Letters

With interest rates up over 100 percent since 2019, home prices up 30 to 50 percent, and year-round rental prices up 30 to 200 percent, it’s a difficult time for our local residents, indeed. Businesses are suffering, the trade parade continues, and 5,000-square-foot homes continue to pop up like daisies, while apartments remain illegal to build and opposed by small groups of loud and vocal opponents, intimidating local elected officials.

Now that the Community Housing Fund, passed by referendum in November 2022, is finally starting to collect funds in the four towns that passed it — Southold, Shelter Island, East Hampton and Southampton — the advisory boards and town boards are searching for effective ways to use the funds to preserve and create more community housing. But the stubborn issue of restrictive, single-family-only zoning continues to be a blockade to many of the best solutions.

We have figured out how to create sustainable, environmentally sound and attractive multi-family properties. Local developers and businesspeople have been champing at the bit to create workforce housing to attract and maintain staff. But the time and money required to overcome the zoning blockade is simply too great — hence, development has been subjugated to larger, deep-pocketed developers.

Just look at Concern Housing’s Liberty Gardens on County Road 39 in Southampton. Now six years into the permitting process, their overhead during that time is over $2 million, hardly a price tag that a local developer could afford. The proposal has been reduced to 50 apartments (25 workforce and 25 veteran-supportive).

The outgoing Southampton Town Board accepted the final environmental impact statement; all that’s left is for the current Town Board to approve the zone change for the development. But there’s a small group of loud and vocal opponents who just want to win their fight and continue to fearmonger against it.

In 1988, Congress passed the Fair Housing Amendments Act. The amendments expand coverage of Title VIII to prohibit discriminatory housing practices based on disability and familial status.

Economically, morally, ethically and legally, how can anyone vote no on creating 25 workforce apartments for our business community, and 25 supportive apartments for men and women who served to protect us and our country, amid the most severe housing crisis in modern times?

The good news is that officials throughout the nation are figuring out that the loud and vocal minority is just that — a minority. Studies on Long Island and across the nation consistently show that 60 to 75 percent see the need for more community housing and support zoning changes to accomplish that.

Today’s officials have recognized that and are taking the necessary steps to push through the paralysis on housing we’ve experienced for years

Michael Daly

Sag Harbor

Daly is a founder of East End YIMBY — Ed.