‘It’s Becoming Queens’: Town Board Votes On Levittown Building Size Cap, Seeking To Limit 'McMansions'

HEMPSTEAD, NY — 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.

The proposed amendment to the building zone ordinance governing Levittown would reduce the allowable building area on lots from 30 percent of the lot’s 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.

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“It 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,” Ferretti said. “It’s changing the character of the Levittown neighborhood, it is a burden on the infrastructure of Levittown.”

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.

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 “hideous.”

“These houses that are going up around our town are hideous, first of all, and they don’t 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’re just so big,” Tintall said. “There’s no green, they’re right up close to the house behind them, some of the houses will have no sun during the latter part of the afternoon…it’s becoming Queens, and we don’t want to live in Queens.”

For Gene Jean, a 27-year Levittown resident, the increase in the so-called “McMansions” across Levittown signaled a change to the “face of our town.”

“These McMansions are changing the face of our community. As we know, change happens everywhere, but this change is just ridiculous…There 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’t get the $600,000 house,” Jean said. “The 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’ve lost some privacy because these people have balconies — I don’t know what they’re looking at, we don’t live on the north shore, we’re not looking at the Hudson River — it makes no sense to me. There’s congestion in the streets, it’s saturating our schools with more students. These homes are not built for the nuclear family anymore. They’re bringing in multigenerational living, and they are saturating our police department, they’re taking over our parking, our ambulance corps, our sewer system, the pools that we have. Everything is overcrowded now, because we’re bringing in multigenerational living…A lot of these things just change the face of the suburb.”

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.

“You’re allowing these structures to go up 30 feet, and you’re saying you want to just have them seven and a half feet away from the house, or the person’s property,” Roach said. “I don’t know why our elected officials didn’t come to the people in Levittown and talk, and tell them about it, before you just did this.”

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.