East Hampton Appoints Housing Fund Advisory Committee To Steer Affordable Housing Revenue

East Hampton Town last week created the new advisory committee that will guide the town’s use of revenues from the newly established Community Housing Fund to create affordable housing opportunities.

The Town Board voted on March 16 to appoint six community members to the committee, who will be joined by four village officials to comprise the Community Housing Opportunity Fund Advisory Committee.

The community members appointed to the committee are: Andrew Garvey of Amagansett, who is a board member of Enterprise Community Investment, a national affordable housing nonprofit group; Patricia Wadzinski, an East Hampton real estate broker; Alice Houseknect, a former schoolteacher who is the director of the Montauk Food Pantry; Bridgehampton attorney Adam Miller; Ray Harden, co-owner of Ben Krupinski Builder; Emma Barrientos, an East Hampton bank teller; and Sarah Brooks Minardi, an East Hampton real estate broker and member of the East Hampton School Board.

The community members will be joined on the committee by a Town Board liaison and representatives from the town’s planning, housing and community development, and land acquisition and management departments.

Together, the committee will first devise strategies for how to best utilize funding from the CHF, which the town will begin receiving later this year through a half-percent sales tax on real estate sales of over $1 million, and then will advise the Town Board on specific allocations of funding to housing projects.

The town expects to take in several million dollars per year — Planning Director Jeremy Samuelson told the Town Board this week the expectation is for at least $6 million annually — from the CHF tax, which was approved last fall by voters and will begin generating revenue on April 1.

Among the potential strategies for using housing funds laid out in the town’s Community Housing Fund Plan are the funding of municipally sponsored developments of rental apartments, condos and single-family homes for sale; the purchase of small single-family homes; loans for construction or refurbishment of homes; and financial assistance with down payments or up-front costs of creating new housing units.

Like the advisory committee that helps the Town Board decide which water quality improvement projects are worthy of funding from the town’s Community Preservation Fund, which draws from a separate 2 percent real estate sales tax, the housing committee will analyze and score the cost-benefits of specific funding proposals to focus funding in the most effective way for creating new housing units and then make recommendations to the Town Board, which will vote to approve allocations on a case-by-case basis.