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Feeling the squeeze of living on LI

BY KATIE THOMAS AND JAMES T. MADORE | Newsday Staff Writers

11:51 PM EST, January 25, 2007

The dream of suburbia -- a robust economy, a comfortable paycheck, affordable living -- may be slipping away for many Long Islanders, although they continue to feel pride in their region, according to a poll released today by the Long Island Index.

Although the vast majority, 82 percent, consider the region an excellent or good place to live, many are also pessimistic about the future, the poll found. The culprit, experts say, is an old foe: a cost of living that is one of the highest in the nation.

"We are seeing people feel very squeezed," said Leonie Huddy, director of the Stony Brook University Center for Survey Research, which conducted the poll last fall for the Index. "For many people, their wages aren't going up but their housing costs are going up, taxes are going up. ... If your income is flat and your costs are going up, it doesn't feel so great."

Fully 70 percent of 808 Long Islanders polled in the telephone survey said they expected the economies of Nassau and Suffolk to remain stagnant or worsen in the next year. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

"It increases my respect for the man and woman in the field out there," said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association. "We have a flat economy; it's not a declining economy, however, we've had virtually no job growth over the past year."

Huddy and others said the results reflect the Island's changing job market, as high-wage employers shrink payroll, and low-wage retailers, health care providers and tourist-related businesses are hiring. This shift has meant local wage growth lagged the national rate from 1996 through 2006, and pay per employee has been virtually stagnant since 2003, the report said.

Eileen Worth, an accountant from Williston Park who participated in the survey, said it's middle-class people like herself and her husband, a registered nurse, who feel the impact. "I think there's some people that are making tremendous salaries," said Worth, who is 47 and has two kids in college, plus a son in private school. "The jobs that my husband and I are in, we're not getting these salaries. We're barely getting a cost-of-living raise."

Worth's hunch is supported by statistics. Families who earn in the top 10 percent of households saw their wages increase by 12 percent between 1996 and 2006, the report found. However, those in the bottom 10 percent saw their pay drop by 1 percent during the same period.

This has meant a growing number of residents are having trouble making rent or mortgage payments. The 2006 poll showed no improvement from earlier surveys; 58 percent of respondents said it was "very" or "somewhat" difficult to pay their monthly housing bill.

These conditions have led many Long Islanders to consider moving to more affordable areas, including Paul Carrizo, 34, of Hicksville, another poll participant. He said he's considered moving to Virginia but hasn't been able to secure a transfer from his job as a foreman for Verizon. "It's just getting worse," he said. "Every year, our taxes are going up on our house. Your mortgage is set where you think you can survive, but every year it just keeps going up."

Carrizo's impulse to leave is understandable to Nancy Rauch Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation, which created the Long Island Index in 2002 to increase awareness of issues such as the rising cost of living. While Long Island wages were historically up to 20 percent higher than the rest of the nation, the gap has narrowed to about 5 percent, Douzinas said.

According to the survey, just more than three in four Long Islanders, 78 percent, say the possible exodus of young people from their county is an extremely or very serious problem, similar to last year's results. Just more than half of those surveyed, 54 percent, said they were either somewhat or very likely to move in the next five years, a number that was also the same as last year, but an increase over 2004.

Many residents "are in a pretty tight spot," Douzinas said. "They can no longer really afford to have the kind of life they've had here."