Southold Town and Greenport Village may soon be working more closely than ever before on addressing the dire need for attainable housing on the North Fork.
Greenport Village has agreed to opt in to Southold Town’s Community Housing Plan, as Southold Town agrees to support the village’s quest to receive grant funding to study potential affordable housing sites both inside and outside the village boundaries.
Pictured Above: Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski (left) and Greenport Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi (right) at the joint meeting.
At a rare joint meeting of the two boards on Thursday, June 26, the glimmer of consensus on housing goals seemed to leave some board members pleasantly surprised.
The meeting began with a contentious rehash of a more-than-year-long debate over the use of another source of money, the Community Preservation Fund, for water quality projects in the village.
Many in the village believe CPF money, collected by the town, could be used to help with issues relating to sewers and sea level rise, while the town has focused its CPF program on land preservation and says other sources of funds could be used for water quality projects.
But on housing, the boards found some common ground and pledged future collaboration.
“It’s been a lot more productive than I thought,” said Southold Councilwoman Jill Doherty, who worked with the town’s Community Housing Advisory Board to draft Southold’s 2023 Community Housing Plan as the nearly three-hour joint session came to a close.
The Community Housing Plan is required by state law to guide the use of funds raised through a half-percent real estate transfer tax approved by Southold voters in 2022.
Ms. Doherty said Southold currently has about $5 million on hand to spend. This money can be spent on projects in both the village and the town.
Prior to the joint meeting, the town reached several housing milestones earlier in June.
One of the Community Housing Plan’s key components is the hiring of a housing plan administrator, with the civil service job title of Community Development Project Supervisor.
The Town Board voted June 10 to create the position, and to hire Andrea Menjivar, an architect and former intern in the town’s Planning Department, to fill it on a provisional basis beginning July 16.
The Town Board also voted unanimously June 10 to adopt a framework for granting subsidies to affordable housing developers through the Community Housing Fund.
The proposal would provide base subsidies of $55,000 per unit, with bonus subsidies for projects that served people with lower incomes or involved adaptive reuse of existing buildings, septic upgrades, a diversity of unit sizes, home ownership, environmental sustainability and proximity to public transit.
The town’s next step is to draft guidelines for its other housing plan goals, including providing down payment assistance and assistance to individual property owners. Here’s the town’s plan.
At the moment, the town is considering using the funds for developers for projects like the proposed 12-unit redevelopment of the former Capital One bank branch on Love Lane in Mattituck and a proposed new ownership-based development on Carroll Avenue in Peconic.
But Greenport representatives are hoping that the town will assist them in exploring housing options closer to home.
Resident Dinni Gordon, who chairs the village’s new Greenport Affordable & Workforce Housing Committee, asked the Town Board to draft a letter of support for its application for a grant from the Long Island Forward Housing Program to study the feasibility of affordable housing both inside and outside the village.
“The application process is simple and help can be forthcoming in short order. This is an offer we cannot refuse,” she told both boards. “It does not commit us to future project, it enables us to better understand the situation. Southold Town could also benefit from this program.”
She added that areas along the Main Road west of the village, and property at Clark’s Beach on the Long Island Sound that is outside the village but is owned by the village, along with potential zoning changes along the railroad to the west of Greenport are areas that could be studied.
“To go it alone when we are not only neighbors, but are institutionally interdependent, would be short-sighted,” she added. “The shortage of affordable housing is undeniable and the need to act now is too, before greater Greenport becomes a functionally gated community of affluent folks.”
Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski said the town would draft a letter of support for the grant, to be approved at its July 8 meeting.
Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi pushed them to go a step further.
“If the town would consider becoming a [New York State designated] Pro-Housing Community, that would be enormously helpful to the village in what we’re trying to do,” said Mr. Stuessi.
Greenport was one of the first municipalities on Long Island to adopt a resolution becoming a Pro-Housing Community back in 2023. Southold is now the only East End town that has not yet signed the pledge.
Communities that take the pledge are eligible for certain state grant programs that communities that do not take the pledge are ineligible for.
Southold Councilwoman Anne Smith, who along with Ms. Doherty serves as a town board liaison to the town’s Community Housing Advisory Board [CHAB] and Housing Advisory Commission [HAC], said she believes the Pro-Housing Community designation “is worth bringing back to our committee [the HAC] for consideration.”
She did say, however, that the HAC will not meet again until September.
Town Board members also urged the village to designate official liaisons to the town’s housing committees as soon as possible.
Because the village is already in the Pro-Housing Community program, it is eligible to apply for certain restricted New York State grant programs. Mr. Stuessi said the village and the town together, through one program that just opened up, “could get up to $15 million for a recreation center.”
The village board, at its regular meeting following the joint session, passed a resolution unanimously agreeing to enter into an intermunicipal agreement [IMA] with the town to participate in the town’s housing plan and its associated funding.
Mr. Krupski said the next step would be for the Town Board to sign a resolution to enter into the agreement at its July 8 meeting, after which the IMA would be drafted and signed by both parties.
“All of this is great, but for part of this funding the mayor is talking about [for the community center], you need to have a resolution passed by the Town of Southold joining in to the pro-housing commitment,” said Village Trustee Mary Bess Phillips.
Lifelong Greenport resident Yan Albaladejo, a student in public policy and history at New York University, is working as an intern at the village this summer, and he shared some statistics with the crowd.
The median home value in Southold Town is $800,000, while the median per capita income is $70,960, he said. At that income and housing price, if someone put 30 percent of their income toward a mortgage, it would take 60 years to pay it off.
The crisis has gutted local schools, he added, with enrollment dropping by 13 percent from 2011 to 2021.
“More than one in eight students in town — gone,” he said. “The kids I grew up with, more than half of them were forced to leave Southold Town. We have 850 active short-term rentals, while 600 residents remain stuck on the housing registry. Volunteer fire departments can’t recruit young people. They can’t even rescue cats in trees. There’s no one left. Some residents are living in tenement homes with entire families packed into single rooms.”
“Show the same commitment you show to farms and working waterfront,” he implored the town. “It’s already a crisis, and one that will only grow worse if we fail to react. We can’t afford to be naive about this housing emergency anymore. A lot of you grew up on the North Fork. I hope you will give the next generation the same chance.”
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