Housing experts from Greenport and Southold fielded a slew of questions from the public at a packed Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association forum on “Affordable Community Housing Solutions” on March 30 at Veterans Beach.
Pictured Above: Southold Community Development Project Supervisor Andrea Menjivar, Greeport Village Affordable & Workforce Housing Committee Chair Dinni Gordon and Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski at the MLCA forum Monday evening.
In the nine months since she was hired to oversee the implementation of Southold Town’s 2023 Community Housing Plan, the town’s Community Development Project Supervisor, Andrea Menjivar, has come to the Town Board at nearly every work session, hashing out decisions on how best to use the money the town has been receiving through the Community Housing Fund, a .5 percent real estate transfer tax approved by voters in 2022.
By the end of 2025, Southold Town had collected more than $6.7 million through the fund, according to figures released in March by State Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni. This builds on around $1 million already in the town’s coffers as a result of the affordable housing buyout taken by the Harvest Pointe luxury condominium complex in Cutchogue.
Once policies being drafted by Ms. Menjivar are in place, the town is soon to begin awarding an array of funding for accessory dwelling units, first-time homebuyer loans and subsidies for developers of affordable housing here.
Ms. Menjivar, Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski and Greeport Village Affordable & Workforce Housing Committee Chair Dinni Gordon all participated in the conversation in Mattituck Monday evening.
Questions ran the gamut, but many were about the technicalities of building accessory dwelling units — affordable rental units that are either inside of peoples’ homes or in outbuildings, and about whether the community should think bigger than what’s currently proposed.
Some wondered if the town would define a family to prevent “four unrelated people” from living in an accessory dwelling unit, and about the impact building ADUs would have on the density of neighborhoods and the property tax implications of building an ADU.
Real estate agents and wastewater experts discussed glitches in existing regulations.
Glynnis Berry of Peconic Green Growth said the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, which regulates septic systems, requires town approval of ADU construction before it will approve plans, while the town requires county Health Department approval before the plans are stamped.
She added that there’s a need in town for seasonal housing for summer workers, which is currently being met by a campground in Greenport.
Ms. Menjivar said that to qualify for town subsidies, projects must provide stable housing.
Ms. Gordon added that many employers have difficulty housing their employees.
“The hospital has many vacancies, because they can’t find workers who can live out here,” she said, adding that a team of architects is looking at the building mix in downtown Greenport to explore ideas for how to encourage more housing downtown.
Real estate agent Melissa Principi said agents don’t know how to explain the process of adding an ADU to potential buyers, who are often scared away by the prospect of having to appear at a public hearing before the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals in order to build an ADU.
The Town Board will hold a public hearing on April 21 at 6 p.m. on changing the town code to allow accessory dwelling units in new detached accessory buildings, and Ms. Menjivar said the town is looking into other ways to tweak its ADU code to make it more user friendly, including allowing the units to be on more than one floor, and not requiring that ADUs go through the Zoning Board of Appeals for review if they meet the town’s setback requirements.
Both Greenport and Southold are exploring ways to incentivize the construction of ADUs.
“Our ADU program is almost 20 years old, and we’re trying to build off an existing program that few people took advantage of,” said Mr. Krupski. “We’re trying to get more people in the door.”
He added that the town, which is also in the process of revamping its short-term rental code, also wants to ensure these units are not used as short-term rentals.
“ADUs are a very small part of the solution — a drop in a very large bucket,” said Ms. Gordon. “ADUs should be largely as-of-right and prohibited for short-term rentals.”
Greenport resident Margaret De Cruz said one of her dreams is cooperative housing through a housing model known as co-housing, in which people have individual living units and common spaces for cooking, child care and other services they’d like to have in common, like community gardens.
“It would be great if we could get the residents of Greenport to build that, in a cooperative system. That’s one thing we should think about,” she said.
Real estate agent Tom McCarthy suggested that the community come up with “some other funding mechanism” for affordable housing, beyond the Community Housing Fund.
“How creative can we be? I think we can get more leverage if we can take more than just a half percent,” he asked.
Mr. Krupski said the town is “moving at the pace of — we just passed the community housing tax and we have a full-time person to administer it.”
“A town housing authority would be necessary, to build and own and operate housing,” he added. “That would be quite a job, and it would have to be done properly. Generally, the government does not operate as efficiently as private business.”
Ms. Gordon said the North Fork Housing Alliance, which operates several multi-family housing units in Greenport, “works just fine in the village.”
She added that all the Housing Alliance’s properties are in Greenport Village because “that’s where people on the North Fork (historically) wanted affordable housing to be. Now there’s hope it will be expanding.”
“One of the goals in (Southold’s) Comprehensive Plan is to eventually have a housing authority,” said Ms. Menjivar. “Southampton and East Hampton both have well-established non-profit housing authorities.”
One of the key elements of the Community Housing Plan is subsidies for affordable housing developers, which will begin to be offered after the town establishes a Notice of Funding Availability — essentially a request for proposals, which will be known as a NOFA, that developers can use to apply for CHF funds according to a framework adopted by the Town Board in 2025.
“We have to implement this fairly and equally,” said Ms. Menjivar, adding that among the policies being debated by the town include who is responsible for selecting tenants, how to market the units to comply with fair housing laws, and how to cap rents.
Ms. Gordon gave an impassioned plea for the town to do more.
She said the town’s Community Housing Plan “recognizes and regrets that the town’s adult children and municipal employees and schoolteachers, just to name a few examples, can mostly not afford to live locally.”
She said the plan endorses “herculean efforts to address the disinvestment has defined housing policy and market behavior for many decades…. Nothing has been built for affordable housing in Southold for a very long time.”
Ms. Gordon said she believes the town’s Community Housing Plan is “ambitious in its embrace of smart growth principals,” and is very easy to read, and is “very concrete, very specific, and very easy to understand.”
“It could make a difference if all the elements of it were real,” she said.
But she said the plan is “lackluster because multi-family housing is not encouraged or even allowed except for the conversion of buildings to a maximum of six apartments, a zoning policy that creates an unused affordable housing district.”
She said Greenport is “doing somewhat better” with its invitation to state experts to assess where multifamily housing can be built in the village.
She said she believes the town hasn’t done enough yet to inform potential developers of the subsidies, and that “small residential developments should be the desired outcome…. We are not talking about five-story apartment buildings, which of course are inappropriate for Southold Town.”
“For now, luxury building is the norm,” she said, adding that, in a recent real estate piece in a local newspaper, all the agents quoted said “inventory is very limited.”
She said “recent proposals for building are for almost 100 large houses on large lots, none with community housing. Only zoning reform can change this picture,” she said. “I and many others are waiting, not so patiently, for action on that front.”
Southold Town released the first draft of a massive zoning update one year ago, but a new draft has not yet been released by the town’s planning department.
“I started out in favor of creating zoning districts for small houses or apartment buildings, only in the HALO zones (surrounding hamlet centers), where people can walk to work and shopping, but I have changed my mind as I recognized that every adult on the North Fork has a car. Now I think we should encourage construction where it is most attractive to those who can do it, constrained only by local and state safety and design regulations.”
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