Two young men who pitched what they call a scalable housing solution for Sag Harbor received an enthusiastic reception from the village board on Tuesday, with members and the audience in the Municipal Building repeatedly applauding their presentation.
Jack Lyons and Kai Latham, who recently completed degree programs in architecture and engineering, spoke about affordable housing, which Mr. Lyons called “a pressing issue of our community.”
“Young people are being priced out of an inflated rental market,” Mr. Lyons said, “and that’s young people who have grown up in the community, like my friend and I here. They would like to work in the community, however it’s too expensive for them to do so.”
“The organization that we’re looking at starting here is a nonprofit called Plinth-Labs,” he said, its mission to create affordable, sustainable housing by financing and building accessory dwelling units “and then reinvesting the revenue generated from those back into supporting, financially, the expansion of these A.D.U.s.” He referred, as a potential partner, to New York State’s Plus One A.D.U. Program, which in the 2022-23 capital budget made available $85 million to create and upgrade A.D.U.s as part of a five-year housing plan.
The solution, Mr. Lyons said, is A.D.U. housing that complies with the village’s existing code. “What we’re pushing for is for Sag Harbor to act locally and lead this initiative at the local level.”
There are two big barriers, he said. One is permitting complexity. “Approval processes are slow, expensive, difficult for certain property owners to navigate, and we want to streamline that process.” Their approach is to “create a clear, A.D.U.-specific permitting pathway that our nonprofit organization could help guide community members in, and fast-tracking and simplifying as well as designing and helping with financing these A.D.U.s.”
The other is a present lack of “visible local examples . . . to demonstrate what these A.D.U.s can be, and how low-impact and beneficial they are to the community.”
To that end, they hope to deploy a temporary demonstration unit so that the public can “see, touch, and understand how these units can integrate into our community, and even allow community members to have architectural input into what these could be.”
With a slide presentation, Mr. Lyons depicted modular, prefabricated units he deployed at sites in Germany and Austria. For Sag Harbor, construction would happen off-site “in order to not have large construction projects going on within the town, but deployable units that we can put in the backyards of existing residential areas.” Units, which could be delivered by trailer, would have minimal impact on the land and be relocatable, he said.
A demonstration unit could be an “educational hub” to show the units’ look and feel up close, while building community trust and support ahead of a full deployment. He and Mr. Latham are in contact with the Suffolk County Health Department regarding integration of the units’ advanced septic systems.
They are engaging local businesses and property owners who might temporarily host a demonstration unit, Mr. Lyons said. “The idea would be to deploy and unveil it at a community event, inviting the trustees, employers, and residents to tour the unit and understand the potential.” At the same time, “we would like to have a fast-track A.D.U. application” for a streamlined process.
“That was an excellent presentation,” Mayor Thomas Gardella told the two. “You’ve recognized that we have a housing crisis and it affects, probably, your generation more than anyone, and you decided to do something about it, to put your knowledge and your passion into it.”
The mayor asked how the process would work for a resident seeking to live in an A.D.U.
Owners of local restaurants who hire seasonal workers are interested in the initiative, Mr. Lyons said. “What we want to do pre-emptively is act as an intermediary between a local business and homeowners who have the ability to put A.D.U.s on their properties,” he said. Plinth-Labs would ask the business “to help contribute to the funding of these A.D.U.s. We would finance, with their help, then design and install the A.D.U. on a homeowner’s property, and then the A.D.U. will be rented to the person . . . and the employers would be able to help subsidize the rent for that person.”
Over time, the property owner, having generated revenue from that rental, would purchase the unit from Plinth-Labs, “except what we’d be asking for is a certain percentage of the revenue each month that would go back to the nonprofit organization to continue funding more of these units.”
The presentation was “absolutely amazing,” said the board’s Aidan Corish. “You’ve really attacked it in a very comprehensive way and looked around all the corners. So I’d like to congratulate you on that, and now I need to know, how can we help?” A site on which to deploy a demonstration unit was the answer.
“What we would really need to do as a starting point,” Mr. Corish said, “is to design a unit that’s in full compliance with village code so that what people see is something you can actually have, and then come up with some numbers” as to a unit’s cost.
