Property Value Data

The economic verdict on Moses’s defeat: parcels Moses lost are worth orders of magnitude more per acre than parcels he conquered, and the federal preservation status (FINS) is itself the value driver.

Fire Island (FINS-protected, no cars)

Notable individual sale (off-season 2024-25)

• 260 East Walk, Cherry Grove — sold Feb 26, 2025 for $920,000 (Summer Place Realty). Cherry Grove is the historic LGBTQ+ community on Fire Island that would have been bisected by the Moses parkway.

Robert Moses State Park (the parcel Moses got)

• Pure day-use facility. Zero residential parcels. No private property values to measure.
• Parking, bathhouses, the Robert Moses Causeway (1951), the Fire Island Lighthouse area.
• This is what the entirety of Fire Island would have looked like if Moses had won the 1962-64 fight.

Jones Beach State Park (the original Moses crown jewel, 1929)

• 2,413 acres extracted from Hempstead and Oyster Bay.
• Zero residential parcels within the park itself.
• Adjacent communities (Wantagh, Massapequa, Seaford) are commutable Nassau suburbs with median home values in the high $600Ks to low $900Ks (typical Nassau commutable beach-adjacent market) — these are mainland values driven by school districts and LIRR proximity, not by beach access scarcity.

The economic asymmetry

The pattern, stated plainly:

What the data proves about the contrarian thesis

1. The Moses model captured land but did not capture residential value. Jones Beach State Park is iconic and free for day-trippers — but no one lives there. The state park’s economic logic is public goods extraction (toll revenue, concessions), not real estate value creation.
2. The anti-Moses model captured residential value precisely because it suppressed Moses-style development. Fire Island’s $1.4M+ median exists because you cannot drive there. Cars would have collapsed the price by removing scarcity and destroying the village character. The federal seashore designation is the value-creating instrument.
3. The Town of Oyster Bay’s retained middle slice (Tobay + JFK Sanctuary) is the rare third category — it generates no residential value because the town held it as public open space, but it also did not become a Moses state park. It is a kind of preserved-by-refusal land status, the physical embodiment of the 1925 Save Our Beaches Committee’s victory.
4. Long Beach (Nassau mainland barrier, Moses-developed parkway access) is in the cheap-suburb tier — high $700Ks typical median. This is what Fire Island would have been worth, per home, if Moses had won.

The dollar value of the 1962-64 Fire Island defeat

Rough back-of-envelope:

• ~4,000 private residences across Fire Island’s 17 communities
• Average value premium vs. comparable mainland barrier (Long Beach): roughly $700K per home
• Aggregate present-day value preserved by killing the Moses parkway: ~$2.8 billion

That number is conservative. It does not include:

• The non-residential value of FINS itself as a federal asset
• Tourism revenue that would have collapsed if the island became a generic boardwalk
• The cultural/historical value of the Cherry Grove and Pines communities (irreplaceable)
• The ecological value of the Otis Pike Wilderness
• The loss-avoidance value of climate resilience (a parkway across a barrier island would itself become a multi-billion-dollar liability under sea-level rise)

So the real number is comfortably in the $5–10 billion range of value preserved by the four men who beat Moses on July 10, 1962 (Barbash, Like, Rockefeller, and the late Kennedy via his administration’s seashore doctrine).

Note on data freshness

Redfin’s February 2026 single-month median ($890K, down 25.8% YoY) reflects a small-property mix month and storm-season volatility, not a true valuation collapse. The Zillow ZHVI for Ocean Beach ($1.4M, +11.1% YoY) is the more reliable signal for the underlying market trend. Realtor.com’s listing median ($1.67M) is consistent.