What should affordable housing look like? What do you see when you close your eyes and repeat the phrase “affordable housing”? Do you think of the damp, dismal, despised — and eventually demolished — “council flats” of the postwar U.K., such as the Crescents constructed in the early 1970s by the Manchester City Council? Do you see the Cabrini–Green “projects” of Chicago and their ilk, which also had to be dynamited after they failed in every regard, with their concentrated poverty, malfunctioning garbage chutes, shoddy construction, and misery? Maybe you see the prefab exterior of the Gansett Meadow, east of the hamlet of Amagansett, constructed with an eye on cost and efficiency, if not aesthetic delight?
What these attempts to provide healthy and safe affordable homes share is the intentions of their creators: All were surely created by politicians and developers with the highest of ideals in mind. But when we as a country and community plan affordable housing, it seems like the unspoken rule is “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Too often, community leaders back the construction of housing they wouldn’t dream of living in themselves. Too often, we build housing that doesn’t serve the community as well as a wisely planned intentional community should.
It’s time to think bigger. Today, with the 21st century well under- way, we need to ask ourselves what affordable housing should be for the good of its future residents and for the good of the commu- nity surrounding these developments. Lessons have been learned — or should have been, at this point — about building high-density housing without considering the human scale (for social gatherings, for walkways, for access to shopping without getting in the car, for greenways, for sustainability). Or sparing a thought for, dare we say it, the feng shui of it all. Certain housing models are simply not conducive to human happiness. We can do better.
Often, developers selling bad ideas think they can just utter the phrase “affordable housing,” and a golden halo will surround their misguided plans. It’s hard to criticize any purported affordable housing scheme without being shouted down. But many people in East Hampton secretly think recent affordable housing devel- opments on the South Fork leave a great deal to be desired, and it’s time to say so out loud.
East Hampton Town’s most successful effort was probably its first: Whalebone Woods (1986) and Whalebone Woods North (1989), an affordable homeownership development with a financial model that combined subsidized private ownership with a retained public interest. The model of 110 appealingly designed, individual houses nestled among the trees to attract working families was excellent and time has proven its success.
Whalebone Woods still houses many of our first responders — those famous firefighters and emergency service volunteers who are so often trotted out rhetorically as the intended future residents of community-sponsored developments (and who, mind you, never do seem to materialize there). Whalebone Woods wasn’t perfect: By 2023, as reported in this newspaper, houses there were reselling for more than $1 million, taking them out of the affordable zone.
The handsome houses at Green Hollow in East Hampton, built by the town in 2008, are also a model to be emulated.
The 50 rental units in the East Hampton Housing Authority’s Accabonac Apartments, built starting in 1999, have been a success, as has the well-situated St. Michael’s Senior Housing in Amagan- sett. More could be made, in an ongoing master plan for East Hampton Village, of centralized, reasonably priced options.
Let’s look at innovative solutions in other places, too. Check out Common Ground of Lopez Island, a net-zero community of 11 houses in the Pacific Northwest. Check out Goldsmith Street in Norwich, England. Consider what makes a South Fork real estate development like, say, Dune Alpin Farm a wonderful enclave in which to live and to age, while — dare we say it — the recently completed Green at Gardiner’s Point is perhaps less than heaven on earth. Is the model of prefab, stacked apartments really the best we can do? Is the funding model — which curbs true local control — really serving us?