LI Quality of Life survey: Most see economic opportunity, but not all groups agree

Editor's note — This is the last in a series of stories that will explore the results of a Newsday/Siena Research Institute survey on how Long Islanders view their life satisfaction. Today's story focuses on issues of opportunity. 

Long Islanders are generally more optimistic than pessimistic about economic and educational opportunity in the region for themselves and their children, but there are stark differences in attitudes by generation, race, ethnicity and even home ownership status, according to a Newsday/Siena Research Institute Quality of Life survey

Data from the survey showed that half of adult Long Islanders see the region as a good place to find a job, compared with 44% who saw it as fair or poor, and 57%  see it as a place where a business can be successful. Overwhelmingly, they view Long Island as a good place to raise children and give them a quality education — 77% and 90%, respectively.

More respondents predicted positive life outcomes for young people, such as graduating from high school or finding a good job, than negative ones, such as getting arrested for a felony or joining a gang.

But the data also show disparities within those attitudes, with Long Islanders who are 55 and older, whites or homeowners generally more positive in their answers than those who are 18-34, Black or Hispanic, or renters.

"It raises the question of whether there are two Long Islands," said Siena pollster Don Levy. "If you are white, a homeowner, have a good job that’s allowing you to afford the life you enjoy, you tend to be far more sanguine about life on Long Island."

The survey polled 802 respondents between May 27 and June 16 on questions about their quality of life on Long Island. It had a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points.

In interviews, even some of the respondents who were optimistic about opportunity overall in the region turned, unprompted, to home ownership and the cost of living here.

"I think there’s opportunities, but you have to seize them and work hard," said Joyce Merzbacher, 75, a retired teacher from Farmingdale, who added: "I wouldn’t want to be trying to break into this housing market."

She and her husband bought their first house 53 years ago for $32,000, when their household income was $19,000, she said. "I don’t see our grandsons and granddaughters being able to sustain that ratio, and that’s why so many young people have to move," she said.

The Long Island she sees today seems to produce many high achievers, regularly sending students to prestigious contests such as the Regeneron Science Talent Search each year, for example. It may also be more competitive, with fewer guardrails, than the one she and her husband knew growing up in Hicksville, where "everyone had a family member working at Grumman ... They took care of their workers. You could afford to live on Long Island and buy a nice house with a high school education, or coming out of the military."

But those companies are "gone, and more and more education has been required, for all kinds of positions," she said.

In Garden City, where the median household income of $228,807 is among the highest on Long Island, the outlook was bright for Robert Gorynski, 41, who works in finance. The public schools Gorynski’s two children attend are among the best in the nation and "everyone I’ve spoken to anticipates their child graduating high school and going to college," he said.

Gorynski, too, saw Long Island’s high cost of living as a limiting factor when assessing opportunities for young people — "I don’t envy a young person starting out now," he said — but one that was surmountable. "Within Garden City and outside Garden City, there seems to be a lot of bustling commerce, he said. "I think there are opportunities and I think that, from the young people I meet, these qualified people, if they applied themselves, could find great opportunities here."

In East Rockaway, Joseph DiCanio, 28, a lawyer, matched Gorynski’s optimism. "In my town, the kids I grew up with, my friends from private schools ended up in more white-collar jobs," he said. "The public school [graduated] tons of police officers, firemen, higher-level blue-collar jobs, legitimate union jobs based out of New York City." His father has for decades run a tractor trailer repair shop just over the Queens border.

DiCanio was bullish on Long Island as a place to start a family or a business. He saw the region as composed of "good, strong communities," partly because of his own childhood in East Rockaway, where there was "plenty of Little League, CYO community events, Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues, a good sense of community, at least in my little town."

When it came to the survey’s most open-ended question, which asked respondents the likelihood that a young person in their community could build a "successful life on Long Island," without defining exactly what success might mean, Long Islanders were deeply divided.

Thirty-nine percent of respondents answered that it was likely; another 39% said it was a toss-up; and 22% said it was unlikely (1% said they didn’t know or refused to answer). For this question there was little polarization by race, age or even income, but home ownership was a powerful predictor: 41% of homeowners said it was likely, while 23% of renters did. (There was weaker polarization for respondents who answered in the negative: 20% of homeowners said it was unlikely, while 31% of renters did.)

This polarity could be a function of one of the economic and psychological realities of Long Island’s housing market: home prices are at record highs, creating wealth for owners but locking out many would-be buyers. According to Realtor.com, to afford a home at the June median asking price on Long Island of $911,754, a buyer would need to earn $242,000. That's a six-figure jump from $132,000 six years earlier and far more money than what most households make in the region.

Renters are more likely to be rent-burdened, spending 30% or more of household income on rent, than owners are to be cost-burdened, spending the same portion of income on ownership costs. 

In Suffolk County, according to the Census, 57.1% of renters are rent-burdened, compared with 37.3% of homeowners with a mortgage and 25.3% of those without a mortgage. In Nassau, 53.3% of renters are rent-burdened, compared with 40.4% of homeowners with a mortgage and 25.7% of homeowners without a mortgage.

Reginald Benjamin, 69, a Hempstead Village renter who is the semiretired former executive director of the ABBA Leadership Center, a faith-based organization there, listed several positive changes he’d seen in years of community work, including higher high school graduation rates, less gang activity and fewer arrests. But those don’t add up to opportunity, he said. "Most young people, once they go to college, you know the first thing they do? They leave this area, they move out ... We are losing the future, the brains of our community."

Hempstead Village’s median household income is $82,454, a little more than a third of what it is in nearby Garden City, and for Benjamin, opportunity for businesses and individuals to thrive seemed constrained by cost. He described a village Main Street where, he said, "they open up stores, they don’t last more than six months ... because of the expenses associated with renting a commercial space."

Long Island, he said, "is the most expensive place I know." It can be a good place to live and raise children "if you can afford it, but it’s very difficult to raise kids on Long Island with the cost of living. If you’re working class, it’s almost impossible."

Correction: The chart displaying the answers to the survey question "how would you rate the ability of residents on Long Island to obtain suitable employment" had incorrect results in an earlier version of this story.