32 years after 'LI at Crossroads,' where are we now?

Soaring property taxes. Lack of affordable housing. Balkanized and expensive layers of government.

Sound familiar?

Those concerns date back more than 30 years to a 1978 Newsday report - "Long Island at the Crossroads" - that explored the region's greatest challenges and offered strategies to avoid what the authors called "the path of decay recently trodden by New York City."

MORE: The Future of Long Island special

Since that time, some predictions of the 13-day series have come to pass, while others failed to materialize. The defense jobs that propelled many Long Islanders into the middle class indeed disappeared. While local schools remain some of the best in the country, issues that bedeviled the region three decades ago persist - sprawl, job losses and the high cost of living.

The region now finds itself at another crossroads, with new challenges ahead.

After years of relative prosperity, the recession has thrown Long Island's high costs and high taxes into stark relief as residents and local governments alike struggle to balance budgets and rein in spending. Some see hope in the Lighthouse project and other big proposals whose mix of housing and commercial space could chart a new direction for suburban growth - if the projects get built. Others caution that Long Island may fall behind unless the region pulls together to develop new industries and create jobs.

"We're really trapped by our history," said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, the area's largest business group. "The problems we haven't addressed over two or three decades have really come back to haunt us this recession."

Kamer was once an economist for the Long Island Regional Planning Board, which contributed data and expertise to the "Crossroads" series.

Influx of newcomers

The "Crossroads" series was published at what now seems a distant point in time, when the Bee Gees ruled the pop charts, Long Island clammers made a decent living and people still used rotary dial phones.

Global economic shifts and an influx of newcomers have transformed Long Island since 1978, when 92 percent of the population was white, and Grumman was the region's biggest private employer. Public schools now teach students whose native languages include Farsi, Korean and Haitian Creole.

Suffolk County's population has grown by 17 percent as homes and office parks sprouted up on former farm fields. Long Islanders work in industries that barely existed back then: computer programming, biomedical research and telecommunications. Many more labor in a vast empire of low-paying retail and service jobs.

Residents in search of a little culture now have more local options - concerts by the Long Island Philharmonic, plays at Northport's Engeman Theater and exhibitions at galleries and museums from Nassau to the East End. Tourism draws visitors from the city and beyond out east, to a glammed-up, built-up Hamptons and the North Fork's string of wineries.

Despite those changes, many of the core suburban values that shaped the region's development after World War II endure and are embraced by more recent arrivals.

Life on Long Island remains centered around schools, home ownership and the increasingly congested roads. Towns, not counties, still hold the power over local zoning and development. Community attitudes that equate rentals with urbanization and crime are only starting to soften, even as planners urge mixed-use developments to revive faded downtowns.

"Keep Nassau Suburban" was the slogan on a Republican Party leaflet from the 1970s and '80s, said Hugh A. Wilson, a professor of political science at Adelphi University. "Housing, local control, education. These values are held dearly in the face of all comers," said Wilson, who headed the school's Institute for Suburban Studies in the late 1970s.

Paying for public services

To Wilson and others, high taxes and other seemingly eternal Long Island troubles are rooted in the same things that make suburban life so attractive.

Good schools cost money. So do the services provided by multiple layers of government - for example, the local sanitation district whose trucks roll into residents' driveways to pick up the garbage. While Long Islanders have long complained about their tax bills, efforts over the years to save money by consolidating the region's 124 school districts or combining municipal services have typically generated tepid or hostile responses.

Long Island property taxes rose 20 percent above the rate of inflation between 1998 and 2007, compared with 6 percent elsewhere in New York, according to the Long Island Index, an annual report on Long Island trends published by the Rauch Foundation.

School taxes have outpaced overall economic growth, and high-paying jobs are leaving Long Island, said Michael White, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Council. He and others also worry that the high cost of housing and lack of rentals will continue to drive young people elsewhere - as they have for decades - taking the future tax base with them.

Many observers say schools need to cut costs. But they also argue that new sources of revenue must be found if expensive schools and tiers of local government are to continue.

Kamer, for one, suggests expanding the tax base by building large-scale projects that blend high-density housing and commercial components. For example, the Lighthouse project at Nassau Coliseum, or Brentwood's Heartland proposal.

The "Crossroads" series called for legalizing accessory apartments and building thousands more to retain young people and seniors. Today, rentals make up 17 percent of occupied housing units, compared to 20 percent in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But in the past decade, things seem to be turning around a bit. Senior housing has been built for empty-nesters. Some higher-end town houses and rentals have gone up too, like the Avalon developments in Glen Cove and Coram.

Affordable housing has been a harder sell, said Lee Koppelman, director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at Stony Brook University. "No community is willing to support housing for the poor. That's the harsh reality," said Koppelman, the former head of the Long Island Regional Planning Board.

Others are more hopeful. Chris Jones of the Regional Plan Association points to affordable housing in Patchogue Village, plans for multifamily housing in Mineola, and a proposal to redevelop downtown Wyandanch.

Going solo on development

Like housing, economic development on Long Island still happens village by village and town by town. This, despite repeated tries at a more united approach to attract and retain businesses such as Canon - which is moving to Melville - and OSI Pharmaceuticals, which announced last year it would leave Route 110 for greener pastures in Westchester.

High-tech incubators and research centers have helped connect Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with local businesses and entrepreneurs. But observers say Long Island needs to play up those strengths to outsiders who may be put off by the area's high costs. "In the 21st century economy, we've got to be able to compete as a region in the way that Silicon Valley does," said Richard Guardino, Hofstra University's vice president of business development and a former Hempstead Town supervisor.

When everything is added up, Long Island may well be in the same predicament as described by Peter Goldmark Sr., the late electronics pioneer who discussed suburbia's growing pains in the original "Crossroads" series.

"Long Island could be a paradise or Long Island could be hell. And it's all going to be decided in the next 25 years."