable subsidies to stay or relocate.
Another preoccupation of the modern Long Island is land preservation, in an effort to retain part of the natural surroundings that were still commonplace in the suburbia of yore. A seminal and symbolic push in this vein took place last month, as the state of New York bought 750 forested acres around what would have been the Shoreham nuclear plant on the north shore of the island.
The shutdown of Shoreham, shortly before it was to open in the 1980s, itself reflected a turning point for Long Island–aware from growth-enabling power generation and toward a more expensive but arguably more “green” economy. The general demise of the factory era from that point is only partly coincidental.
Newsday itself is a shadow of its post-war self–that, too, is greatly coincidental, although the paper actively backed the closure of Shoreham–but remains the institutional chronicler of the region. It gets many of the milestones right, even if the ledes sometimes are buried.
