In the New Year

Beyond the ball drop, the celebratory kisses and the Champagne toasts, January 1 is a clear line of demarcation that allows something of a fresh start every 12 months. As 2024 arrives on the South Fork, it brings change: Both Southampton and East Hampton towns have new supervisors — in fact, all five East End towns do — so, presumably, in addition to taking down holiday decorations, a lot of energy is going toward setting priorities for the new year.

But that’s easy in 2024. For both towns, and the villages they contain, there is only one priority for the new year: Building a solid foundation upon which a workable, effective plan arises to address the severe affordable housing crisis.

The issue is not new: The topic has gotten plenty of lip service in recent years, and some sizable concrete action was taken — most notably, the creation of Community Housing Fund programs in both towns, patterned on the successful Community Preservation Fund. The first realistic step involves funding, and the towns (and their voters) deserve credit for getting that part done.

But the next step, as proceeds begin to trickle in, is far from complete. Neither town has put together a strategy that’s easy to articulate, one that gets past the systemic obstacles and the zoning challenges and the nagging community aversion to actually building new affordable places to live. Before New Year’s Day next year, this should be at the top of every agenda for the new administrations in the two towns and in all the villages. It’s going to take them all, united, to bring effective change.

The New York Times, this past week, published a guest essay, and online supplemented it with 3D graphics, titled “How To Make Room for One Million New Yorkers.” Vishaan Chakrabarti has the credentials to undertake such a thought experiment: He is “the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York City architecture firm, and the former director of planning for Manhattan.”

“There are many reasons homes in the city are so expensive,” Chakrabarti wrote, but at the root of it all, even after the pandemic, is supply and demand: Insufficient housing in our desirable city means more competition — and therefore sky-high prices — for the few new homes that trickle onto the market.”

That same paragraph sums up the South Fork’s dilemma. Homeowners all love the “sky-high prices” — the demand for houses here, and the scant supply, has been a major payoff for many families who purchased houses not as investments but to live in, and it makes up the biggest asset in a lot of retirement plans.

But there are thousands of men, women and children on the outside looking in — not potential “Hamptons house” part-timers, but local families whose labor is necessary to keep the economy afloat, yet who are not paid a wage that allows for a comfortable abode, or any abode at all. Add in the steady evaporation of year-round rentals, and the escalation of rent for what remains, and the real estate boom for some is a devastating bust for those who do necessary jobs and make the region a year-round community instead of merely a resort for the wealthy.

Chakrabarti’s essay is worth reading, even as it identifies strategies for an urban environment that aren’t really translatable to the South Fork: When you’re looking to squeeze a million more people onto an island, and going up is a clear option, the strategies are unique to Manhattan.

But there are a surprising number of elements of the analysis that can jump-start similar conversations here. Chakrabarti states the obvious, but it’s obvious here too: To truly address the problem, you must build, and begin to counter the cause-and-effect of low supply. He finds room for 500,000 new dwellings — a number many magnitudes larger than would be needed locally. But the number here might be higher than people expect.

Chakrabarti’s method starts by identifying public transportation to focus on, flood-prone areas to avoid, and empty spaces that might be available to develop. He moves on to creative solutions; in Manhattan, that might be a high-rise apartment building towering over and straddling a one-story market in a neighborhood where skyscrapers abound.

The South Fork has achieved much through open space — it is more than just potential building sites, and it must be preserved so that all the progress made in the past quarter century isn’t undone by thoughtless construction. But a similar step-by-step examination of both Southampton and East Hampton towns, and the villages and hamlets within, would start to bring the scale of a solution into focus.

Getting to that solution will take years, maybe decades. What matters now is that first important step: Visualizing a new reality.

What is needed here is not a new year’s resolution exactly — resolution is a long way off. But in 2024, we need to get focused.