The New York Housing Compact, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to address a statewide housing shortage by building 800,000 new residences over the next decade, has been removed from the state’s 2024 executive budget, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele said this week.
The proposal, which would have mandated a 3-percent increase in housing for regions that have access to public transportation operated by the M.T.A., such as the Long Island Rail Road, was poorly received by East Hampton Town officials. It would have meant around 600 new housing units constructed in the town within three years, with a requirement that two of five “preferred actions” that would override the town’s zoning code be taken if the town did not meet that mandate.
Those actions included allowing accessory dwelling units of up to 1,500 square feet with four-foot setbacks, and no minimum lot size, maximum coverage, or parking requirements, and no updated certificate of occupancy requirement; an allowance for lot splits and lot-line modifications with no explicit size requirement other than being able to accommodate an 800-square-foot residence with four-foot side and rear-yard setbacks; removal of lot size requirements and height and coverage restrictions, and allowing construction of 25 units per acre on previously developed land equal to a third of the total disturbed land in the town, or in an area that was previously allowed only for commercial space.
Were the 3-percent mandate still not achieved after enacting two of the five preferred actions, the town would have been required to approve any application considered a qualifying project within 120 days, with review limited to the ability to provide water, septic, and utilities. The Housing Compact defined a qualifying project as an application that is for at least 20 dwelling units where 20 to 25 percent of them are affordable, depending on the income requirement.
The governor’s proposal would have effectively eliminated home rule “and decades of work put into creating our own local zoning, building, and environmental regulations,” Morgan Slater of the Planning Department told the town board last month. It also would have done little to address affordable housing. The town board is attempting to mitigate the acute shortage of affordable housing without the dramatic increase in density and change in character that would inevitably result were any of the “preferred actions” taken.
The Housing Compact “is out of the budget,” Mr. Thiele told The Star on Tuesday. “Not just the provisions that were of particular interest on Long Island, which dealt with growth targets and zoning overrides and transit-oriented development,” housing clustered around public transportation stations such as the L.I.R.R. stations in East Hampton Village, Amagansett, and Montauk.
“Everything is out,” Mr. Thiele said. “There are literally no housing initiatives in the budget.” He said that housing issues are likely to be considered by the governor and Legislature after the budget has been finalized.
“Transit-oriented development is fine,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said during the Planning Department’s presentation to the town board last month, “but you have to have transit first, and we are woefully underserved by the L.I.R.R., something we’ve been working with our representatives to improve.”
The Housing Compact, Ms. Slater told the board during that presentation, “is simply incompatible with East Hampton.”
Negotiations over the state’s approximately $230 billion budget continued on Tuesday, but an official in Mr. Thiele’s Albany office said that day that Mr. Thiele “has a good feeling about it” and is confident that it will be finalized by week’s end. It was initially to be passed by April 1, but the Legislature has postponed that deadline five times, most recently to tomorrow.
