Listen to this articleThe developers of a transformative $300 million project in Central Islip celebrated the completion of its first phase with a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week.
Steel Equities and The Marcus Organization marked the successful first phase of The Belmont at Eastview with the event, which was attended by elected officials and civic leaders. The project, primarily an adaptive reuse of older buildings on the former campus of New York Institute of Technology, has so far brought 364 rental apartments and an 18,000-square-foot community building, that features a fitness center, swimming pool, outdoor gathering spaces, grills and fire pits. In addition, about 60 percent of The Belmont at Eastview community is open space and green space, featuring walking, biking and fitness trails.
The development offers a 10 percent monthly discount on rent for select units to first responders and it is now more than 80 percent occupied since it welcomed its first residents in August 2023.
“Steel Equities and The Marcus Organization is proud to bring this vibrant living community to our region at a moment when our younger generations are in desperate need of housing options,” Steel Equities Director of Property Development and Operations Russell Mohr said in a written statement. “From our vast array of amenities, quality living spaces and more, The Belmont at Eastview is an innovative approach to combatting New York’s housing crisis and keeping the next generation of our workforce here on Long Island.”
The ceremony was also the official launch of the second phase of the project, which will bring an additional 281 rental apartments and 81 for-sale condominiums for people aged 55 and over. The second phase will also feature the project’s commercial component, which includes about 55,000 square feet of new retail space anchored by an 18,000-square-foot grocery store to be located along Carleton Avenue and a new three-story, 40,000-square-foot medical office building.
The developers also plan to repurpose a few other existing structures on the 87-acre property, including transforming the 22,874-square-foot Robbins Hall into an entertainment venue and redeveloping a former chapel building into a 7,000-square-foot home for the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine Family Healthcare Center.
The Belmont at Eastview project, which earned the Top Residential Redevelopment honor at LIBN’s 2024 Real Estate, Architecture and Engineering Awards, is being assisted with economic incentives from the Islip Industrial Development Agency. The project will have created more than 1,000 construction jobs and many permanent jobs by the time it’s completed.
Steel Equities had originally proposed a 10-building industrial park for the property in 2018, but after several meetings with the community and town officials, the developer pivoted to the mixed-use project. Mohr credited Islip Supervisor Angie Carpenter and the area’s civic leaders for their input and for making the project a reality.
“Given the lack of available open space on Long Island, developers are constantly challenged to find new and creative ways to make economic investment projects a reality,” Mohr said. “With this development, we were able to identify a blighted property and transform it into housing, something that was welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the surrounding community.”
Once home to the state’s Central Islip Psychiatric Center, NYIT bought more than 500 acres of the 750-acre hospital site in 1984 to establish a Suffolk County campus. In the 1990s, the school began selling off large chunks of the site for commercial development. Since then, land sales to developers from NYIT and the state have created more than 1,200 units of housing, an industrial park, a nine-hole golf course, a baseball stadium for the Long Island Ducks, two hotels and a retail center.