Letters

On Tuesday, March 28, I spoke at the Southampton Town Board public hearing regarding the affordable housing project of 104 units, in eight multifamily apartment buildings, called The Preserve at South Country. I requested that the board deny the zoning change to multifamily housing, because the negative impacts on the community from this project have not been addressed.

In preparation for the hearing, I read the draft environmental impact statement about this project, watched the video of the Planning Board’s response to the DEIS and read its report to the Town Board.

The DEIS clearly avoided addressing these negative impacts. It either ignored them by just repeating the need for affordable housing or buried them in ludicrous answers, such as suggesting the fear of overwhelmed emergency services by such a sudden, dramatic increase in population is unfounded, because new residents might become volunteers.

But the Planning Board saw through this obfuscation and addressed the negative impacts head on. Every member expressed serious concerns about the design and the size of the project. These concerns included: only one access road, all traffic onto South Country, inadequate number of parking spaces, not enough amenities, loss of open space, and unrealistically low estimates for traffic, intersection accidents, school-age children, total population, and number of vehicles. These are the same concerns that we, the residents of Quiogue, have been expressing for over a year.

Here are just a few of the comments from the Planning Board meeting: “Even by conservative estimates, at the low end of 250 new residents, it would mean a population increase of 46 percent.” “I have never seen a project that would so dramatically increase the population of one hamlet such as this one.” “If we think the projections are too low and the system can’t support it then you have to have fewer apartments.” The Planning Board’s own estimate of the total number of people was 355, not the 250 in the DEIS.

In their referral report to the Town Board, the Planning Board stated: “Given this existing rural population density of Quiogue, limitations in emergency services and the lack of community amenities, the Town Board should require a project with a reduction in density in efforts to maintain consistency with the existing character of the hamlet.”

We can and must do better than this very flawed project. Solving Southampton’s housing crisis demands creative thinking. Instead of overwhelming one neighborhood and destroying so much open space, apply a multi-pronged approach that would include building Speonk Commons-size projects (38 units of multifamily) throughout Southampton Township, subsidizing purchases of single-family homes to make them affordable, and utilizing the Community Preservation Fund to protect more open space.

Barbara Weber-Floyd

Quiogue