Community development concepts and applications

¶ … Neck sits on the north shore of Long Island in Nassau County, and the name refers to both the village of Great Neck and the peninsula on which it sits. The Great Neck Park District, Great Neck Station on the Long Island Railroad, and the Great Neck School District make the village a premier residential community with a median home value of $466,800 dollars. This is largely due to the compactness of the community; at just 1.4 square miles, most of the city is within walking distance of the train station.

Great Neck station's express service on the Port Washington branch gets commuters to Pennsylvania Station in less than half an hour, allowing high-powered Manhattan executives to get to the city from suburbia and back without having to miss breakfast or dinner with their families. Although the average home value has increased significantly since 1990, this can mostly be accounted by a housing boom created by low interest rates and a previous NYC area housing boom created by the city's prosperity in the 1990's.

Great Neck is a mostly white upper-middle class bedroom community of New York City that is home to approximately 9,538 people. The median resident age is 40, making Great Neck a somewhat older town. Most residents of Great Neck, 61%, are married and the median household income totals $76,645 dollars. The average commuter in Great Neck takes just over 40 minutes to commute to work. The railroad station's parking lot is owned by the park district and is for the exclusive use of residents at a cost of 25 dollars a month.

The village sits in the Great Neck Park District, which was established in 1916 by local visionaries and is one of the only park districts in Nassau County, an area that is sometimes considered synonymous with sprawl. The park district has a wide range of programs, playing fields and parks, including an Olympic-size swimming pool, an indoor skating rink, and indoor and outdoor tennis courts. In addition, a park district cultural center, Great Neck House, offers concerts, art classes and movie nights. The district also features a marina where sailing lessons are available and picnic areas on the Long Island Sound. The village also features a green at its center on Middle Neck Road.

Great Neck's most affordable housing is to be found in the nine co-op apartment complexes on Middle Neck Road, the village's 'main street.' There listing prices range from approximately 130 thousand for a studio to 440 thousand for a three-bedroom apartment. Small houses in the community fetch incredibly high prices: modest cape cod houses regularly sell for 600 thousand. However, taxes are relatively low and many believe the area is under-assessed, despite a well-regarded public school system. Demand for housing increased with the lower mortgage rates of 2001 and 2002 and after the September 11th attacks.

The Matinecock Indians were the first to live on the peninsula; the Dutch and English arrived in the mid-1600's. Early settlers farmed, fished and grazed animals, and the area remained agricultural until the mid-1800's. However, in the mid-19th century, steamboats connected Great Neck to New York City. Great Neck was one of the earliest suburbs of New York; in 1866, suburb and metropolis were connected by the Long Island railroad. The village was incorporated in 1924, around the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized the area in The Great Gatsby.

Although Great Neck is a city that reflects the architectural style of the first suburban boom (that brought by commuter rail) and the second (that which followed World War II.) Cape cods and ranches predominate, but the single-family housing mix also includes colonials, Tudors and Mediterranean styles.

Some older houses date back to the 1880's, with a large number of Victorians along Arrandale Avenue and scattered around the village. However, these houses are priced particularly low and many have taken to buying them, knocking them down, and building bigger, more expensive homes. While many contend that the older homes were falling to pieces, many see developers as robbing the city of its heritage. Luckily for the conservationists, the village's landmarks preservation commission is in the process of creating a landmark district along Arrandale Avenue. 2,474 of Great Neck's 3,347 houses are owner-occupied, with 1,067 of these residences built before 1940 and another 1,435 built between 1940 and 1960.

Many city residents have roots in the middle class that fled New York during the chaotic 1960's, 70's and 80's and is home to an especially large Jewish population. Great Neck is home to over a dozen synagogues with a large number of Iranian and Russian Jews. The city became a haven for wealthy Jews that fled Iran in the late 1970's following the Islamic revolution. Only 188 houses were built in the 1990's and 159 homes were built in the 1980's.

The local high school is considered excellent in an affluent suburban county that prides itself in excellent high schools. More than 97% of 248 members of this year's graduating class at North High School went on to attend a four-year college or university; the mean scores for the class of 2001 were 570 in verbal and 609 in math, a combined 159 points above the national average. The high school features many advanced placement courses and vocational programs in which students can intern in their intended professions. Over 50% of adult residents of Great Neck have a bachelor's degree and nearly 30% have some kind of professional degree.

Although the village is over 80% white non-hispanic with a black population of less than 3%, it is extremely diverse. The foreign born population is approximately 35.7%. Of these, 22.8% are from Asia with most being Jews from the Middle East. In addition, 7.0% of residents are from Latin America and 5.6% are from Europe.