The New York Times-20080127-Post-College Blues- Just Move Back In
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127
Post-College Blues? Just Move Back In
Full Text (993 words)MOVING to New York City after graduation does not hold much appeal for Janika Sundstrom, a sophomore at Dowling College from Finland who plays on the women's basketball team and lives in a dormitory on campus here.
I don't like it, she said of the city. It seems a little bit like chaos. I like the calmness here. I would stay here on Long Island.
Still, Ms. Sundstrom said, if she cannot break into the professional basketball leagues in Europe, she will probably head to the city because she is resigned to the impossibility of finding an apartment on Long Island.
That is a common sentiment at Dowling, where many students frame their postgraduate housing options as a choice between moving back into their parents' homes and moving away.
Robert J. Gaffney, the college's president and a former Suffolk County executive, is trying to develop a third possibility for Dowling graduates: continue living on campus. The college plans to begin building more than 1,000 units of new student housing in 2008 or 2009, with a certain number set aside for graduates on its campus in Shirley, about 15 miles east of here.
We'd like to create an alternative, so that when students graduate they don't have to move into their parents' garages or into their old rooms, Mr. Gaffney said.
The challenge of retaining young residents has long been a problem on Long Island. Between 2000 and 2006, the population here between the ages of 25 and 34 declined by 20 percent, according to an analysis of census data by the Long Island Association, the Island's largest business and civic association. Young people have found it difficult to afford housing on the Island, with 62 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds saying they were having trouble meeting monthly housing costs, according to the 2008 Long Island Index, a yearly analysis of data about the Island.
And Long Island has fewer options than other suburban areas in the metropolitan area. Multifamily housing makes up 16 percent of the housing stock on Long Island, compared with 53 percent in northern New Jersey. The proportion of housing available for rent on Long Island is also the lowest in the region. Less than 19 percent of the housing in Nassau and Suffolk counties is rental, compared with 36 percent in Westchester, 26 percent in Rockland County and 32 percent in Bergen County.
Mr. Gaffney readily concedes that urban areas also offer a greater range of social activities than the suburbs. By creating a critical mass of young people, he said, he hopes to create an atmosphere different from the one his daughter described as a social wasteland before moving to Boulder, Colo., a decade ago.
When you graduate, you get married, buy a house and get involved in the Little League, he said. There's nothing else to do.
At first glance, a bustling social scene does not seem ready to burst out at the location that Dowling, a college of 7,000 students with only 600 living on campus, has chosen for its project.
Its campus in Shirley consists of a single classroom building and a dorm, set back from major streets. The big amenity is an airstrip at Brookhaven Calabro Airport, where the college's aviation students practice flying small Warrior II planes.
But athletic fields are under construction, and a student center is planned along with new housing, which will include a gym and other facilities that residents who had graduated would have access to. The new units, complete with kitchens, would resemble apartments more than traditional dorm rooms. Mr. Gaffney said the project's cost had not been determined.
When asked recently about the idea for on-campus housing after graduation, Dowling students reacted positively.
I think it might be easier after college if you stayed here for a while, Ms. Sundstrom said. It would make the gap smaller, jumping to work life.
Marcie Bodanzio, a senior from Ronkonkoma majoring in psychology, said the apartments would have to be exempt from some current rules of campus living, because graduates would be hesitant to live in a place where they had to sign in guests and were not allowed to drink alcohol.
There would have to be a distinction from the dorms, she said.
Dowling is not the first college to consider using its campus to help revitalize the surrounding area. The University of Connecticut plans to build several hundred apartments at its campus in Storrs, and the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, has reached an agreement with developers to build 295 on-campus apartments, not just for recent students but also for the general public. Two colleges in British Columbia, the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, have built extensive retail and housing developments on campus.
To build the apartments, Dowling may need a zoning variance from the Town of Brookhaven. The college and town officials have spoken about the idea, but officials said they could not comment about a possible zoning change until a public hearing had been held.
ON Long Island, plans to build multifamily housing have often been met with opposition from those concerned about an area's losing its suburban feel. There are some indications, however, that such objections are loosening. Almost three out of four residents say they believe that government efforts to ensure affordable housing are extremely or very important, and a majority of local residents support state government action for greater housing density, according to the Long Island Index.
This attitude will continue, Mr. Gaffney said, as opponents of affordable housing projects find their own families squeezed by the Island's housing shortage.
The people who have so vehemently objected to this are the ones who are going to suffer, he said. It's their grandchildren who are going to live in another state.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: HIGH HOUSING COSTS: LOOM Janika Sundstrom, Dowling student. (pg. 6); COCOON: Dowling College plans to build dorms for graduates. (pg. 1)(PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHIL MARINO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)