Southampton Town Board Members Continue To Search For Affordable Housing Solutions

Southampton Town Board members are moving forward in trying to create more affordable housing opportunities.

Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said he is planning an initiative that would involve creating accessory apartments by enlisting the owners of homes of around 2,000 square feet or larger that have only one or two occupants. Currently, the law prohibits houses that are on less than three-fourths of an acre from having accessory housing. Participants in Mr. Schneiderman’s program would be exempt if their home is on property greater than one-third of an acre.

“Houses in downtown areas that are closer to shopping—those tend to be smaller lots,” the supervisor said. “They’re walkable areas. There’s a lot of potential homes that can’t currently put in an accessory apartment.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Schneiderman stated that his goal would be to identify 25 units by the end of the year that the town could move forward with in 2017. He said he has received positive feedback on the initiative and that he hopes that homeowners can begin to sign up sometime in the fall.

He added that the accessory apartments would be geared toward people who work in town, such as nurses, schoolteachers and emergency responders, who may otherwise have a difficult time finding a place to live locally.

“It would help if we had options east of the canal,” he added. “The choices are not even remotely affordable. We are working to create a program that will start to make units available closer to town.”

Providing such housing would, in the long run, reduce traffic, decrease the number of overcrowded and illegal rentals, and provide revenue for new landlords, the supervisor said at a July work session.

Unlike recent affordable housing apartment complexes proposed in Speonk, which would require new apartment buildings to be built, this program would give the homeowner income without changing the footprint of the unit, as well as making sure that the existing houses were up to code, the supervisor said.

According to a 2008 Suffolk County Workforce Housing Needs Assessment, Southampton would need to create 227 new units of affordable housing annually until 2020 to keep up with demand.

“In the last 20 years, there have been zero affordable housing rental units,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “You can’t find affordable rentals.”

Town Councilwoman Julie Lofstad has begun working on her own housing opportunity program aimed for local workers, seniors and veterans, by partnering with different East End citizens advisory committees. Her group is in the preliminary process of identifying potential locations in each hamlet, such as “zombie” houses or empty apartments, that could be possible locations for affordable housing.

She said she believes that if officials work with the community from the beginning, residents will be more open to the idea of affordable housing and helpful in finding the right locations.

“It’s the residents of those hamlets that know those towns very well,” she said. “I think with the group that we have, we have a good start. We’re trying to get something going because we’re just so short of housing. Even five units is five more than we had.”