Building a Better 'Burb, With Envy

Long Island was initially built out in the years following World War II, when it helped define for much of the rest of the country the idea of suburbia. As that idea has aged, though, the island has more recently struggled to hold the interest of young professionals not particularly enamored with mass-produced ranch houses and tidy but dull Cape Cods (or the job prospects and affordability issues that have grown up around them).

“We are the original Levittown. So much of the island is just like that: it’s sprawl, sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ann Golob, director of the Long Island Index, which has been tracking the exodus. Today, the island has roughly 100 distinct towns, which Golob describes this way: “Some of them are beautiful little villages, some of them are really falling-apart little villages, and some of them are just a memory of like, ‘yeah, there used to be a village here.’”