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November 23, 2003

Wide Island
By VIVIAN S. TOY

When Robert Moses unveiled Long Island's parkways and Levittown advertised its
reasonably priced cookie-cutter homes, New Yorkers couldn't uproot themselves
from the city fast enough to claim their own patch of grass and breathe in all that
fresh suburban air.

But now a recent study suggests that the two-car garages that go with that
suburban dream may actually be hazardous to your health.

The study, which surveyed 200,000 men and women living in 448 counties across
the country, found that people living in communities marked by sprawling
development walked less in their daily routine and weighed more than people
who live in more compact urban areas. Suburbanites, the study found, are also
more likely to become obese and suffer from high blood pressure.

Health and nutrition experts on Long Island say this study, the first to directly link
obesity with the way communities are designed, simply reinforces what they have
been saying for years - that Long Islanders need to work on increasing their level
of physical activity.

Some planners and developers have heartily embraced the study's results,
saying that it supports their efforts to redevelop downtown areas and create
more pedestrian-friendly communities. But others view the results with heavy
skepticism and criticize the study as anti-suburban and anti-development. Even if
you can't walk a block or so to pick up a quart of milk in Long Island, they argue,
the suburbs provide more parks and open space than cities do and therefore
more opportunities for exercise and physical activity.

Debbie Brown, a recent transplant to Dix Hills from Brooklyn, let out a big laugh
when she was told about the study as she waited for her order at the
drive-through window at a Dunkin' Donuts in Hempstead. "Oh, I believe it," she
said. "My exercise agenda is horrible, and I don't walk anywhere."

A woman who was two cars behind Ms. Brown agreed. "People don't even walk
around the corner out here, and nothing is convenient without a car," she said.
"It's just a different way of living."

She said that she and her husband refused to buy a car for 12 full months after
they moved from New York City to Rockville Centre in 2001. But now that they
have succumbed, she said, she was too embarrassed to give her name "because
I'm so excited to have discovered this drive-through."

Reid Ewing, the lead author of the study and a professor at the National Center
for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, said that researchers have found
that the amount of physical activity people got during their leisure time did not
vary much between cities and suburbs. "The difference isn't in their leisure but in
how they spend the rest of their time," he said. "In an urban environment, you
move more for transportation purposes. Instead of walking out of the house and
into your car, you're walking to lunch or the subway, and you're climbing up and
down those subway stairs."

The study used data from surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. It found that in Manhattan - the most compact urban area in the
nation - an average adult weighs 161.1 pounds, while the average adult weighs
165.8 pounds in Nassau County and 166.4 in Suffolk County. The expected
probability of obesity also increased from west to east, with 11.5 percent
probability in New York City, 17 percent in Nassau and 17.8 percent in Suffolk.

Patrick Duggan, the executive director of Sustainable Long Island, a group that
promotes pedestrian-friendly development, thinks he knows why. "We have such
limited walkability in Long Island communities," he said. "We just live such
sedentary lives that it's not a big jump to make the correlation between sprawl
and obesity."

Mr. Duggan said his group hoped to study the way the design of specific Long
Island communities affects health and obesity. "We just have not thought about
the health implications when thinking about the design of our communities," he
said. "I think the study is significant enough that planners and policy makers
need to take notice, and we need to think about how if you're driving all the time,
you're not contributing to your health in a meaningful way."

Lee E. Koppelman, the executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning
Board, said that he was very skeptical of the study's findings because he
contends that the difference of five pounds between city dwellers and
suburbanites was negligible. "I know when I weigh myself at home, I'm 169, but
at my internist's it's 177," he said. "So to me statistically, five pounds is a dead
heat. The importance of the study is that obesity is a national problem, and
people in New York aren't off the hook. They're just as much at risk as people in
the suburbs."

He has a point. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions nationally, and federal
health officials are saying that it may soon overtake smoking as the nation's
biggest health threat. A recent national survey found that almost 65 percent of
the adult population in the United States was overweight and almost one adult in
three was obese. State Health Department figures show that while less than 10
percent of the population was obese in 1985, the figure had grown to 20 to 24
percent by 2001.

Obesity is measured by a person's body mass index, which is weight in relation to
height. Anyone with an index figure of 25 or higher is considered overweight;
anyone with a figure of 30 or higher is considered obese. (To calculate your body
mass index, visit http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/bmi-adult.htm.)

While it may be true that Long Islanders are completely dependent on their cars
to perform even the simplest errand, Dr. Koppelman said, "we probably play
more golf and tennis and make use of hiking trails more than people in the city."
Besides, he added, "even in the city everybody goes places by bus, subway or
taxi, and the only people walking significant distances are the tourists gawking at
buildings."

Even if Long Island residents wanted to go for a walk in their neighborhoods,
many would find it difficult because most areas were built without sidewalks. Long
Island led the way in the 1950's when suburban communities across the country
revised their zoning codes to make sidewalks optional.

"People didn't want them because sidewalks and smokestacks were the symbols
of what people fled from in the cities," Dr. Koppelman said. And homeowners
didn't want people walking on what they considered their private property.

Dan Burden, a national planning consultant and the executive director of
Walkable Communities Inc., has surveyed dozens of neighborhoods on Long
Island and said measuring "walkability" on a scale of 1 to 10, Long Island rates a
low 3. "It's extremely difficult to find a place where you're not running the whole
challenge of 'can I get there from here safely without having to drive?' " he said.

Some areas of the country that developed without sidewalks are now trying to
add them. For example, Columbus, Ohio, where Mr. Burden grew up and which
has sidewalks along only 40 percent of its streets, has spent more than $4 million
in the last three years to build sidewalks near schools so that children can walk
there more easily.

Long Island developers and planners have not yet considered building sidewalks
where none exist now, but several proposals for new developments would create
old-fashioned village centers complete with sidewalks. Assemblyman Steven
Englebright is backing a $250 million development that would convert a series of
strip malls in East Setauket into a village center. In Brentwood, Gerald Wolkoff
has proposed a $4 billion complex of apartments, town houses, restaurants and
shops on a 460-acre site that would be called Heartland Town Square.

"This would give people a different lifestyle than they're used to in the suburbs,"
Mr. Wolkoff said. "It would be like when I was a kid in Brooklyn, and I could walk
to the store or to a friend's house, and it's an added bonus that it would help cut
down on obesity."

Although the new study did not examine childhood obesity, it noted that C.D.C.
figures show that 15 percent of the nation's children 6 to 19 are overweight. It
also noted that a recent poll conducted by the Surface Transportation Policy
Project in Washington found that while 71 percent of 800 parents of school-age
children walked or biked to school when they were young, only 18 percent of
their children do the same.

"So even children aren't getting as much physical activity in the course of their
everyday lives as children used to," said Dr. Ewing, the study's lead author.

State law requires school districts to provide buses for high school students who
live three miles or farther from school, and the distance drops to two miles for
younger students. But many districts on Long Island provide buses for shorter
distances.

Levittown, for example, now provides transportation for any child who lives half a
mile or more from school. Thirty years ago, about 50 percent of the district's
students walked to school, but only 20 percent walk to school now. Herman A.
Sirois, the district superintendent, said the increased busing came mainly
because of concerns about traffic safety. "Our streets were not built for four-car
families," he said, noting that the original Levittown homes all had one-car
garages. "Who could afford two cars in the 1950's and who needed it when most
moms stayed at home? But society has changed, and the response to the
increased traffic has been to bus our children to school."

In fact, according to census data, the number of cars available for personal use
to Long Island households has increased from 522,132 in 1960 to 916,686 in
2000. And the number of households with two or more cars at their disposal rose
from 29.4 percent in 1960 to 65.2 percent in 2000.

But, Dr. Sirois said, walking to school - or not walking - had little effect on weight.
"Our kids aren't getting fatter because they're not walking to school any more,''
he said. "It's because television advertises junk food, and the kids decide they've
got to have junk food."

He added that with the growth in soccer leagues and other organized sports
leagues outside of school, children have many more opportunities to get exercise
than they used to. True enough, said Josephine Connolly, a professor of family
medicine at Stony Brook University who specializes in physical health and
nutrition. "But kids spend so much time riding in a car to get to activities, and a
lot of the time at the activity is often spent sitting around, and many of the
venues tend to sell junk food," she said. "It's so different from just playing
outside in the neighborhood, and there are no vending machines in my
backyard."

At the Center for Weight Management for the North Shore-Long Island Jewish
Health System, experts are t trying to inject more physical activity into sedentary
suburban lives. Eileen Rosendahl, the center's clinical supervisor, said that
patients have often been unable to lose weight despite a series of diets and a
host of gyms. "What has a more long-term effect is simply integrating more
movement into their daily lives, and that involves learning new life strategies,"
she said.

One strategy is to have patients wear pedometers to measure the distance they
walk every day. For most people, that's about 3,000 steps a day, or about a mile
and a half. To help people lose weight, physiologists at the center may set a daily
goal of 10,000 steps and devise ways to reach that goal.

That might include parking farther from the supermarket entrance and watching
less television, which has a natural tendency to get people up and about.

Those strategies are similar to those used by Weight Watchers. Maggie Jerchau,
who led Weight Watchers meetings on Long Island for 12 years before
transferring to Manhattan three years ago, said that people in the suburbs often
don't realize how little physical activity they get.

Ms. Jerchau started wearing a pedometer nine years ago and has found that
when she works from her home in Wantagh, she tends to clock only 2,300 steps
a day. But when she goes into Manhattan, the number climbs to 10,000. "We're
all very busy people, especially moms on Long Island who are running around all
day getting their kids everywhere they have to go," she said. "But what I try to
tell people is you shouldn't confuse busy with active, and if you're just getting in
and out of the car, you're not being active."

The health departments of Nassau and Suffolk Counties are working to help
tackle obesity. Nassau plans to conduct a telephone survey to assess the
behavioral patterns of residents next year, and Suffolk already provides an
extensive health-education program to local schools.

More than a third of Suffolk's 72 school districts have signed up for the county
program. The curriculum on physical activity starts in kindergarten, where
children are urged to set a goal for physical activities each day; suggestions
include walking to school and playing tag. By the fifth grade, students are asked
to map out 30 minutes of physical activity and 30 minutes of exercise daily.

"The program focuses on teaching children skills they can use to develop healthy
lifestyles for the rest of their lives," said Lori Benincasa, Suffolk County's director
of health education.

State law requires only two semesters of health education during middle and high
school, but the county's program provides lessons from kindergarten through the
12th grade.

Robert Wieboldt, the executive director of the Long Island Builders Association,
said he agreed with efforts to make Long Island more pedestrian friendly, but
changing Long Island's well-ingrained car culture, he said, will not be easy.

"Out here people look askance at people who walk,'' he said. "In the city or even
other suburbs it's the norm, but here when somebody sees somebody walking,
unless you're wearing expensive jogging clothes, they think you got a D.W.I."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company