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Kara Bak in her office at Southampton Town Hall. DANA SHAW
Southampton Town’s new director of housing and community services is a familiar face around Town Hall: Kara Bak was an assistant town attorney for 17 years prior to assuming the role last month.
The Quiogue resident is tasked with finding and implementing solutions to the town’s affordable housing crisis, among other duties. During a recent interview, she shared her goals for the new position and some housing initiatives that are underway or on the horizon.
Ms. Bak said one thing she aims to do is debunk some of the myths that surround affordable housing.
For one, while people complain that affordable housing is going to bring more traffic, she said it will have the opposite effect. “It’s not going to increase the traffic,” she said. “It’s actually going to make the traffic better, because people will be able to live closer to where they work.”
Ms. Bak is originally from Wantagh and attended Touro Law School in Huntington. She moved to Southampton Town in 1992 and had a private practice in Westhampton Beach, where she practiced real estate law prior to becoming an assistant town attorney.
“There is no other place in the world that I would want to live,” she said. “I want to be able to bring that same opportunity to other people who want to live in this beautiful town and who can further contribute to making it a wonderful place to live.”
As an assistant town attorney, she worked closely with the Housing Department for many years. “I’ve been working with Diana Weir, my predecessor, since she arrived, and even prior to that I was doing a lot of the legal work for the Housing Department,” she said.
That work included placing “buyer benefit” mortgages on affordable housing units, reviewing title reports and contracts, preparing mortgage satisfaction documents and more. The “buyer benefit” is a type of lien placed on a property in the town’s affordable housing program. The lien represents the difference between the appraised value of the property and the actual purchase price, Ms. Bak explained. “That is so that somebody who is in the program cannot go out and sell the property on the open market.” The lien will show up in a title search when someone tries to sell the property.
There are approximately 134 affordable ownership units in the town that are subject to buyer benefit mortgages, Ms. Bak said. The town also has 237 affordable rental units, and more ownership and rental units could be added to the town’s affordable housing roster in the near future.
The town is now in the very beginning stages of possibly purchasing U.S. Coast Guard housing units in Westhampton off Stewart Avenue. “The vision is to create 23 affordable, single-family homes, each containing an affordable accessory apartment,” Ms. Bak said. The homes would be refurbished with the assistance of Suffolk County and the nonprofit Long Island Housing Partnership.
Also in the beginning stages is a project in Water Mill. A developer approached the town about an entirely affordable development, Ms. Bak said.
Ms. Bak sits in traffic every day on her commute from Quiogue. It can take an hour or even longer, so she sees the need to enable the people who work in and contribute to the community to live in the community, she said. “It’s what we really need to keep this community going.”
School, hospital and town employees and skilled tradespeople need housing as do EMS and fire department volunteers and the workers at grocery stores, restaurants and businesses, she said.
“Now more than ever, local employers are having difficulty finding and maintaining employees because people just don’t want to sit in the traffic for several hours to commute back and forth to work,” she went on to say. “Both the younger and the older, senior generations are leaving our town in search of homes that they can afford.”
She added that she is excited for New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.’s Community House Fund bill. The legislation, which passed the State Legislature but requires the governor’s signature to become law, would create a revenue stream for affordable housing initiatives. It is modeled after the Community Preservation Fund and would impose a half percent tax on property sales. Southampton Town would receive the proceeds of any tax revenue generated within the town.
“The proceeds of the community housing fund can be used to provide financial assistance to first-time homebuyers, to produce community housing, rehab existing housing for the purposes of converting it into community housing, acquiring housing units that will produce community housing and housing counseling services,” Ms. Bak noted. “This fund no doubt will allow the Town of Southampton to house a greater percentage of its workforce and thus, alleviate traffic and create a better quality of life for everyone living in this community.”
On the community services side of her new post, Mr. Bak oversees Southampton Town’s senior services programs and Youth Bureau and the distribution of federal Community Development Block Grant funds to be spent in income-eligible areas or to improve accessibility.
“I am also excited to be heading up those departments,” she said. “It is programs like these that make living in our community great.”
