By Matt Bisanz

This May, I, along with nearly 2,000 other students, will graduate from the University. While many of us know where we are going to establish ourselves post-Hofstra, I know one place I will not live: Long Island. Quite frankly, a cost-benefit analysis of living on Long Island indicates to me that it really doesn’t make sense for me or most of my fellow graduates to live on Long Island.

First, there is the public transportation system, or lack thereof. If you live in New York City, there are subways and taxis at every corner. People pay the $2,000 a month rent for a loft, because they know they want to walk 50 feet and be in a subway to work in 20 minutes. On Long Island, you’ll pay an arm and a leg for a house that is still 40 minutes from a train station. And unlike the subway, the Long Island Railroad costs up to $17 round trip. Every so often, additional services such as more track spurs or more freeways and more bridges are proposed that would speed up things like the hour-long ferry ride to Connecticut or the bottleneck at the Throgs Neck Bridge, and every time it’s voted down in order to retain the historic image of the island. I’m sorry, but people don’t spend every day in wildlife preserves and historic villages; they work for large corporations in inpersonal modern office parks.

Second, there is the issue with the cost of living. If you live in the city, you pay more for things because they are all close to where you live. You spend more at the bodega because its only a block away. Up in, say, Westchester or Connecticut, the cost of living is lower since people trade having to drive 30 minutes to a Wal Mart for its lower prices. The problem on Long Island is that it’s the worst of both worlds. You have to drive to overpriced shops that close at inconvenient times. Most Wal- Mart stores and many grocery stores in the suburbs are open 24 hours a day, but here they close at 10 p.m. What sort of professional who works in the city all day and needs to go shopping after dinner wants to be faced with a closed door?

The third reason many of us will leave Long Island is that there are not that many good jobs here. For instance, I will be pursuing a job at an accounting firm. That firm has an office in New York City and on Long Island. However, of the dozen or so specialties my firm has, the New York City location has them all, the Long Island has one of them, and it’s not the one I’m interested in. If you’re looking to work for a Fortune 500 company and don’t like Cablevision or Commuter Associates, you’re pretty much out of luck finding a job out here. Due in part to the resistance of towns to let corporation build tall office towers in Nassau county, Long Island is slowly falling behind as a place for young 20-somethings to find jobs. Why pay Long Island’s high real estate and cost of living prices to commute to a city job, when you can live in the city for the same price, or New Jersey for a lower price and have the same or short commute? It simply doesn’t make sense.

In conclusion, many of the graduates of the class of 2008 will find themselves living in other states and regions, not because Long Island is a bad place to live, but because it has not decided whether it wants to be a suburb or a city. It’s too expensive a place to be a suburb, but too spread out and inconvenient a place to be a city. I’d urge community leaders to push for ways to make the island a more business-friendly place. Permit more box-stores on the Island and permit them to stay open later. Encourage the development of more mass-transit, especially in highly populated urban centers. Bring more corporations here through reasonable zoning laws. Boston is a great example of a city that has maintained its historic past while modernizing today’s lifestyles. Long Island can become another such example.

Matt Bisanz is a graduate student. You ma e-mail him at [email protected].