HEMPSTEAD, NY \u2014 The Town of Hempstead passed a resolution Tuesday to decrease the percentage of lots that can be built upon in the Levittown Planned Residence District. <\/p>\n
The proposed amendment to the building zone ordinance governing Levittown would reduce the allowable building area on lots from 30 percent of the lot\u2019s size to 27.5 percent. That change, Town Supervisor John Ferretti said, would bring the Levittown Planned Residence District into line with other residential districts in Hempstead. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is my opinion, as someone who has lived in Levittown my entire life, which as of yesterday is 43 years, that this is an issue that is changing the character of the area,\u201d Ferretti said. \u201cIt\u2019s changing the character of the Levittown neighborhood, it is a burden on the infrastructure of Levittown.\u201d <\/p>\n
Item 9A on the Town Board agenda was a vote adopting a negative declaration on State Environmental Quality Review (SEQRA), which indicates that the board found no indication that the ordinance change would create adverse environmental impacts. When the board moved to item 9B on the agenda, Ferretti entered into the record 10 emails he had received, all of which the Town Supervisor said were in favor of the proposed change. <\/p>\n
Then came public comment, which was kicked off by Lisa Tintall. A self-described lifelong Levittown resident, Tintall called some of the new houses being built in Levittown \u201chideous.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThese houses that are going up around our town are hideous, first of all, and they don\u2019t represent the community. I understand that some of these houses that have been torn down were houses that were not properly taken care of, and we have no problem with the rebuilding of some houses, but they\u2019re just so big,\u201d Tintall said. \u201cThere\u2019s no green, they\u2019re right up close to the house behind them, some of the houses will have no sun during the latter part of the afternoon\u2026it\u2019s becoming Queens, and we don\u2019t want to live in Queens.\u201d <\/p>\n
For Gene Jean, a 27-year Levittown resident, the increase in the so-called \u201cMcMansions\u201d across Levittown signaled a change to the \u201cface of our town.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThese McMansions are changing the face of our community. As we know, change happens everywhere, but this change is just ridiculous\u2026There are no more affordable homes in Levittown; first-time homebuyers like my own children have to move out of state, and to Suffolk, because they can\u2019t get the $600,000 house,\u201d Jean said. \u201cThe builders are buying them, knocking them down, and putting up million-dollar homes that no one can afford. These homes overshadow my neighbors; I have one across the street, I have seven in a two-block radius. They overshadow the properties, they come back-to-back with your back yards, you\u2019ve lost some privacy because these people have balconies \u2014 I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re looking at, we don\u2019t live on the north shore, we\u2019re not looking at the Hudson River \u2014 it makes no sense to me. There\u2019s congestion in the streets, it\u2019s saturating our schools with more students. These homes are not built for the nuclear family anymore. They\u2019re bringing in multigenerational living, and they are saturating our police department, they\u2019re taking over our parking, our ambulance corps, our sewer system, the pools that we have. Everything is overcrowded now, because we\u2019re bringing in multigenerational living\u2026A lot of these things just change the face of the suburb.\u201d <\/p>\n
Peter Roach, another Levittown resident, said he opposed the change, citing concerns about the height of houses that are going up in Levittown and expressing skepticism at how effective the increased setback might be. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re allowing these structures to go up 30 feet, and you\u2019re saying you want to just have them seven and a half feet away from the house, or the person\u2019s property,\u201d Roach said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why our elected officials didn\u2019t come to the people in Levittown and talk, and tell them about it, before you just did this.\u201d <\/p>\n
After public comment concluded, the Town board unanimously passed the amendment, reducing the permissible building size in Levittown to 27.5 percent of a lot’s area, which brings it in line with other residential districts in the town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HEMPSTEAD, NY \u2014 The Town of Hempstead passed a resolution Tuesday to decrease the percentage of lots that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-228830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}