On the Cusp

It appears that Governor Kathy Hochul’s ambitious New York Housing Compact is being sent back to the sidelines while state budget negotiations try to wrap up several weeks late. Her plan, to create hundreds of thousands of new homes statewide by setting local development goals and, as needed, overriding local zoning to get it done, got a great deal of kickback from many communities — including on the East End.

What seemed to ring hollow was the criticism, painted with the same broad brush as the original plan, that “suburban” communities were balking because of an outdated desire to keep the focus on single-family homes, which created both the crisis the Housing Compact meant to address, and inequities that far too often broke along racial lines.

But the argument was not whether the problem exists; rather, it was how it should be solved. No one on the East End had to be recruited to the battle on Hochul’s side — this is a region in which four of five towns recently took it upon themselves to add a new Community Housing Fund, taxing real estate transfers to feed a new fund allowing the towns to support affordable housing measures. We are not only taking aim at the same enemy, we’ve beaten our plowshares into swords for the fight.

Money is part of the problem, but the governor is absolutely right that it won’t solve the housing crisis alone. There will need to be new zoning, new community development strategies. Some options, which have been anathema for years, like small clusters of apartments and pockets of more dense development to push down costs, are the bitter pill that will have to be choked down.

The timing is interesting: On April 1, the CHF began collecting revenue for affordable housing, and just a few weeks earlier the Community Preservation Fund, on which it was patterned, crossed the $2 billion threshold in the five East End towns, as the 25th anniversary of its passage approaches.

The overwhelming success of the CPF, and the indisputable impact it has had on the development of the region in the last generation, should be a reminder that a strong step in the right direction pays tangible dividends. It can take time, but the results can be breathtaking.

The CHF is already humming, so it’s time for the four towns participating in it — Southampton and East Hampton, plus Shelter Island and Southold — to recognize that it’s time to work on zoning changes to create spaces for new affordable housing. This won’t be an easy conversation, and there will be a great deal of consternation when individual neighborhoods start to see, on maps, something they have fought for years. Some will see “overdevelopment,” though it’s really just healthy development that’s never been able to take root, because of the soaring demand for high-end single-family refuges here.

A parallel conversation also is underway, where the CPF is concerned. It’s no betrayal of the legacy of the fund to suggest that the days of regularly buying up swaths of farmland and open space probably are over. The good news: The CPF got a lot of that land locked up, enough to preserve the region’s quality of life, and to largely keep real overdevelopment at bay.

It’s never a good time to declare victory, for fear that it’s too soon. But continuing to fight the wrong battle can be disastrous, too. So recent discussions about nudging the CPF cash more firmly toward the other big issue related to the real estate boom — the decline in water quality, the result of a near absence of sewage treatment — are well-timed.

This isn’t a new idea, obviously: Spending CPF proceeds on water quality projects was added, by referendum, in 2016, when they extended the program through 2050. It fits the original purpose of the fund, which was to use development pressure, which drives up the cost of real estate, to fund the very problems it creates. That means saving farmland and vistas, and also rescuing the water bodies poisoned by septic tanks.

The region is on the cusp of a new era, when it can build on the incredible success of the CPF and show Governor Hochul, and the world, that a community can develop robustly but not lose control, can see property values rise but still find a way to make housing affordable for the working families who keep it going, can build houses but not pollute the natural beauty surrounding them.

It’s an ambitious goal — but, as the CPF has demonstrated, ambition is something the East End does well.