Letters

The Southampton Press lunch discussion, “A Year of CHF: Grading the Nascent Community Housing Fund,” on January 9 [“Express Sessions: Affordable Housing Funds Are Building, but the Challenges Are Towering,” 27east.com, January 14], raised questions about the program’s slow start and central focus. Before the CHF affordable housing plans are firmed up, we need to remember its reason-for-being in the first place.

The purpose of the CHF is to finance affordable housing — for our critical workforce, too many of whom cannot afford to live here and are subject to very lengthy and costly commutes. Our critical workforce includes, at the top of the list, the people our community most depends upon: our hospital workers, teachers, EMTs, firefighters, police force, government employees. Consider, for example, the fact that Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has difficulty finding nurses to make this commute.

To be clear, these units must be reserved for people with current employment here. Affordable units are not for retirees who would rent or sell their houses. Only when we have built more units than needed to meet our critical workforce demand, should other renters be considered. Renters should be required to show proof of employment for qualification on an annual basis, with a short grace period for those who find themselves unemployed during their lease.

Our need is big, in the hundreds of units, and we need a multifaceted game plan to achieve this goal with a timeline for occupancy. We need many multi-unit clusters. The town needs to rapidly expand plans for one or two dozen multi-unit clusters.

The CHF should be aggressively banking property for housing clusters. Ideal properties would be close to the highway, but few parcels of such size remain to be found. Larger farmland parcels can be purchased and split between the CPF (preservation) and CHF (development). The longer we wait, the fewer potential properties will exist, and that will translate to higher future prices.

The construction cost alone of 100 affordable units can be expected to cost $50 million or more. CHF has the financial means to ramp up this large program. Given the history of CPF transfer tax collections, we can safely project that CHF will collect several hundred million dollars over time. This income stream can secure bonds to provide our current funding needs, and rents can be fashioned to self-liquidate the building costs.

A robust CHF plan is needed — now. Administration of the CHF program will require significant ongoing management and cost oversight. To control this process, the town needs a full department of experienced construction personnel to oversee and manage the development, purchasing and cost accounting. There’s a whole lot to do. Let’s get going.

Steve Abramson

Water Mill