From Suffolk County to Sussex County - The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same

Kathy and I both migrated to Long Island with our parents - it was their decision. We found each other in Suffolk County, we went to school there, we got married there, we started our family there and then we left there in 1980.

Our parents migrated from New York City. When they moved to the Island, the Island was referred to as the "country". They were moving to escape urban congestion. They wanted a wholesome place for their families.

Ironically, Kathy and I left the Island for the same reason - we wanted to live in a rural area that wasn't drowning in congestion.

Prior to leaving the Island, I spent over a decade as an advocate while working for both county and state agencies. I didn't aspire to advocacy. My advocacy arose as a response to the corruption I found in both the community and my workplaces.

My family left Brooklyn in 1959 to move to Suffolk County. We traveled the Belt Parkway to get there. When you go East on the Belt from Brooklyn, you go through Nassau County and from there you cross the county line into Suffolk County.

The first memory I have of taking that ride is vivid. We left urban blight and the more we drove, the more we found ourselves in progressively more rural territory.

Suffolk County used to have large farms. It had a shellfish industry. It had pristine beaches. It was affordable. The air and land and water were all clean.

My father paid the price for our move to the country. He had to commute daily to Manhattan for work. My father was not unique in that regard. Lots of Suffolk's new residents were "commuters". My father took the Long Island Railroad - others drove.

Initially, my father's commute was over an hour each way - over time, that increased. People driving could easily spend hours going each way. The Long Island Expressway was one giant parking lot during commuting hours.

When I was in early 20s, I spent two summer's clamming. My friend Joe had a small runabout with an outboard motor and we would go out to the flats, jump into chest high water with bushel baskets floating inside inner tubes. When we got in the water we would shuffle backwards with our feet feeling for clams. When we felt one, we would go under to retrieve them and put them in the bushel basket. 

We were treaders. We wore Keds. We would take everything out of the inside of our new Keds so all there was between our feet and the sand beneath us was a thin rubber membrane - a membrane that saved our feet from being sliced up as we shuffled.

We got out to the flats at sunrise and left to go to the markets in midafternoon. We put in a long hard day, but we were each making about $50 a day and that was big money - some days we could each make $100.

We didn't work on weekends. We didn't work on bad days - rainy, cold, etc.

It wasn't until after I graduated college that I began to get an inkling of what the adults who were commuting were facing - there was a scarcity of paying jobs on the Island. If you didn't want to commute, you took tests and hoped for a civil service job.

I started what became my first career as a caseworker for the Family Services Division of the Suffolk County Department of Social Services in Bay Shore. I left after a year. I left after trying to organize the caseworkers - not in terms of wages and benefits - in terms of client advocacy - in terms of agency accountability.

I took a job as a social worker assistant at Northeast Nassau Psychiatric Center on the grounds of Kings Park State Hospital - I was working for the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. I worked at various NYSDMH facilities in Suffolk County for over 10 years. I had escaped the county frying pan and jumped into a much worse state fire.

I met Kathy when I attended the School of Social Welfare at Stony Brook. I was pursuing an MSW and she was pursuing a BS in social work.

I built a tiny house on 1/16th of an acre after graduation. The property taxes were just over $2,000 a year. I couldn't afford to do anything after becoming a homeowner - my mortgage and taxes ate up most of my pay each month.

When Kathy and I married it was with the understanding that we would leave New York for the "country" when I finished my pension requirements with NYS - by that time we had an infant daughter, Jessica. We moved to Virginia.

Ten years prior to our fleeing the Island for greener pastures, I worked hard with others to prevent Suffolk County from being destroyed and rendered unlivable. We put up a great fight. We failed.

Suffolk Country was killed by many things, but they were all the result of greed and inhumanity. The county was being overdeveloped with houses and shopping malls. The land, the sea and the air were all contaminated. Property taxes went through the roof, inflation (?) was out of control.

The house we sold in 1980 for under $30,000 would sell for about $500,000 now. The property taxes are close to $10,000 a year.

Before we left the Island, we were fighting over development. We tried to get the county to require at least one acre per single family home - the exact acreage might be higher depending upon the ability of the ground to process waste - septic system.

The developers fought back. You could easily put 4 or more houses on an acre if there were sewers.

We fought against sewers based upon quality of life, pollution and attending consequences - like desalinating the bay and killing the shellfish industry.

The sewers went in, property taxes rose and the shellfish industry went down the tubes.

We also fought against nuclear power plants. We won half that battle - one plant went in, the second one was stopped. There was an increase in birth defects and cancer among those living nearer to the power plant.

Suffolk County had another unique problem. Over half of the institutionalized mental patients in NYS were housed in the world's 3 largest mental hospitals in Suffolk County - NYS housed over 50% of all the institutionalized mental patients in the world - a good deal of those were the result of urban living - they came from NYC - there are consequences to poverty, unemployment and crime.

When NYS decided to "deinstitutionalize", tens of thousands of people were dumped from state mental institutions into the community without proper resources - homeless former patients became a new problem.

Suffolk County was a Republican County. The good old boy network controlled what happened in Suffolk County. There was no political solution to the County's problems, the problems only got worse.

I haven't been to Suffolk County in over a decade. The last time I went there was when my sister died. To get there I went North from Delaware, crossed into New Jersey and then crossed over onto Staten Island and eventually entered New York by taking the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, NY and taking the Belt Parkway going East.

My last journey from Brooklyn to the Island via the Belt was nothing like my first. I could no longer tell where Brooklyn ended and the country began - the country was gone. When you got off the Belt, you could easily think yourself in Brooklyn - dense housing, congestion, filth.

On that trip I visited my old clamming partner. He lived in a house equivalent in size to the one we live in now. They're easily paying $20,000 a year in property taxes.

Suffolk County has a premier "beach" area - the Hamptons. There are multi-million-dollar homes on large acreage in the Hamptons.

Suffolk County also has a small native American reservation.

Like all of Long Island, Suffolk County is dealing with rising sea water and the consequences of global warming in addition to the consequences of over development.

I remember reading about Long Island years ago when medical waste started washing up on Jones Beach. I remember reading about landfills on Staten Island being maxed out and barges loaded with garbage unable to find a place to unload. I remember reading about homes on the Island starting to sink into the ground.

When we left Suffolk County we moved to Virginia, then to New Hampshire, then to Colorado, and finally to Delaware. We moved to Delaware in 1996. I've lived in Delaware for about a third of my life, Kathy has lived in Delaware for a little more than a third of her life. We initially bought a house in Magnolia - Kent County. We sold that and moved to Milton - Sussex County almost 10 years ago.

Our daughter graduated high school before we left Magnolia. She now lives in Middletown Delaware. She's married. She has 3 children. She has an excellent job - she has an actual career.

She lives across the river from a nuclear reactor. Our grandchildren attend charter schools.

Kathy and I designed our current home. It's not a large home. It's a ranch house. There's a barn next to our home that houses a private art gallery. Kathy is an artist.

I was the general contractor building our house and barn. We live on 1.5 acres. Our house is not part of a homeowner's association. We have our own septic and well water. We've installed solar panels and are almost self-sufficient in terms of energy use. We have a geo-thermal heat pump for heating and air conditioning. We have an on-demand hot water heater. The house is properly insulated and we are basically non-polluting.

Kathy and I are both retired, senior citizens. We paid less than a $1,000 in property taxes last year. We have a small vegetable garden and Kathy is a well known artist in this area. I make prints of Kathy's work and I do the same for other artists. We've finally made it to the country.

Worth mentioning - when we lived in Colorado we bought a house in a development in Louisville in Boulder County. The quality of construction of the homes in our massive, sprawling development cannot compare to what we have now. We bought that home new in 1992 - it's gone now - it burned down in a massive fire that destroyed almost all the homes in our development in December, 2021 - about 1,000 homes are no more.

So here we are in Sussex County, Delaware. We're nearing the end of our life cycle and I think we're ending off in a county facing similar problems to those we left when we left Suffolk County.

Developments are overtaking Sussex County - mostly here on the Eastern Side of the county. Development has overtaken infrastructure and traffic congestion goes from bad to worst as we approach Summer - the tourist season.

There's talk in Sussex County of sewers and failing sewers. There's talk of road construction strategies - roundabouts seem to be big at the moment.

As the farmland and forests in Sussex County disappear, so do the wild animals. Agricultural waste and animal waste is contaminating rivers and waterways and ground water. The sea is rising and the ground beneath us is actually sinking - double trouble.

Thousands of new residents require medical, educational, police, fire and emergency support. There's a growing demand for employment.

The homeless population in Sussex County is growing. Meanwhile, new houses are being built on flood plains and necessary buffers aren't being preserved - they're being diminished when they should be expanding.

For the record, Sussex County is a Republican County. We have a good old boy network. There's a lack of meaningful planning for growth and what planning there is is not backed up with enforceable legislation.

Sussex County includes Rehoboth Beach with its multi-million-dollar homes. It has a native American population as well.

Kent County has gotten worse since we left. Crime has definitely increased.

We use Route 1 (Coastal Highway) to go from South to North. They're now removing the traffic light at Route 16. When they do that there will be nothing to cause traffic to pause as people come South in the Summer. Route 1 will be a parking lot between Kent County and the 5 lights in Lewes.

I'm not sure any of this can be avoided. I'm absolutely sure we won't be able to avoid it if we're fighting with each other over partisan political issues.

How many houses a given area of land can sustain is not a matter of politics, it's a matter of science - many different sciences. Sadly, science has been supplanted by opinion not only here is Sussex County, but in the country as a whole.

Our current experience with a pandemic demonstrates how partisan political issues take precedence over medical, health and scientific strategizing and problem solving.

We have no plans to leave Sussex County. When we go, our useful organs will be donated and our remains will be cremated - we will not be taking up further space. At 76 and having survived cancer twice, I'm not sure how long I have.

When we designed our house we made sure it would work for us should we become infirmed - one level, 3 foot wide doorways, easy access to everything.

We planned our home, we researched design and technology, we hired varied, competent, skilled local subcontractors to do the work. Planning was our responsibility and we did so in compliance with law and statutes.

Who's planning our county? What exactly are we developing? What are we leaving for our children and grandchildren?

Holy Moly!