Meadow Fabulous (Strong Island Got The Zone)

The thread titled South Floral Park vs Franklin Square, located in the Long Island, NY forum of the popular and informative City Data site, begins innocuously enough. A newcomer with the nom d'plume "nybittman" writes "I'm planning to purchase a house in nassau county. We have seen a couple of houses in S. Floral Park and Franklin Square. Which is better option when it comes to LIRR, Schools and overall neighborhood?" To the untrained eye, this is a fairly straightforward inquiry, but online conversations regarding issues of housing and education on Long Island are often bitter and volatile. The original post is concluded with a potently vague incantation "Any information will be appreciated." To the bemusement of those of us with no real stake in the matter as it is initially introduced, nybittman gets exactly what he summons and then some. The thread ambles into a thorny thicket where the apparitions of snobbery, exclusion, cognitive dissonance, and circular fallacy perform a spastic moonlit line dance to a medley of muzak versions of Billy Joel's greatest rejected album cuts.

Before I continue, allow me to explain my odd interest in Long Island real estate. As a minority homeowner living in central New Jersey I often find myself engaged in discussions about race, class, and place that range from overly formal academic exercises to mutually antagonistic debates. As a blogger with a penchant for hip hop music that has developed on the periphery of the NYC metropolitan area I find the inner-ring suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk to be a fascinating place despite the area's reputation as a purgatorial middlebrow suburban wasteland. I am not alone in my interest. Back in the very early 90s I spent hours reading and rereading my local library's only hip hop book, Havelock Nelson's Bring The Noise, which mentions black migration to Long Island's creatively fertile if segregated "Black Belt" in chapters on Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim. Years later Jeff Chang persuasively linked the establishment of majority black communities to the rise of the burgeoning LI rap scene in Can't Stop Won't Stop. The native LI writer Jesse Serwer has written an impressive and informative series of articles on Long Island rap that frequently discusses the relationship between artistry and place. While rap music is rarely mentioned citydata.com forums, the Long Island communities that figure in the rap music are frequently referenced (usually in disparaging terms), and over time I have become a sometimes shocked, sometimes cynical, sometimes hopeful observer (read: lurker).

Back to South Floral Park vs Franklin Square:

Less than thirty minutes after the initial post, "Glad2BHere" arrives. Glad2BHere is a "Senior Member" (his posts to date have been read over 1,400, 000 times!) and his entrance into the thread is surely a sign that the stakes are higher than they appear. He responds in a manner so brief that those of us who harbor sensitivities towards discussions of race and class cannot help but feel wary of its implicit negative space: "These are two very different areas, not really comparable. What do you like about each one, that makes you narrow your search down to these two?" Nybittman maintains his composure, however, and plainly responds "We are not very familiar with Nassau county ... The real estate agent showed us a bunch of houses in Elmont, Franklin Square, and S. Floral Park. We basically like two houses out of all the ones we've seen so far ... I'm trying to gather more information about the neighborhoods before I make a decision." Okay, so far, so good - no direct mention of race, or class, or any such nastiness, and the request appears to be as simple and humdrum as any other you might encounter on a website devoted to real estate trends, right?

Wrong. Enter "Walter Greenspan." Walter is a stoic figure on a forum in which unlettered jeremiads, bigoted diatribes, and ad-hominem attacks mar otherwise civilized discussions. He is a man dedicated to seeking out and sharing the raw empirical truth, a fount of knowledge and enlightenment (his posts have been read 3, 500, 000 times and his Citydata.com reputation is 760!). The politics of home ownership on Long Island are maddeningly complex in part because the place is a sprawling "little box" zoning nightmare but Walter Greenspan promises to lead us out of the wilderness. Watch as he drops the actual facts on South Floral Park: "The Village of South Floral Park in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County is the smallest village in either Nassau or Suffolk counties in terms of acreage ... According to my quick calculation, 64 acres = 0.1 square miles ... if South Floral Park was a perfect square, then each of its sides would be slightly less than 1/3rd of a mile." Better living through science.

It is this commitment to empiricism that informs Walter Greenspan's ongoing mission to educate his fellow Long Islanders about the quirks of local geography, and from him we learn of another sobering fact: "South Floral Park is one of those many villages and hamlets on Long Island where none of the places in the community have the village name in their mailing address: places in the Village of South Floral Park have a "Floral Park, NY 11001" mailing address." Aw, shucks. In addition to learning to differentiate between "cities," "towns," "hamlets", and "villages," one has to learn to distinguish between municipalities and postal zip codes that share the same name without sharing the same physical space in order to make sense of Long Island. To add to the confusion, school district boundaries rarely coincide with municipal or postal boundaries. Throw in census-designated places, unincorporated areas that defy explanation, and vanity towns that only seem to exist in theory, and the Strong Island Imaginary is born. This is clearly not the type of place where perception and reality are separated by an impermeable membrane.

A character with the suspiciously appropriate moniker "I_Love_LI_But" enters the discussion to warn the author of the pressing need for further clarification, requesting confirmation on "(a) which town each house is in and (b) which school district each house is in," insisting "Then we can give you some real information." Unwilling to risk a drop in his/her smoldering site reputation of 1066 by hesitating before dispensing advice, I_Love_LI_But suggests "do not buy anything in the Elmont School District. It has been recently named by Newsday as one of the 11 Long Island school districts that is rated as subpar ... it's YOUR money... The taxes are just as high as in a good school district." Despite this ominous warning, nybittman soberly relates that one of the houses in question is situated in South Floral Park, within the Elmont school district, while the other house is conveniently located in Franklin Park the municipality as well as the Franklin Park School district. I_Love_LI_But is quick to point out that the Elmont school district was recently tagged as substandard (along with ten other districts, most of which have majority minority and disproportionately low income student populations), and this is the precise moment that the thread loses all semblance of sanity.

Glad2BHere notes, sensibly enough, that a poor performing school district can affect the resale value of a house, but then proceeds to steer the discussion in a subtly different direction: "Are you interested in demographics at all? Just offering you the info, not meaning it in anyway other than to educate you so you can make the best choice for yourself." Wait, what? Where did this come from? The author of the original post laid out his areas of inquiry rather specifically, and race/ethnicity was not mentioned. To educate the author of the original post, Glad2BHere copies and pastes the ethnic/racial breakdown of each town, and we learn that South Floral Park is 84% non-white, while Franklin Square is 87% white, adding "SFP isn't the greatest in regards to safety overall, there are some issues with crime that is higher than in neighboring areas." He offers no sources to back up his claim, and that awful feeling of suspicion that I felt in the pit of my stomach towards the beginning of the thread is back with a vengeance. A million questions come to mind, some of them contradictory but all of them causing me anxiety, ranging from "what is the point of bringing up race when the author of the original post is no more than an anonymous screen name?" to "how can you expect anyone of any race not to discuss race and ethnicity when describing a community?"

Another local celebrity contributor, known as "sean sean sean sean," is on hand to dispel rumors and kick some ballistics. He starts by countering Newsday's methodologically vague claims of the academic inferiority of Elmont schools and goes on to note that Franklin Square and Elmont schools perform quite similarly. This leads him to suggest that any disparity in property values is likely linked to perceptions based on the racial/ethnic makeup of the two towns. I_Love_LI_ is displeased by sean sean sean sean's assertion and suggests that a home in Franklin Square is an inherently wiser purchase because home prices in South Floral Park are higher on average despite the crime problem noted by Glad2BHere. sean sean sean sean performs a little bit of research and demonstrates through the use of graphs and simple arithmetic that the data cited by I_Love_LI_ does not reflect South Floral Park the municipal entity, but the larger 1101 zip code. He also notes that both Franklin Park and South Floral Park are served by the same police precinct and that reliable statistics comparing criminal activity in the two towns do not exist, concluding that the two towns are nearly identical aside from ethnic composition.

sean sean sean sean's appeal to logic is not universally welcomed. I_Love_LI_But professes a blind faith in the statistics he cites: "I tend to believe there IS truth in what they wrote and that's good enough for me as I am not a statistician," while a seemingly irate Glad2BHere is content to throw out all statistical analysis in order to stay tethered to his initial claims: "The two areas are NOT nearly as close as you can get, by far. You can't just go by "stats" you read online. You would need to KNOW both areas from a homeowner standpoint and from experience." In his experience "There is a HUGE different b/w these two areas, from crime, to school district, to home maintenance, to demographics and location. This is NOT just about race, it's about everything." One almost gets the sense that Glad2BHere is attempting to paint sean sean sean sean as a naive cloistered academic, a kind of bumbling liberal do-gooder who wishes to superimpose his integrationist values onto sensible working class folks from an ivory tower. This does not appear to be the case, however: sean sean sean sean is adamant in arguing his case but remains conscious and accepting of of the fact that negative perceptions impact the market. He is similarly aware that pragmatic concerns are usually weighed more heavily than abstracted notions of justice in real world transactions.

But sean sean sean sean won't allow Glad2BHere to casually spread misinformation without a challenge. He delivers another stunning point by point refutation of Glad2BHere's claims while explaining that his sense of such matters is derived from a combination of careful analysis and direct experience. At this point, a rational independent observer would be led to imagine that a concession of defeat was imminent - if the schools perform similarly, the homes in both communities are well-maintained, both towns are favorably located, and one cannot be proven to be more prone to crime than the other, how can anyone make a valid claim that one town is an inherently more desirable place to buy a home? And yet, the debate continues. Glad2BHere finally resorts to citing anecdotal evidence, claiming to have encountered rock-throwing ruffians while taking a shortcut through South Floral Park. sean sean sean sean inquires further and it turns out that the site of the alleged rock assault was not in South Floral Park, but in neighboring Elmont. The ever reliable Walter Greenspan reappears to confirm this fact, which any observer could have easily gleaned simply by glancing at the handy maps that he attaches to his posts.

And so the conversation (or chest-puffing competition, depending on your perspective) ends. Is purchasing a home an ideological gesture? Are housing and educational inequities magnified by uninformed perceptions? Is it wrong for someone to prefer to reside in a homogeneous town? What do the shifting demographics of Long Island reveal about larger national trends such as illegal immigration, the resettlement of the South by middle class Blacks, and the movement of affluent whites to exclusive exurbs? How does marginalization impact artistic expression? I am not closer to answering these questions after studying this thread, but I am thoroughly engrossed and partly entertained, and sometimes that is the most one can expect from an odd fascination.