There is a strip of land in Ronkonkoma, about a mile long, that runs between Long Island MacArthur Airport and the Ronkonkoma station of the Long Island Rail Road. Roughly 179 acres of it are in play. Suffolk County owns 48. For the better part of a decade those 48 acres have been the answer to the question of what Long Island could build if it ever decided to build something at scale.

On July 3, the county issued a new request for proposals for them. Responses are due at the end of September.

What was supposed to go there

The plan this replaces was called Midway Crossing, and its ambition is worth recording, because it explains why the site still carries the weight it does.

Midway Crossing proposed roughly 6.8 million square feet of new construction across the wider 179-acre area. Inside that: 1.7 million square feet of life science lab and office space. A convention center of 350,000 square feet with an attached 300-key hotel. An indoor arena seating 4,000 to 5,000, and an outdoor soccer stadium seating 5,000 to 6,000. A new terminal for MacArthur. Some 14,700 structured and surface parking spaces. And a new public square at the LIRR station tied to the airport by an 1,800-foot connector, so that a passenger could step off a train and walk to a gate.

The price was $2.8 billion, the timeline was ten to fifteen years, and the regional planning community described it, accurately, as the largest commercial or residential development proposed on Long Island in fifty years. It cleared a Federal Aviation Administration review on the convention center component.

Then it did not happen. Suffolk terminated the agreement with the developer, citing a lack of progress, and first relaunched the search in the spring of 2025. This July's RFP is the second attempt.

What the county is asking for now

The new document is noticeably less operatic, which is probably the point.

Suffolk is seeking a mix of office, healthcare, life sciences, retail, food and beverage, hospitality, and industrial or manufacturing uses, together with public open space and strong connections to both the train station and the airport. Commuter parking has to be preserved, which is a real constraint rather than a courtesy: Ronkonkoma is one of the busiest stations on the system and the people who park there vote.

The county says it is particularly interested in proposals anchored by healthcare or life sciences, with the stated aim of making the Ronkonkoma Hub a center for innovation, research and high-quality employment.

No arena. No stadium. No convention center named in the ask. What remains is the part of Midway Crossing that was always the most defensible: lab and clinical space next to an airport and a main-line train station, in a county whose job growth comes almost entirely from health care and which has been trying for twenty years to convert its research institutions into employers.

The money on the table

This is the substantive difference from the last round, and it is why the RFP deserves to be taken more seriously than a re-listing.

County Executive Ed Romaine has committed a minimum of $50 million in county infrastructure funding to prepare the site, subject to approval by the county Legislature. That is money for the unglamorous half of a project of this kind: roads, sewer, water, drainage, the work that has to exist before a private developer can price a building.

It sits on top of a state commitment of $150 million, announced by Governor Hochul in February 2025, to improve the connections between MacArthur and the Ronkonkoma LIRR station, which itself built on an earlier $40 million.

Two hundred million dollars of public money for site preparation and connectivity, before a single private dollar, is a different proposition than an empty parcel and a vision document. It is also, roughly, what the last decade taught everyone involved: that a developer will not fund the infrastructure that makes a transit-oriented district work, and that asking one to is how a $2.8 billion plan becomes a terminated agreement.

The confusing part, cleared up

Two different things on Long Island are called the Ronkonkoma Hub, and conflating them makes a muddle of both.

The one in the Town of Brookhaven, on the north side of the tracks, is being built. It is a phased mixed-use development that has been going up in stages for years, with a later phase before the Suffolk County Planning Commission this year.

The one in this article is the county's 48 acres on the airport side. It has never been built, and after Midway Crossing it does not currently have a plan.

What to watch after September

Two things, and the second matters more than it sounds.

Who responds, and whether anyone responds with a healthcare or life sciences anchor already committed rather than aspirational. A master developer with a signed tenant is a different animal from one with a rendering.

And whether the county Legislature actually appropriates the $50 million. The commitment is explicitly subject to legislative approval, which means the most important number in this RFP is one the RFP cannot guarantee.