Major transit-oriented project begins in suburban Long Island
The Albanese Organization of Garden City, New York, is breaking ground on the first phase of a $500 million redevelopment in Wyandanch, a community of about 10,000 in the Town of Babylon, Long Island.
The regulating plan and code by Torti Gallas and Partners recently won the annual Driehaus Award from the Form-Based Coding Institute (FBCI) in Chicago.
The project breaks new ground for transit-oriented development in the suburbs of densely populated Long Island, which make up most of the 1,400 square mile land area. The community is an inner-ring suburb that has been in decline for many decades.
The area has an unusual combination of urban blight, automobile-oriented commercial buildings and thoroughfares, a commuter rail station, and an old, human-scale street grid.
“The Code is intended to transform the existing 142-acre suburban corridor and transit station area characterized by odd-shaped parcels, brownfields sites, surface parking, blighted buildings and lack of open space into a cohesive, pedestrian-friendly downtown,” notes the FBCI.
The revitalization effort, called Wyandanch Rising, is designed as the kind of dynamic mixed-use environment that is rare on suburban Long Island, all focused on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) station.
The plan for Wyandanch, with mixed-use buildings shaded red and shaded blue, civic buildings, and various types of residential uses.
Wyandanch was named the most economically distressed community on Long Island in 2001 by the Suffolk County Planning Department. It is “a place where even McDonald’s closed up shop several years ago,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
The first building is a five-story structure featuring 17,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and 91 rental units above. A second building, with 30,000 square feet of retail and 86 apartments, is scheduled to break ground later this year. Sixty percent of the units will be affordable and financed by affordable housing tax credits.
The first mixed-use building in Wyandanch, above. The Straight Path, below, a commercial strip arterial that will be rebuilt as a main street.
Although a number of similar town centers are planned around Long Island, Wyandanch is the first to move forward, says the Journal. Significant public investment -- especially to make the streets walkable and create attractive public spaces -- helped make Wyandanch Rising possible.
According to the Journal:
“Babylon spent about $26 million to buy up the properties where the new downtown is supposed to take root and $17 million to install sewers in Wyandanch ... . The town plans to spend about $20 million more on roads and a plaza for the first phase of the project, and the county recently approved $1.7 million for parking, sidewalks, lighting and other site-preparation work. Federal and state grants, as well as low-interest loans, help the municipalities bear some of those costs, officials said.”
Despite the blighted condition of some of the parcels, Albanese doesn’t have major concerns about market demand. More than 300,000 people live within a three-mile radius of the site, and many people on Long Island would like to live in a walkable community connected by transit to New York City.
The town center includes about seven new plazas, squares, and greens — public space amenities that are entirely missing from the area currently. Streetscape improvements will link the town center to two regional parks -- the closest about a half-mile away.
More commercial and office development is planned -- in addition to rental and for-sale residential. When completed, Wyandanch will be a regionally significant walkable urban place (WalkUP) -- the kind that is gaining real estate value in many urban markets. Christopher Leinberger studied WalkUPs in the Washington, DC, area, where they have accounted for 48 percent of the commercial development since 2009.
The 134-acre project is within walking distance of thousands of existing households. Completion time is estimated at 15 years.
