“Typically I get the urge to train,” the famously rotund basketball coach Frank Layden as soon as stated, “however I lie down and it passes.”
Typically I get the urge to jot down about good issues occurring in actual property. However I feel for a second and it passes. There may be simply an excessive amount of foolishness happening.
At this time’s instance comes from Lengthy Island’s North Fork.
We’ll begin with the excellent news. Practically each hospitality web site on this bucolic peninsula has been upgraded lately.
Longtime homeowners and new investors — mom-and-pops, personal fairness funds, even the magnate Stefan Soloviev — are capitalizing on robust demand to go to the North Fork, which stretches from Riverhead to Orient Level, reverse the Hamptons.
The availability of resort rooms, nevertheless, continues to be tight sufficient that some venues can cost greater than $1,000 an evening through the summer season. Buyers try so as to add extra. The issue is, locals make it exceedingly troublesome.
Between an open area preservation tax and residential zoning, good websites for industrial growth are exhausting to search out. And while you do discover one, neighborhood opposition is a given. Fears of Hamptonization, visitors and adjustments within the North Fork’s character typically prevail.
Amid this dynamic, a big, doubtlessly wonderful piece of land on the Gardiners Bay waterfront has sat moribund for many years. The 18-acre “Oki-Do” web site in East Marion is probably the worst eyesore on the North Fork, because of an deserted oyster processing plant — a hulking, hideous mass of crumbling concrete surrounded by an unsightly fence.
An outdated smokestack completes the pathetic image.
Varied plans to redevelop it haven’t come to fruition. One known as for 114 resort rooms, two dozen rental cottages, two eating places, an amphitheater and a marina.
The most recent was from homebuilder Paramount Hamptons and Sal DeLorenzo, who snapped up the land in October 2021 for $6 million and announced plans for 80 condominium items.
Paramount tapped Steven Losquadro, whom Newsday not too long ago described as a “connected Suffolk lawyer,” to pitch this plan for quiet Shipyard Lane.
As if to make his activity much more difficult, Losquadro talked about workforce housing. Actuality verify: That’s one thing Lengthy Islanders help within the summary however hardly ever in an precise challenge.
An East Marion civic group polled residents and reported that greater than 80 % opposed reasonably priced housing on the Oki-Do web site. The city supervisor persuaded the city board in 2022 to vary the zoning to draw a resort and restaurant, however Paramount’s Invoice Locantro stated he builds houses, not eateries and hotels.
Shipyard Lane residents, for his or her half, stated visitors from both challenge would harm their high quality of life. Thoughts you, it is a dead-end road with extra deer than automobiles on most days.
Put all these elements collectively and you’ve got a recipe for inertia.
From what I can inform, Paramount Properties has not been heard from since. Sadly, whereas the cat was away, the mice got here out to play: Southold City is within the course of of fixing the positioning’s zoning from marine to large-lot residential, because the NIMBY neighbors wished.
As a substitute of an aesthetic waterfront resort and restaurant, the rezoning would permit for a number of McMansions, rendering this stretch of waterfront the personal area of second-home homeowners.
That’s the best-case situation. The worst case is that large-lot zoning so devalues the positioning that clearing it, remediating any air pollution and constructing homes wouldn’t pencil out. The eyesore would stay for an additional technology.
Learn extra
Southold hoteliers protest proposed zoning changes
North Fork developer lands tax breaks for controversial hotel project
Purchase of former oyster farm puts town in a pickle
