The East Hampton Village Board heard a pitch for the creation of 10 affordable apartments allocated to village employees, an effort to bridge a large and growing demand and a vanishingly small supply, when it met on Friday.
Kirby Marcantonio of the East End Housing Initiative and an owner of 350 Pantigo Road in East Hampton, where he hopes to develop a 47-unit work-force housing development, proposed five condominium and five rental units on three acres of the village’s 12-acre Highway Department site at 172 Accabonac Road. The overall cost was estimated at $5 million.
“Because this is a small project,” he told Mayor Jerry Larsen and the board, “we would want to stay with this limited size because it allows us to provide septic for the project” with an innovative/alternative hydro-action septic system, per Suffolk County Health Department requirement. That system would cost around $30,000 to $40,000 per unit, with a three-to-six-month Health Department review. “Increase the density, and you need to use a far more expensive” system requiring “extremely lengthy” review and approval.
“The format I would suggest would be a condo work-force project,” he told the board, with a decision needed to subdivide three acres from the overall site or simply situate the housing on a portion of it. In either event, modular units would be cost-effective and allow for fast construction, he said. “I would suggest using the same two and three-bedroom floorplans we have developed for our projects and have been found acceptable from the Planning Department.”
The three-acre site would have to be reshaped, and drainage, curbing, walkways, parking, and possibly fire hydrants installed, Mr. Marcantonio said, along with landscaping to buffer the units from neighboring properties and the existing Highway Department structures.
To recoup most of the estimated cost, Mr. Marcantonio proposed selling five of the units, most likely three-bedroom units, for $500,000, “the current top-end price for an affordable home in East Hampton.” Eligible buyers, he suggested, would be essential workers such as police officers and emergency medical service personnel. The other five, he said, “would make great rentals, and, at $2,500 per month per unit,” would provide $150,000 per year in rent to the village.
Owners would pay the typical condominium fees for things like management, groundskeeping, insurance, and common utilities, he said, and taxes would be assessed per unit, with a current town assessor’s office estimate of $1,300 per year per unit.
The plan would begin to address what Mr. Marcantonio said is a real estate market that only grows further out of reach for the average resident, with a typical starter house priced at $1.2 million and year-round rentals starting at $6,000 per month. “The result is that businesses that look to hire workers are hamstrung by the inability to house them.” In the town and village alike, “you pay wages that are amongst the highest in the area, but still your workers cannot actually live in the village they service.”
Should the board agree to the overall concept, the East End Housing Initiative would come up with a detailed schedule enumerating the costs and contractors. If Eric Schantz, director of the town’s Housing and Community Development Department, deemed the project acceptable, the village would have to engage an attorney to prepare legal documents for an affordable housing overlay designation for the site. “You would hire our engineer to prepare the initial site plan, hire our traffic experts to expedite a traffic report, and use our staff to prepare the economic impact study,” all requirements, he said. He expressed confidence that the project would see “easy acceptance.”
He estimated a six-month time frame for acceptance of affordable housing overlay designation, and another eight to 12 months for town planning and Suffolk Health Department approval. “Actual construction is the fastest part of the process,” he said. “Once ordered, modular units can be shipped from the plant to East Hampton in as little as 10 weeks and completed in another eight to 10.”
As the cost of housing to the west and on the North Fork rises, Mr. Marcantonio predicted that “you’re going to start to see people who are coming out here to do work for you or other businesses dry up” in as little as a year or two, “and it’s not going to dry up temporarily.” The board “will, of course, come to the decision as to how you want to allocate this new resource. But there’s not very many places where you can do this.”
The mayor told his colleagues that if the board wants to move forward on the plan, the next step would be to ask Mr. Marcantonio for a contract for the village attorney’s review. “Let us think about it, and we’ll get back to you,” he said.
