The reasons for moving off Long Island are mounting. (click ‘read more’ for reasons). Although the value of our current house is way up, if I can estimate it’s worth from the houses that have been sold and appraised around me, it’s still far below what comparable homes fetch in surrounding areas (from talking to others and looking through real estate ads). Therein lies the rub: sell the house, and we won’t be able to afford to buy anything else on the Island without getting saddled with huge debt! This hasn’t stopped most other folks I know who are happily saddled with massive debt ($600k+), maybe it’s me? Although the taxes are bad relative to other parts of the country, at our current place, they’re better than anywhere else on the island – if we sell and move, we won’t only have to pay through the nose to buy another house here, we’d also have to budget for at least doubling our taxes. The only solution would seem to be to move *off* the island, but then there’s the black hole of finding a job, etc.Running List of Reasons to Move:
- Plans are in the works to put a massive high security prison about a mile down the tracks from my house to replace the over-crowded one in Riverhead.
- Plans are in the works for a 6000 seat stadium / race track about 2 miles away – the roar will be incredible, not to mention the traffic.
- Not a real factor, but an annoyance: the huge baseball fields they put in down the road have so much light that at night the entire sky is lit up as bright as the light of dawn. On nights that they use the fields you can’t see a single star in the sky. Funny – it actually scared me one night I heard a roaring outside, and went out to realize that it was a huge crowd of people screaming at a game.
- There are still plans to stick a huge 58 megawatt electric generating oil burning facility at the end of my road. (update: it was *supposed* to be a gas fired plant, but it’s really dual-use, and since they currently have no source for gas, it’s pretty obviously *not* going to be gas fired. Oh, and its a 384 Megawatt facility now.
- Bad enough that the gravel places behind me work from 6am every day but Sunday (which I think is illegal – to be grinding stone (loud) on Saturday at 6am, but everyone is afraid to mess with them as they appear to be tied to the mob), but one of them now wants to graduate to start doing asphalt. This would really be a clincher – it would spell terrible consequences for Em who already has trouble with allergies. An asphalt place would eventually kill us all, too since the prevailing wind would bring the black cloud of death right over the house. –update: I think I had this confused. The asphalt plant would be in Middle Island at the gravel place on Middle-Island Yaphank Rd. Still bad, but wouldn’t affect us directly.
- there have been over 50 home invasions this year (I forget if that’s just Suffolk or both counties) and the police have no clue who’s doing them (despite the fact they are the highest paid cops in the country?)
- the traffic is awful now – it takes me 45 minutes some days to drive the 14 miles to work. It used to be I could wait till 6:00 to leave for home and miss most of it on the way home, but now the traffic is bad until 7, and still a factor till 7:30.
- I haven’t even mentioned Grucci setting off his bombs (fireworks manufacturer) in the summer about 1 mile away, or Gershow (recycling plant) chugging out fumes and setting itself on fire mysteriously every two years (to burn off the oil and gas in the cars?) because they are basically community fixtures. –update: I forgot all about Gershow’s bombs! Our local legislator has been fighting with them about it, they denied and denied and finally admitted that every once in a while they ‘forget’ to let the gas or oil out of a car they are recycling and it EXPLODES! Since they’re not that close, you’d think it wouldn’t be a big deal, but the whole house shakes, and it’s so loud you think it’s a bomb going off someplace. I actually called the police once about it, afraid it was a pipe bomb on the tracks or something.
- There’s a real possibility for having our house utterly destroyed in a hurricane – if we really are moving into a period of higher hurricane activity, although LI is less of a target than Florida and the east coast – huge hurricanes have hit here before with devastating effect. Perhaps we should get out now before another one hits? We’re certainly due.
- The illegal immigrant population here is booming. Hundreds of men stand on the corners of every road around here – some unlucky ones all day. There seems to be no attempt by the federal government to do even the basic work of processing these folks who I imagine would rather be here legally – so we end up with hundreds of people with no home, and no legal status to aquire one. They end up crashing in abandoned houses that can’t be sold because nobody wants to buy a house in a place where hundreds of men hang out all day on the street, or in illegal rentals where they are crammed in 60 per house with a cesspool that can only handle 4 people so the stuff backs up in the street.
- Our new postal delivery person doesn’t speak english. It seems to me that speaking/reading english would be a requirement, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We’ve met more of our nieghbors than ever before since we constantly have to exchange mail with them – one neighbor found mail in her driveway! but it’s not your father’s postal service, man.
- The Expressway has always been loud, but now it is a consistent roar all night. Each year it gets a little louder, but during the winter with the windows all closed you don’t hear it – then comes the spring and the difference is immediately noticed. I guess for some, the Expressway is a plus – easier commute and all, and we’re not right on it – but it’s changed alot since I was a kid. Whenever you go outside you are surrounded by noise of cars all around + gravel guys + emergency vehicles + baseball fields, etc.
- Which reminds me! The people of Holbrook who have a lot more money than our neighborhood (collectively) convinced Islip airport (or whoever decides these things) to change the flight pattern for incoming flights. Now the planes go right over my house! Some nights I wake up with a start and hear a massive roar – and it’s a plane, flying low over the house. We’re almost 10 miles from the airport! I don’t know how that happened, but nobody told us they were changing this – it just happened one day.
- Gangs: there has been a huge increase of gang violence. MS-13 is big here (kids of illegal immigrants mainly). This in of itself isn’t much of a big deal, since gangs tend to blast away at each other, but if they move in on your street, your chances of getting caught in a crossfire go up considerably. Plus, you don’t want your kid ending up becoming friends with gang-members. There are some concerns about a big house at the end of the road where lots of males live. We don’t know anything, it’s just a concern.
