More Housing, More 'Affordable' Housing Would Help Hampton Bays, Not Hurt It, Experts Say

Affordable housing advocates and experts made a pitch to Hampton Bays residents last week that increasing affordable housing opportunities and the density of housing in what is already the South Fork’s most populated hamlet would not mean overcrowding, quality-of-life issues and rising taxes, but, instead would result in bursting vitality and better circumstances for the people already living there.

The hamlet has been embroiled in a debate over the redevelopment of the downtown, which a developer has said needs to have dozens or hundreds of apartments incorporated into it in order to make it viable and vibrant, and residents have battled against proposals for new affordable housing developments over fears of rising school taxes and influxes of newcomers rather than providing housing for the nurses, firefighters, blue-collar workers and young families who are often held up as the poster children of who struggles to find housing.

The town’s two top housing officials — Curtis Highsmith, the executive director of the Southampton Housing Authority, and Kara Bak, the director of the Southampton Town Housing Department — told members of the Hampton Bays Alliance that the fears that affordable housing development will not address the needs of the current community and will just bring new interlopers is wholly debunked by the statistics of the dozen or so projects the town has marshaled in recent years.

Almost all applications for the subsidized housing opportunities the town has overseen — which are all open to anyone from anywhere in the country under the rules of the federal Fair Housing Act and are all awarded via a blind lottery drawing — come from people living in the immediate area, they said, or locals seeking to move back.

“We have found that the vast majority of people came from the Town of Southampton or worked in the Town of Southampton, or they lived here and had to move away to an adjoining town,” Bak told the group gathered in the Hampton Bays Library on September 11. “A very high percentage, 92 to 98 percent, had some connection to the town previously.”

Highsmith said that a recent lottery for units in Hampton Bays had more than 120 applications — 80 were from Hampton Bays, 100 were from somewhere in the town, and only five were from people who currently lived west of Riverhead — including one from out of state.

“No one buys a home, no one relocates where you don’t have employment, family, friends, relationships,” he said. “If you are relocating from the Bronx, where do you work? You have to be able to afford the home. You’re going to move out here and travel back to the Bronx to work? Just our location, it organically weeds out those who don’t have any relationship to the community.”

Andrea Klausner, a town housing authority commissioner, said that the knee-jerk impressions that too many in the community have of affordable housing means only poor and disadvantaged people. “In reality, affordable housing is all of us,” she said. “If you have a disability, if you want to age in place, if you’re a young family just starting out. It doesn’t just mean low-income housing.”

Highsmith noted that the thresholds for affordable housing income requirements in most instances mean that tenants are earning far more than the area median income and able to pay rents of $3,000 to more than $4,000 per month.

Michael Daly, a vocal advocate for the entire South Fork region breaking its aversion to increasing the density of housing in order to create more living situations that are not priced out by the demands of wealthy seasonal visitors and real estate speculators, said that Hampton Bays in particular should be embracing the idea of creating more new housing and welcoming people into its borders — as the fuel that will drive the revitalization that nearly all agree is desperately needed in the hamlet’s struggling downtown.

“Density is not a four-letter word, although it’s used like one,” he said.

He ticked off the density of population per square mile in local hamlets. Hampton Bays’s is 1,117 people per square mile, Sag Harbor is 1,540, Greenport is 2,583, he said, and those increased densities bring bustling business to those hamlet’s downtowns, boosting both economic prosperity and the value of housing.

“What does that density give to Sag Harbor? Vitality,” Daly said. “There’s people living above stores. There’s people living in small houses close together. Does Sag Harbor have any of the qualities we would like to see perhaps in our downtown in Hampton Bays?”