North Fork Rezoning Could Preserve Waterfront Eyesore

“Sometimes I get the urge to exercise,” the famously rotund basketball coach Frank Layden once said, “but I lie down and it passes.”

Sometimes I get the urge to write about good things happening in real estate. But I think for a moment and it passes. There is just too much foolishness going on.

Today’s example comes from Long Island’s North Fork.

We’ll start with the good news. Nearly every hospitality site on this bucolic peninsula has been upgraded in recent years.

Longtime owners and new investors — mom-and-pops, private equity funds, even the magnate Stefan Soloviev — are capitalizing on strong demand to visit the North Fork, which stretches from Riverhead to Orient Point, opposite the Hamptons.

The supply of hotel rooms, however, is still tight enough that some venues can charge more than $1,000 a night during the summer. Investors are trying to add more. The problem is, locals make it exceedingly difficult.

Between an open space preservation tax and residential zoning, good sites for commercial development are hard to find. And when you do find one, community opposition is a given. Fears of Hamptonization, traffic and changes in the North Fork’s character often prevail.

Amid this dynamic, a large, potentially glorious piece of land on the Gardiners Bay waterfront has sat moribund for decades. The 18-acre “Oki-Do” site in East Marion is perhaps the worst eyesore on the North Fork, thanks to an abandoned oyster processing plant — a hulking, hideous mass of crumbling concrete surrounded by an ugly fence.

An old smokestack completes the pathetic picture.

Various plans to redevelop it have not come to fruition. One called for 114 hotel rooms, two dozen rental cottages, two restaurants, an amphitheater and a marina.

The latest was from homebuilder Paramount Hamptons and Sal DeLorenzo, who snapped up the land in October 2021 for $6 million and announced plans for 80 condominium units.

Paramount tapped Steven Losquadro, whom Newsday recently described as a “connected Suffolk lawyer,” to pitch this plan for quiet Shipyard Lane.

As if to make his task even more challenging, Losquadro mentioned workforce housing. Reality check: That is something Long Islanders support in the abstract but rarely in an actual project.

An East Marion civic group polled residents and reported that more than 80 percent opposed affordable housing at the Oki-Do site. The town supervisor persuaded the town board in 2022 to change the zoning to attract a hotel and restaurant, but Paramount’s Bill Locantro said he builds homes, not eateries and hotels.

Shipyard Lane residents, for their part, said traffic from either project would damage their quality of life. Mind you, this is a dead-end street with more deer than vehicles on most days.

Put all these ingredients together and you have a recipe for inertia.

From what I can tell, Paramount Homes has not been heard from since. Unfortunately, while the cat was away, the mice came out to play: Southold Town is in the process of changing the site’s zoning from marine to large-lot residential, as the NIMBY neighbors wanted.

Instead of a classy waterfront hotel and restaurant, the rezoning would allow for a few McMansions, rendering this stretch of waterfront the private domain of second-home owners.

That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is that large-lot zoning so devalues the site that clearing it, remediating any pollution and building houses wouldn’t pencil out. The eyesore would remain for another generation.