Affordability May Hit the Fan Again in Southampton

New and potentially partisan battle lines over “affordable” housing–or overdevelopment, if you prefer–are forming in Southampton town. It’s a tussle that has shape-shifted over recent decades but is now resulting from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s carrot strategy with local governments. After Long Island in particular bucked her earlier plans to intensify residential building in affluent suburbs, the Democrat adopted a “Pro-Housing Community Program” to make grants available to localities that better behaved. To qualify, they must supply zoning and permitting data in support of a pledge to increase the housing stock by 1% a year. Southampton’s majority-Democrat town board is due to consider its application this week, and Republican council member Cyndi McNamara on Saturday flagged various neighborhood associations in an email about the effort. “While that [1%] doesn’t sound like a lot, it is roughly 500 units per year in the Town outside of [its separately governed] Villages,” she wrote. “We will also be required to pledge to streamline permitting for and enact policies to encourage a variety of housing, including ADUs [so-called accessory additions], supportive housing, multifamily and more.” Some of these–particularly supportive units–are hot buttons in Southampton, as a recent simplified New York Times story* recounted. So McNamara’s alert may interrupt what would otherwise have been a quiet maneuver to bring the town along with neighboring East Hampton (dominated by Democrats) in obtaining “Pro Housing” status. Whether piecemeal in its many currently low-density areas, or through extensive development in a relatively depressed part of town, the matter of adding to Southampton’s population–especially when done with density to shave cost–is not a purely apple-pie affordability question. –Oct. 20, 2024

*The Liberty Gardens project got entangled not only in the political personalities involved–namely, the outgoing town supervisor, Jay Schneiderman, who shepherded it–but in its location. It would be roughly adjacent to one of the last tracts of historically black-occupied homes in Southampton Village. Those blocks fought any traffic access to the development through their streets.