East Hampton needs more affordable housing. One town official says making it easier to add granny flats will help.
East Hampton planning director Jeremy Samuelson proposed several adjustments to local legislation that allowed accessory apartments on lots of one acre or larger, 27East reported. He broached the ideas at a Town Board meeting Tuesday.
Samuelson suggested cutting the allowable lot size for the granny flats in half, raising the rent cap (set at $1,865 for studios and one-bedroom apartments), simplifying applications and renewals and ditching East Hampton tenancy requirements.
“We don’t have the dials adjusted to allow people to fully see themselves in this program and benefit from it,” Samuelson said.
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The 2016 legislation didn’t create nearly as many accessory dwelling units as expected. Based on the legislation, 100 accessory apartments could have been created. Six years on, not even half as many have come to fruition.
The planning department looked into why residents were not creating accessory apartments. Lot size restrictions and rent caps were among the primary reasons, the department found.
Essentially, the town had hamstrung its own law — possibly by design: So-called ADUs can be controversial with locals who don’t like the idea of more cars and lower-income renters, so towns tend to limit them.
Samuelson’s other suggestions included allowing apartments above detached structures to be two-bedroom units and increasing the maximum size allowed of those units.
East Hampton’s affordable housing crisis has been mounting for years, leading the town to launch an all-hands-on-deck initiative at the start of the year. The combination of the high cost of living in the town and the high poverty rate in Suffolk County rendered the 600 affordable housing units woefully insufficient, making it difficult for businesses to hire wage workers.
In March, the Town Board took a couple of steps towards alleviating the affordable housing crisis. It adopted an affordable housing overlay on Route 114 and amended the town code to increase the number of single-family residences allowed per acre in affordable overlay districts.
A push at the state level to allow ADUs across New York was foiled by resistant suburban lawmakers and political rivals who used it to campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul. The governor withdrew the proposal from her budget after just a few weeks.
— Holden Walter-Warner