'Zombie' Homes Are Relatively Rare In Southampton And East Hampton Towns

As the rest of New York State works to purge “zombie” houses, both Southampton and East Hampton town officials say the epidemic has not spread to this relatively affluent part of the East End.

A zombie house is an abandoned property, often where health and safety violations need to be addressed. In most cases, the homes are in foreclosure, with neither the bank nor the original property owner taking responsibility for the upkeep of the home. The foreclosure process can take years, lowering property values and creating eyesores for neighboring property owners in the meantime.

This week Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation attempting to combat the problem by making it mandatory for banks and debt servicers to maintain the homes they take back from property owners, at the same time requiring bank officials to meet with homeowners to explain their rights before foreclosure.

“For many New Yorkers, homes are our single most important investment, but that investment can be undermined by the blight of neglected and abandoned properties,” Gov. Cuomo said in a statement on Thursday. “For each zombie home that we cure and for each that we prevent with this legislation, we are saving entire neighborhoods from the corrosive effect of blight and neglect.”

“We are trying to keep people in their homes,” said State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. “We strengthened that part of the law. The legislation also imposes the duty on the banks to maintain the properties before foreclosure, those are the two major provisions of the law.”

Mr. Thiele said, however, that Southampton and East Hampton both fall well below state and Long Island averages for the number of abandoned homes.

According to Mr. Thiele, the average number statewide is 1.6 “zombies” for every 1,000 homes. On Long Island, that number jumps to 4 homes per 1,000—a spike due in large part to places like Mastic and Shirley, which have 54 and 58 homes, respectively. The average for Southampton Town is 0.70 per 1,000 homes, and in East Hampton Town the number drops to 0.37 per 1,000 homes.

The largest zombie home population out east can be found in the Riverside, Flanders and Northampton area, which has an average of 1.62 per 1,000 homes. There are 19 abandoned homes in the area, 13 more than in East Hampton Village, East Quogue or Hampton Bays, each of which has six.

And the properties have not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, members of the Flanders, Riverside, Northampton Community Association submitted a list of 15 homes to the Southampton Town Board that they deemed to be the worst in the neighborhood. Since then, the town has held public hearings about demolishing the homes, and two homes have been torn down.

“We have had a number of homes that were collapsing and we have since taken the appropriate steps to secure or remove them,” Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said last Thursday. “In fact, it feels like at every Town Board meeting there has been a conversation about an unsafe condition. There are a number of homes in Flanders that continue to occupy time at the Town Board meetings as we try to figure out what to do.”

At the same time, however, Mr. Schneiderman acknowledges that Southampton is lucky compared to many other places. “They are a very big problem at the county level,” he said. “Typically these houses just fall through the cracks—the bank is usually paying the taxes on it, but they haven’t been foreclosed, so they end up sitting there.”

The state legislation signed into law last Thursday is intended to change that in two ways.

First, it would help prevent home foreclosures by requiring settlement conferences—meetings between the bank and the property owners to give property owners more time to find the funds needed to keep their home. The new legislation makes it mandatory for banks to explain homeowners’ rights during foreclosure and to explain how the process works.

The law also creates a Community Restoration Fund that allows the State Mortgage Agency to purchase defaulted mortgage notes from banks and alter mortgage terms to make it possible to keep families in their homes.

The second part of the law targets blighted properties. Banks will be mandated to maintain vacant and abandoned properties that are in the middle of foreclosure proceedings that last longer than six months. In the past, the bank only had to maintain the property after a foreclosure judgment was entered, but now the cost of maintaining the property will be placed on the mortgage itself. Whoever holds that mortgage will face a fine of up to $500 a day, per violation, for failing to maintain the home.

This week East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said he was optimistic about the new legislation, and that it can be frustrating to have to wait for properties to be cleaned up.

“It is private property, so we can’t just improve it or resolve the impact on the neighborhood on our own, so it is a very difficult and frustrating process,” Mr. Cantwell said. “This will certainly help, because now there is at least a process for notifying the bank and forcing them to do the maintenance—or at least secure the appearance—of the property.”