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A Few Clouds ‘I’m done with Long Island’
High housing prices push young people away, or strand them with their parents
Part three in the series “Plugging the Brain Drain.”
“I’m done with Long Island,” said Randall Press, a former Long Beach resident. “I’m done with the politics, I’m done with the taxes, I’m done with the nonsense. I’m done with all of it. I left Long Island, and I’m not looking back.”
Press and his wife, Christine, decided to move with their two young sons to the Poconos, in Pennsylvania. Press was born on Long Island, grew up in Merrick and lived for five years with his family in an apartment in Long Beach. But that still wasn’t enough to keep him here, where housing prices are soaring out of control and making it almost impossible for him to get a foothold.
“I grew up my whole life on Long Island’s South Shore, and I saw all the taxes going up throughout my childhood and heard all the stories that my parents were saying,” said Press, 38, on the phone from the Poconos. “And as an adult I saw how expensive things got and I saw how impossible it was for somebody who was raised on Long Island to stay on Long Island.”
Press is just part of a growing number of young people from Long Island who can’t afford to stay and raise a family in the place where they grew up. Things are just too expensive for them to stay here, and it shows.
From 1990 to 2006, Long Island’s population of 25- to 34-year-olds dropped by 35 percent. The national average was eight percent. And based on a 2008 Long Island Index survey, 65 percent of Long Islanders between the ages of 18 and 34 said they were likely to move off the island in the next five years.
“I went to school in Vermont, and then I graduated in June [2010] and decided not to go back to Long Island because, one, as much as I love them, I didn’t want to live with my family again,” said Nicole Perratto, 21, a former Lynbrook resident. “And I didn’t want to spend the $900 a month for a studio apartment.”
Instead of paying $900 a month for a basement studio apartment, Perratto and four friends pay $900 between them for a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house on the property of the Killington ski resort, one of the largest on the east coast.
