Huntington Supervisor Smyth is making steady progress in Melville
Maxess Road, looking south, in Melville. The area would be part of Huntington Town’s proposed Melville Town Center overlay district that would include retail, commercial and housing development. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
Empty stretches of asphalt and old concrete buildings dot the landscape along Maxess Road, a four-lane thoroughfare in Melville. Geese waddle along the grass. Picnic tables in front of one vacant building sit empty.
Other than an occasional bird call, and the low rumble of a car or truck, it's quiet. Too quiet.
For the last year, the office park has been the subject of multiple listening sessions, as Huntington Town Supervisor Ed Smyth invited residents, business owners, first responders and other constituents to talk about what they want — and don't want — there.
At one such session last winter, Smyth walked into a room of about 75 people and someone asked, “OK, what are you showing us?”
“I said, 'I have nothing to show you. This is a blank sheet of paper. I'm not here to tell you anything. I don't have a plan,'” Smyth recalled this week. “That's how we started.”
But he did have a message — both for developers eager to build and residents eager to say, “No.”
“I said, 'If you're a developer who wants to build a 10-story apartment building, you're in the wrong room,'” Smyth remembered. "'But if you're somebody who thinks nothing is going to happen here, you're also in the wrong room.'”
A year later, Huntington has a plan, a Melville Town Center overlay district, south of the Long Island Expressway and north of Ruland Road, that permits retail, commercial and residential uses. Buildings can include four stories of usable space, including a ground floor for retail and three floors of housing.
The town is still making tweaks, with a special meeting to approve them scheduled for Wednesday. Three public hearings will be held in April, May and June. More changes could come.
Even so, naysayers unsurprisingly have emerged with ugly fearmongering. Most recently, the North Shore Leader, a local weekly that covers the town, said the rezoning “could result in some 40,000 new apartments being built,” an absurd number reached by incorrectly attempting to use every bit of the parcel to calculate a maximum. It would be “by far the largest housing development ever in the history of Long Island,” the Leader said.
But that's not true. It doesn't take into account the reality of development, the open space and other uses or the infrastructure and sewer limitations. The number, Smyth said, is “preposterous.”
The reality: Melville Town Center could include about 3,000 apartments.
Huntington's effort has been methodical, typical of the pace that has helped cause the region's housing shortage. It's unfolding as the town disappointingly has rejected other reasonable opportunities to add housing, including an attempted expansion of accessory dwelling unit codes.
But at least in Melville, that slow-paced strategy seems to be working.
A year after arriving with a blank sheet of paper, Smyth now has a vision of what Melville needs. Housing. Restaurants. Even a low-level trauma center and emergency room.
“I see a vibrant, walkable downtown, with wide sidewalks and outdoor dining and outdoor retailing … an economic and social center in Melville that's going to attract new businesses to the area, along with giving their employees a way to stay locally,” Smyth said.
It's a refrain other Long Island communities have heard. Results have been hit and miss. Perhaps Smyth is the slow and steady tortoise in this race, the one who will make it past the roadblocks — and cross the finish line.
Columnist Randi F. Marshall's opinions are her own.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.