‘If you build it, they will come’?

Final part in the series “Plugging the Brain Drain.”

“We don’t want to see our young people leave,” said Island Park Mayor Jim Ruzicka. “That’s our future.”

Ruzicka and others like him — local government officials — are the linchpin in keeping young people on Long Island.

When a developer wants to start building, it needs approval from the local government. It may receive grants or tax incentives on the federal or state level, but it’s the local government that ultimately decides the fate of a project.

This was demonstrated recently when the Town of Hempstead decided not to approve a zoning change that developer Charles Wang wanted for the Lighthouse project, effectively killing Wang’s plan. The control over zoning is the main authority that villages — and towns, in the case of hamlets like Oceanside and Baldwin — hold over construction projects.

Many planned projects for things like housing complexes require areas of land to be rezoned, and local municipalities hold the power to do that. If a village chooses to not rezone an area, it can kill a million-dollar project.

But some villages are embracing the movement to revitalize downtowns and bring in affordable rental housing. Valley Stream is in the process of demolishing old stores so that it can put in a new building that will have stores on the ground floor and apartments on the second through fifth floors.

“You have a walk to the train station, a walk to shops and restaurants and a walk to this beautiful park,” said Vinny Ang, Valley Stream’s village clerk. “So we’ve got a lot going for us. It kind of behooves us to do something with this downtown, and that’s exactly what we’re working on now.”

Ang said that Valley Stream is following the “Field of Dreams” philosophy: If you build it, they will come. He said that once Valley Stream has people living in its downtown, everything else will fall into place.

“Once you bring those people to the area, you don’t have to do another thing,” he said. “The restaurants, the shops, the businesses — they all come on their own. You don’t have to go out and find them; you don’t have to go out and solicit them. They will come here.