A Cheat Sheet for Building Great Neighborhoods

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In municipalities across the country, parking lots are getting reincarnated as everything from outdoor food markets to condos. But those are individual projects. In Long Island--itself a region so caked with traffic that people refer to its central highway, the Long Island Expressway, as one long parking lot--an ambitious plan to convince developers to infill thousands of acres of parking lots with stores and even homes is underway.

The Long Island Index (LII),
an advisory group that...