Northwell Health Proposes Senior and Workforce Housing Development in Eastport

Northwell Health and Peconic Bay Medical Center have proposed constructing a “multi-generational” housing complex with a mix of senior citizen and workforce housing and on-site health care services in Eastport, on land off Old Country Road that had long been seen as a potential site for a new hospital.

Peconic Bay’s former CEO, Andrew Mitchell, brought the housing idea to the Southampton Town Board last week, pitching it as a way to boost the supply of subsidized housing for both seniors and the local community as well as providing housing that local hospitals could use to help attract employees.

And the plans, which Mitchell said are only conceptual at this point and will require a change of zone for the property, would create what PBMC hopes would be a new model of health care services provided by medical professionals to their own neighbors.

“This is a health care project — it has a housing component, but it’s a health care project,” Mitchell told the Town Board on July 25. “We see this as a unique opportunity to provide health care … and include an element of affordable housing, which is very important to our colleagues at Peconic Bay Medical Center and Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. We hope to create something as a pilot that is very unique in New York State.”

The hospital envisions the development as a place where local seniors could find low-maintenance, affordable, independent housing with basic health care services close at hand, where local medical professionals could be provided affordable living arrangements and where the community could site a substantial number of affordable rental apartments.

The first draft of the idea that Mitchell brought to the town calls for 217 senior housing units and 60 units of workforce housing spread over a cluster of two-story buildings that would be built on the southern half of the more than 43-acre property, and a “clubhouse” that would contain medical facilities. The property would be serviced by an on-site sewage treatment system at the northern end of the developed portion.

The apartments would be a mix of one and two-bedroom units, but primarily one-bedroom, accounting for the focus on senior citizen residents. Mitchell said the vision is for them to incorporate state-of-the-art technology that would allow telemedicine links into each apartment, and that the facility would provide shuttle services to seniors for shopping and medical appointments elsewhere.

Mitchell said that the concept of how it would ensure medical professionals had access to the housing beyond the usual lottery system is still being formulated and that the hospital may keep outright ownership of one of the buildings so it could be used specifically for its employees.

About 22 acres of the property at 242 Old Country Road — now part of the Seatuck Nursery — have never been disturbed and would be left undeveloped. The land is on the edge of the Long Island Pine Barrens. The development would take place only on the portion of the property that was cleared decades ago for farmland and is currently used by a nursery, the hospital’s consultants said.

“Preservation is an important piece of this project,” Mitchell said. “We are not clear cutting, which I know has happened in this area. We have worked very, very hard to only build this project on the farmland that was previously cleared 50 years ago.”

Mitchell said that Northwell would be willing to deed the preserved land to the town or Suffolk County and would allow other developments nearby to tap into the septic treatment system to improve the overall quality of waste water in the region.

The land, which is actually two separate lots, has long been pegged for medical facilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the site of a planned new hospital, the Hampton Hospital. The developers broke ground in 1973, but the project was derailed by financial hurdles.

Central Suffolk Hospital, now PBMC, acquired the land and proposed an ambulatory surgery center on the site, which was also shelved when Peconic Health Corporation opened its medical village in Southampton.

The site was then seen by PBMC as a prime location for a new state-of-the-art hospital to replace its aging facilities in Riverhead. But those plans were also abandoned when the hospital purchased the 22-acre former McGann-Mercy High School property in 2020 and decided to renovate and expand its existing facilities instead of building anew.

Mitchell, who retired from his role at PBMC in 2022, is working for Northwell Health, the network that owns PBMC, as a consultant for the hospital specifically on the development of the latest vision for the property.

“This has been my project for 21 years,” he said. “This is a vital project for Peconic Bay Medical Center. We are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit the staff that we need. Having a component of this is a key piece of being able to provide care. We are not a typical developer. We are completely open to dialogue and discussion and we think this will be a model project for others.”

The properties are currently zoned for residential development at densities of 1 acre and 5 acres. The hospital’s plans would be to ask for new zoning, also split between multi-family and senior housing, the senior housing on 29 acres, 13 of which would be preserved, and the rest for the multi-family housing with 9 acres preserved, one of the project’s consultants said.

“This is an area of limited development,” Southampton attorney John Bennett, who is representing Northwell Health on the project, said, noting that large swaths of open land surrounding it are owned by the state and the private Wyandanch Club and Long Island Club, which have preserved the bulk of their properties through Pine Barrens credits.

“So this is an area that has an enormous amount of open space,” he said, “which we think is helpful because we’re going to land this in area that is not going to be subject to a lot of further development.”

Councilman Michael Iasilli noted that the development sketches show the planned construction area coming very close to Montauk Highway and asked what the setback buffers would be. One of the project consultants said that the renderings are only rudimentary and that there would be a wooded buffer of at least 50 feet between the development and the roadway.

A consultant noted that a variance from zoning to allow the buildings to be three stories instead of just two would allow for fewer buildings and a small area of development, but was met with grumbles of apprehension from board members.

Town Planning and Development Administrator Janice Scherer noted that the property has been specifically identified as a target site for increased development density where Pine Barrens credits could be utilized in the town’s Comprehensive Plan.

The consultants said they would also expect the development to create jobs, both in short term around the construction and longer term to service the property and tenants.

Mitchell said the expectation is that the project’s residents would mean some children added to local schools, but Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni noted that it would be in the Eastport South Manor School District, which he said has been seeing declining enrollment in recent years.

Mitchell emphasized that the plans are only in their infancy and that Northwell would be open to working with the town to help craft the plans in whatever way it needed to for the benefit of both the community and PBMC’s goals.

“We believe,” he said, “that partnering with the town and the community, we can provide something really special here.”