Community Recovery Slips Back into the Blight of Foreclosures
It is happening in places all over the country with variations in intensity here and there – community recoveries are slipping back into the blight of foreclosures. Central Islip in New York State is one of those places.
Central Islip is a community in Long Island. About 32,000 people reside here. It is modest locality near the highway without any quaint downtown or rolling beachfront. Its renowned landmark was Central Islip Psychiatric Centre. For decades it generated prosperity. Today it is an icon of decay and despair.
The psychiatric centre was for a long time the second largest mental institution in America. All those living in Central Islip were directly or indirectly connected with work with this centre. But when it emptied out from the 60’s to the 90’s the adjacent region became desolate. Rows of neat houses fell into decay as families shifted elsewhere. Drug peddlers and slumlords took over.
Locally operated institutions somehow patched up matters and kept things running. One such endeavour is the Central Islip Civic Council – a modest body operating on a non-profit basis that has for forty years acted as a fixer – constructing houses, offering counseling regarding loan matters, managing rented units, administering a food pantry as well as a newspaper.
Nancy Manfredonia its executive director has seen the ups and downs of the region as master plans have appeared and disappeared. New houses and business centres tried to fill in the hole left behind by the psychiatric centre. Slowly things were beginning to look up. A county court house was built and soon came to be followed by a federal one. Nearby a law school made its debut. The old hospital building was repaired and taken over by the New York Institute of Technology. There came a ballpark for Long Island Ducks, couple of shopping malls and housing development units with ambitious names like Islip Landing and Courthouse Commons. The worst deserted area of CarletonPark became College Woods. Here many houses were sold at low prices to those with moderate to low income. Manfredonia proudly said, “We recycled the neighborhood.”
During the upswing many predatory lenders sneaked in just as they were doing elsewhere. They teased people into accepting unaffordable loans and the inevitable story of foreclosures unfolded itself. Today the bottom has fallen out – only the skeleton remains. Central Islip is dotted with foreclosed houses. The number of abandoned houses has become eyesores.
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