L.I. needs to be smart about growth

With all the talk about the Lighthouse project and whether it will ever come to fruition, it’s easy to think that it is the be-all and end-all for development in Nassau County.

But the Lighthouse is just a part — albeit a large part — of a bigger plan for Nassau County and Long Island as a whole: Smart Growth.

Smart Growth is a term that politicians are fond of overusing, but its concepts are important. It advocates responsible development in towns, villages and cities based around existing transportation hubs. In the case of most local areas, those would be Long Island Rail Road stations.

Smart Growth is a concept worth embracing, because it’s not about development for development’s sake. Its ideal is developers working with the community and expanding on the unique flavor that every village has. It aims to transform quiet, lackluster downtowns into areas where people will want to visit, dine and shop. And in the shadow of the Lighthouse, it’s easy to forget that the heart and soul of Long Island is its small downtowns.

Former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi began focusing on such places with his “cool downtowns” concept. Suozzi wanted to build up the existing infrastructure in Nassau County communities built around their transit hubs — places like Long Beach and Rockville Centre. He envisioned multi-story buildings surrounding a train station, with shops on the bottom floors and apartments on the upper floors — areas where people could live and shop.

Unfortunately, Suozzi didn’t have any real plans for what, exactly, he wanted villages to do to transform themselves into cool downtowns, and for a few months after he left office, Smart Growth wasn’t really talked about unless the subject was the Lighthouse project.