Smackdown in the Middle

In Long Island’s Suffolk County, at the eastern edge of New York’s suburbs, three towns are squaring off over their plans for four new shopping centers to be built within a mile of each other’s borders. If completed, the projects crowding six square miles of Babylon, Smithtown and Islip will include a Wall-Mart, a Home Depot, a 14-screen cineplex, and hundreds of other stores—in all, 2 million feet of retail space, 3 million feet of office space, and apartments for 9,000 people. The traffic numbers have not been fully crunched, but planners for just one of the new malls—and not the one with 9,000 residents—expect 4,000 additional Saturday car trips.

Traditionally towns clash when no regional body exists to notify localities of competing developments and play traffic cop. In this case, county officials’ warnings were ignored or overridden by town governments anxious to draw their share of revenue from the last undeveloped turf in their area, much of it a retired state psychiatric hospital. "We're kind of toothless in that all the zoning powers rest with the local towns," the county executive Steve Levy told Newsday. As local resistance to the plans grow, however, Levy has called a summit to discuss how to reduce the wallop of the simultaneous developments.