The Mountain

Southampton Town officials, it must be said, are very much on point when it comes to affordable housing. It’s not just lip service: The town is doing its level best to begin to address the ongoing crisis that is making it harder for the town’s workforce to stay here, and more difficult for the town’s business community to fill positions. It became problematic a few years ago, but today it’s probably the biggest issue Town Hall faces. And it appears that all hands are on deck.

The town’s voters also have done their part, approving a new Community Housing Fund by referendum in 2022, agreeing to a new real estate transfer tax with the sole purpose of funding new measures to create new housing opportunities and to help homebuyers and renters alike find more reasonable housing options.

But the town still seems to be standing at the base of the mountain and still missing more than a few pieces of climbing equipment, including a good map. The hike to the summit is already starting — just putting one foot in front of the other is easy at lower elevations — but it feels disjointed, and possibly destined for disaster.

A story last week pointed out one small way this is evident, but it’s indicative of a larger problem: This life-or-death excursion needs a much clearer plan.

The story of Evelyn Ramunno’s plight feels like a microcosm — there’s reason to believe it’s not a unique story. She was willing to add a cottage to her 1-acre property just outside Sag Harbor Village, an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, as the town calls it. That’s something the town is encouraging as a major way to address the crisis without building high-density, ugly and problematic apartment complexes and the like. These would nestle into neighborhoods, one at a time, and not wreck them. The rentals would be more affordable, and the income will help people like Ramunno, who is nearing retirement, to be able to better afford to stay here.

The town, through a state-sponsored Plus One ADU program, issued a $125,000 grant to help pay for the cottage, which is walking distance from a school and thus perfect for a teacher with a small family, one of many groups these programs are designed to help. So far, so good.

But then Community Development Long Island, a nonprofit agency that administers the program for the town, wrecked the plans. A law in 2019 said that an ADU could only be created in the school district if the town had extinguished a development right elsewhere in that district. The law, designed to keep intense development from driving up school enrollment, essentially killed the proposal: No credits were available in the Sag Harbor School District.

This isn’t an isolated problem: All over town, since 2019, similar snafus involving development rights have stymied more than 100 projects, with only 14 eventually leading to certificates of occupancy — nearly nine out of 10 eager and willing property owners were turned away.

This hints at a larger problem: On the one hand, town officials have a full gas tank and are mashing the accelerator pedal to the floor. Meanwhile, the parking brake is on.

The approval of the Community Housing Fund required quick and decisive action, and it quickly went into effect bringing in tax dollars to spend. There wasn’t much time to put together the infrastructure to get the new money working quickly. Credit to the town: They have still been able to get some projects started, with appropriate urgency. Everyone is doing his or her job.

But it is time for the Town Board to step back and take a wider view of the situation. As demonstrated by the snag with development rights — an artifact of a time when schools were terrified of increasing enrollment, which is no longer an issue for most districts on the South Fork — the framework for CHF usage needs to be refreshed.

Kara Bak, the town’s director of housing and community development, has been terrific in that job, but it’s clear that the Town Board has not been as effective a partner as it could be. When someone like Ramunno steps up, it’s a team effort by the town and its officials to make sure they are enticed, such as with the grant that was successfully rewarded, but not flummoxed and forced to walk away in the end. That undermines the effectiveness of the grant program, solely because the overall structure seems to have flaws that make its day-to-day implementation less than it could be — than it must be.

There are so many facets to addressing the affordable housing crisis: down payment assistance, rental units, first-time homebuyer opportunities, own-and-rent options. Each has its own challenges to implement. In other words, it’s a big mountain — and the town simply isn’t ready to truly start climbing. The board has to plot out a better course.