At a League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, North Fork, and Shelter Island forum, panelists agreed Community Housing is a “desperate, critical need” on the East End.
The forum — “Affordable Housing: Hope or Promise?” — took place on September 13 via Zoom with:
- Moderator Andrea Gabor, professor of business journalism at Baruch College and a Shelter Island resident
- Panelists:
- NYS Assembly Fred W. Thiele, Jr., author of both the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund and the Peconic Bay Region Community Housing Fund
- Tom Ruhle, director of the East Hampton Town’s municipal department of Housing and Community Development
- Curtis Highsmith, Jr., director of the nonprofit Southampton Housing Authority
- Amber Brach-Williams, deputy supervisor of the Town of Shelter Island
[You can watch a video of their 90-minute talk on YouTube.]
Gabor said the LWV doesn’t endorse political parties or candidates. But the local group supports the 0.5 percent real estate transfer tax to fund Community Housing on the general election ballots in East Hampton, Shelter Island, Southampton, and Southold.
If voters in a town approve the additional transfer tax, that town can add 0.5 percent to the 2 percent real estate transfer tax now supporting open space preservation. Exemption limits would also rise where the 0.5 percent tax is approved to offset additional homebuyer costs.
On Shelter Island, for instance, the first $250,000 of some real estate purchases is exempt from the 2 percent transfer tax. If voters approve the additional 0.5 percent, that exemption will rise to $400,000. The exemptions don’t apply to purchases over $2 million. First-time buyers are wholly-exempt for sales under $2 million, and other caveats apply.
Below is a synopsis of what the speakers had to say (edited and somewhat reordered for clarity and flow).
Community Housing Fund transfer tax
Thiele described the Community Housing Fund as a “sister” of the Community Preservation Fund. “They’re very similar in process and mechanics,” he said.
While the CPF, created in 1998, has successfully used a 2 percent real estate transfer tax to fund open space purchases, the Community Housing Fund (CHF) would use an additional 0.5 percent real estate transfer tax to provide Community Housing resources.
Before the launch of CPF, towns sought to protect open space to preserve community character but struggled to come up with adequate resources, he said. The same is true today for housing, which also plays a vital role in defining a community.
“A dedicated fund for affordable housing would allow the towns to do much more in the way of providing housing opportunities than they can now,” he said.
The referendum is on the ballot in the four easternmost towns — East Hampton, Shelter Island, Southampton, and Southold. Riverhead decided not to pursue voter approval of the transfer tax this year but may do so in the future. If voters reject the transfer tax, a town may try for it again in a future referendum.
“We in the state are not mandating it, but we’re giving the authority to the towns to create it if they want to,” Thiele said.
The law provides no new powers to towns; he said the housing must still comport with all local, county, and state codes. Towns can use the funds for the:
- provision of financial assistance for first-time homebuyers
- production of Community Housing for sale to eligible individuals by the town or in a public/private partnership
- production and maintenance of Community Housing for rent to eligible individuals by the town or in a public/private partnership
- rehabilitation of existing buildings and structures in the town for conversion to Community Housing for sale or rental to eligible individuals
- acquisition of real property interests in existing housing units for sale or rental to eligible individuals
- provision of housing counseling services by a HUD-authorized nonprofit
Before spending Community Housing Fund revenues, a town must enact a Community Housing Plan. Such a plan must be updated regularly, as is the case with each town’s Community Preservation Plan.
‘A learning experience’
Tom Ruhle said East Hampton has been in the “affordable housing business, for want of a better term (and not counting the Trustees’ early allotments back in the 1600s) since the early 1980s.”
Depending on the situation, projects have varied, from building single-family homes to assisting residents of a manufactured home park purchase the park itself. East Hampton also converted to affordable housing, former officer housing on an air base in Montauk.
The town has built condominiums and has worked with an independent nonprofit housing authority to build apartment complexes with multiple rental units. In addition, the town owns a house it rents and buys back houses constructed under affordable housing rental programs.
“We’ve got a long history of doing just about everything,” Ruhle said. “One thing we’ve learned — and we’ve learned a lot along the way — is to view every project as a learning experience.”
During one early development, he said, some residents felt the town was “building a slum.” But houses that sold for $80,000 in the 1980s were re-selling for over $1 million. While this demonstrated enduring value, the town also learned the importance of ensuring that its projects retained affordability.
Now, it uses 99-year land leases — a concept borrowed from community land trusts — to reduce costs for program buyers and retain price control. Ruhle said planners have also thrown away preconceptions, such as the idea that people will start with rental housing and transition into home ownership, or that seniors will initially downsize but then move away.
“The way the market’s gotten, in some cases, people get into rental housing, and that’s where they live for an extended period of time because that’s the only thing out there.”
“In the case of some of the senior projects, they really don’t want to go anywhere else,” he said.
East Hampton has also studied other resort areas, like Aspen and Nantucket, “so everything’s a continuous learning cycle.”
Hamptons affordable housing an oxymoron
In Southampton, Highsmith said a push years ago to create affordable housing as part of any new development forced builders to provide affordable housing within market-rate projects. But it didn’t meet the demands.
Since 2014, the Southampton Housing Authority (an independent nonprofit entity) has built 20 single-family homes for first-time buyers, a 38-unit multiple-building complex at Speonk, and a 28-unit rental Manor House-style building with additional units in a “barn” that blends into its Sandy Hollow setting.
The authority works with private developers to construct housing and manages a 37-unit senior housing complex. Highsmith said a project with Habitat for Humanity would create homes on six lots for first-time buyers. He has another on deck to construct 16 single-family homes.
A common misconception, Highsmith said, is there’s one type of affordable housing. But just like market-rate housing — whether for rental or homeownership — affordable housing can be developed in numerous forms to meet the demands of a community and the constraints of available parcels.
“I was told it was an oxymoron to build affordable housing in the Hamptons,” he said. “We’ve shown by demonstration that it’s actually a possibility.”
Shelter Island’s plan
Amber Brach-Williams said the Shelter Island Town Board is moving forward with a schedule to adopt a Community Housing Plan. A final draft is available for review before a public hearing scheduled for Tuesday, October 11.
[Read the draft here on the town website.]
Among key recommendations: focus first on rental housing, and build on town-owned land to keep costs down. The town should also encourage residents to create accessory dwelling units (ADUs) for Community Housing use.
However, she said, Shelter Island has no in-house expertise or independent housing authority. “So we have to focus on how we can get that kind of expertise.”
Options include engaging in inter-municipal agreements that allow Shelter Island to share resources with nearby communities or working with a nonprofit.
With additional public input, she said, the priorities might shift. But the Community Housing Fund Advisory Board (CH-FAB) has collected a lot of input, done significant research, and toured East Hampton and Southampton developments with Ruhle and Highsmith.
“(CH-FAB) has spent a lot of time going around and understanding how [other communities] have accomplished affordable housing and what the pitfalls are,” she said. “That’s all come together to inform how we think we need to move forward.”
‘Desperate, critical need’
While it’s up to the individual towns to decide which options suit their communities, Thiele said all agree “there is a desperate critical need for affordable housing.”
Having grown up and lived all his life in Sag Harbor, he said every East End problem leads back to housing affordability.
“Too much traffic on the roads in the morning heading east — it’s because people can’t afford to live here,” he said. “Talk to the local volunteer fire department or the local ambulance corps; they’ll tell you they’re having difficulty recruiting and retaining people for their volunteer services. Talk to the local hospital; they’ll tell you they have vacancies because even among doctors and nurses, professionals, they can’t afford to live here.”
Everyone, Thiele said, has dealt with an understaffed business. Meantime, school districts are having trouble recruiting teachers and other staff. But having district employees live in or nearby the community used to be commonplace.
“They were there for extracurricular activities,” Thiele said. “They were there to help students. Those are the kinds of things that we’re losing.”
Pandemic exacerbated the problem
All also agree the pandemic made a bad situation worse.
“The resources of those trying to buy a second home are outpacing the ability of those who need a first home,” Thiele said.
The goal of the Peconic Bay Region Community Housing Fund Act is to restore community balance, he said. But so off-balance is the local real estate market that the program isn’t designed just to relieve pressure on those at the lowest end. Instead, it serves everyone below the median.
“It’s not some narrow group in the community; basically half of the families that live on the East End would be eligible because that’s how bad the need is,” he said.
Income eligibility is around $155,000 for a family of two (the number, set by HUD and subject to change, is a multiple of the state median based on location, with high thresholds in Suffolk County reflecting the realities of the real estate market here).
“But you’d be hard pressed in Southampton or East Hampton or even Shelter Island to find a home under one million right now,” he said.
‘Everybody’s either vacationing or retired’
Ruhle said that he and Highsmith oversee the Housing Choice programs for their communities, also known as Section 8, a federal housing voucher program that focuses on earners at 80 percent of median income.
A vital feature of the Community Housing Fund is its relief to those in a somewhat higher income group.
“The middle class has really been hard hit, and that’s the group that wants to buy a home,” Ruhle said.
Like Thiele, he lamented the loss of vital volunteers and professionals, noting examples of accountants, doctors, and other medical personnel who couldn’t afford to stay and restaurants that failed to open because their staff couldn’t afford local housing.
“It affects everyone equally,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s equally bad, and it’s particularly hard-hitting not on my generation but on the younger generation. They want to be here, but they’re driven out.
“At some point, you can’t run a community with no employees where everybody’s either vacationing or retired. It just doesn’t work very well that way.”
‘Mommy and Daddy’s basement forever’
Highsmith said he’d seen the impact on his children, having set up a separate living space in his basement for an adult son and family.
“There’s just nothing available that he could actually afford to be in and also take care of his family,” Highsmith said.
His daughter also couldn’t afford to move back after graduating from college. “So we’re going to lose that talent.”
“Not having the means for housing, it becomes extremely difficult,” he said. “No one wants to live in Mommy and Daddy’s basement forever, I hope.”
His organization handles five wait lists for various complexes, and “everyone one of those waiting lists has over 1,000 names on it, and that’s a problem. That’s a problem.”
“There’s just no opportunity out here in the East End,” he said. “Something has to be done.”
No single answer meets the need
“The challenge is that whatever we build will always be modest and marginal,” Highsmith said; dozens of units where thousands are needed. But “some impact is better than nothing.”
He said that by demonstrating what’s possible, Community Housing Fund-supported development might inspire additional private action.
Ruhle also envisions using the fund to “just retain housing we currently have.” By using down-payment assistance, eligible buyers can compete with buyers intending to tear down lower-cost housing.
For example, he said, a neighbor sold a home for about $500,000, and the buyer tore it down, replacing it with a much larger house and pool. That home is now worth $2.275M. “We’re just trying to retain stuff that’s currently functioning as affordable.”
Another example in East Hampton is motels and small inns targeted for the short-term and high-end boutique rental market could instead be converted to affordable housing.
“There’s no single bullet,” he said. And indeed, no one is proposing high-rise towers.
“The single most cost-efficient way to build affordable housing is [with] a giant skyscraper, but that has no place on the East End, and I don’t think anyone wants that,” he said.
Instead, East End communities need to think about places where additional housing makes sense — adding an apartment over a store, for example. “There’s no single bullet answer — this will solve the problem. It’s all different kinds of things.”
Continuous regular funding
Essential, particularly in a time when the state has imposed town budget caps, the 0.5 percent transfer tax, Ruhle said, “will give a continuous regular funding source.”
“This will start to chip away at the problem,” he said. “It also rightfully creates hope because instead of thinking, ‘Well, I’m leaving town because I got no chance of ever living here,’ if there’s a continuous program generating housing that’s recycled with recapture provisions, then it will be self-sustaining over time.”
Ruhle said the process of “recycling” housing is similar to old traditions of passing down homes within a family.
“Somebody would pass away or move in with their relatives, and the house would stay in the family and go from generation to generation,” he said.
“Now, everyone is cashing out and going to South Carolina or Florida, and [their former primary homes] are becoming second homes, investment properties, or airbnbs. So they’re lost to the recycling effect.”
As a regular source of revenue, the proposed transfer tax would enable towns to recycle “smaller houses that are now tear-down fodder.”
And where towns can couple Community Housing with water quality improvement initiatives, such as upgrading septic systems, “you’re accomplishing two public purposes — creating affordable housing and cleaning the groundwater or the harbors. “
He said that retaining some homes of modest size keeps “the character of the community” rather than “just every single house is at the maximized square footage.”
Highsmith said he’d like to reverse the trend of transforming multiple-family houses into single-family houses, particularly in downtown areas.
“This may be an opportunity not necessarily to add or do something foreign to a community but bring back kind of the vernacular of a village-style (multifamily) home,” he said.
A former chair of the Village of Southampton Architectural Review Board, Highsmith said, “I was never a fan of building a big old home and putting it behind a hedge.”
Role of TDR?
Ruhle said that in towns where transfer of development rights (TDR) programs are in place, they’re helpful for Community Housing because they enable greater density.
“One of the limitations on affordable housing on the East End has always been the fact that we don’t have sewers,” he said, with certain exceptions (such as parts of Greenport Village, Sag Harbor Village, and Shelter Island Heights).
But under Suffolk County’s sanitary code, TDR can be used to transfer sanitary credits from land preserved as open space to allow double density on lots deemed suitable for such development.
However, Highsmith pointed out that it costs money to purchase development rights, and competition in places where they’re also available to private developers can further drive up pre-development costs. The transfer tax offers some assistance because it can cover pre-development costs.
“There’s a lot that goes into pre-development before we get to the point of even constructing anything,” he said.
On Shelter Island, the Town Board recently engaged a consultant to study TDR (as required under the Community Preservation Fund law). It would be used solely for Community Housing, but, Brach-Williams said, a general lack of public water and sewer systems means TDR isn’t feasible.
Anyone developing Community Housing on Shelter Island will be constrained by what’s allowed under the Suffolk County Sanitary Code, with limited capacity for variances.
“We have a natural limitation because we can’t do a TDR program,” she said.
Community Housing and water
As it relates to housing, water is about the supply of potable water and wastewater management.
When a housing program recycles old homes — purchasing them, making needed upgrades to septics and other systems, but not vastly enlarging them — Ruhle said the impact on water supply is unchanged, and wastewater management is improved.
“It’s true that if somebody buys them, tears them down, and puts a McMansion, they’re going to be required to upgrade the system,” he said. “We’d like to upgrade them and simultaneously keep them affordable.”
“Not blowing them up into 3,000 or 4,000 square foot houses, but keeping them in the 1,500 to 1,800 range which for years was sufficient for raising a family.”
Like Highsmith, Ruhle also noted the loss of multifamily homes in downtown areas, such as Sag Harbor Village, the Lanes in Amagansett, and parts of Montauk. “Those small denser areas naturally were affordable, but now even those values have been blown out.”
Unlike Shelter Island, many parts of East Hampton and Southampton have public water supplies through the Suffolk County Water Authority (SCWA), enabling higher density as onsite potable water wells aren’t necessary.
“That gives us a big advantage because that’s the other half of the equation for the health department,” Ruhle said. “Are you cleaning your sewage, and do you have potable water?”
Highsmith said that within Southampton, some villages and hamlets are investigating the creation of small sewer districts to improve water quality and enhance opportunities for businesses and housing.
He noted that many areas in the Town of Southampton have private wells. As a result, the housing authority must contend with increasingly strict county rules, even for essential home improvements.
“Once [a project] goes to the health department, 99 percent of the time they’re going to require you to upgrade your septic,” he said. “Which is not a bad thing.”
Fortunately, some state, county, and local CPF funds are available for water quality improvement projects. “So I’m definitely in support of any initiative that improves water quality.”
A balanced community
Thiele said the discussion illustrates the array of issues that towns and villages have to balance.
“You can’t put these things in a silo and just talk about affordable housing over here. Or just talk about open space over here. Water quality over here,” he said. “People want a balanced community. “
“They want clean water. They want the community character that the East End provides for them. But they also want the opportunity to buy a house where either they grew up or have a job.”
The question facing all East End communities is, “how do you meet that balance.”
“The demand for affordable housing is is extraordinary,” he said, and “you can’t just build your way out of it.”
Each town faces unique challenges.
“Southold is different than Shelter Island, and Riverhead is different than East Hampton,” he said. “Each town has to put its own plan together.”
While numerous tools are available, “this is not a problem you’re going to solve without having the resources.”
“Whether it’s to deal with very old cesspools and septic systems or the potential for maybe accessory apartments or apartments over stores, we need the resources to be able to do this,” he said.
‘Lack of resources’
Thiele likened the current housing situation to concerns in the 1980s when “to protect community character we wanted to preserve open space.”
Through private fundraising or a bond act, he recalled that communities would “scrape every dollar together to try to preserve a little bit of open space here and there, but conservation couldn’t keep pace with development until we had the Community Preservation Fund.”
“The revenue it generated allowed our conservation efforts to keep pace with development,” he said. “It’s the same thing with affordable housing.”
Towns want to provide affordable housing, as demonstrated by efforts over the past decades, but “one project at a time every couple of years doesn’t meet the demand.”
“It’s not a lack of political will,” Thiele said. “It’s the lack of resources.”
“Without a dedicated long-term funding source that only goes to housing, it’s impossible for the towns to provide the supply of housing necessary to at least attempt to meet the demand,” he said.
“And that’s what this referendum is all about — to at least give the towns the tools they need to address what we all agree is a critical problem in a crisis mode.”
Accessory dwelling units
Highsmith said he’d included ADUs in two new single-family affordable homes built as part of a larger private development. However, adding ADUs to existing homes can be tricky, particularly in areas where small lots present septic and zoning challenges.
Southampton is looking into code adjustments to streamline homeowner ADU processes, he said.
In Shelter Island, Brach-Williams said, ADUs are permitted under special licenses issued by the Community Housing Board. Still, only a few homeowners have applied, and the town needs to work out some practical details.
Ruhle said ADUs as a solution reminds him of a proposal in Colorado “where everyone favored public transit because they were hoping somebody else would take the bus so they could drive their care to the ski resort unimpeded.”
While ADUs should “absolutely, positively” be part of the solution, he said they’re not going to solve the problem because they cast individual homeowners in the role of landlords.
“Some people — and I’ll throw myself in that group — just do not want someone else in their house renting,” he said.
And, for those who do, there’s already an unregulated sector of “people renting and not declaring it on their income taxes, and they’d like to keep doing that.”
“Frankly, if we didn’t have those, we probably wouldn’t have a year-round population,” he said.
Ruhle said that ADUs might offer a workable solution for employers with properties with the capacity to house staff on site. Still, septic and zoning challenges also limit these possibilities.
Each town sets different parameters governing who may live in town-regulated ADUs.
“In East Hampton, you absolutely can rent it to whoever you want as long as it’s a year-round rental and the person you’re renting it to lives in East Hampton, and the rent is capped (by HUD standards),” he said. “You pick them; we qualify them.”
Each town, he said, can choose a tenant selection system “provided that it’s not in any way discriminatory.”
Inhibiting open space preservation?
Thiele said changing the exemption levels would somewhat reduce the amount captured by the 2 percent CPF transfer tax. But this change is long overdue. The Legislature set the levels in 1998 based on the median house price.
“We didn’t want to affect the affordable housing market, so it was $250,000,” Thiele said. “We haven’t updated that number in 25 years.”
Furthermore, the authors of the CPF had to estimate what the fund would generate if enacted and came up with a figure of $15M in the first year. After being approved in all five East End towns, CPF raised $25M in the first year.
While annual revenue has fluctuated with changing real estate values — dipping to $40M in 2009 during the Great Recession — it soared to $210M in 2021 “because everybody wanted to buy a house on the East End of Long Island,” Thiele said.
“We’ve averaged $100M a year through most of the last decade,” he said. “From my perspective, increasing the exemption to make sure we don’t impact the affordable housing market — given everything else that the CPF has generation and where the market is — is a small trade-off for helping to promote Community Housing on the East End.”
Non-construction uses
Using an example of an available $800,000 house, Thiele said, “the biggest problem for somebody trying to buy [that] house is getting into the market, you know, having the down payment or just having enough to be able to get a bank mortgage.”
One possible non-construction use for Community Housing Fund revenues is providing shared equity agreements, where a new homebuyer splits costs with the fund.
“It wouldn’t be a gift; it wouldn’t be a giveaway,” he said. “The town would have a share in the equity of that house.”
When the home sells, the town retains 50 percent of the equity and applies the gain to its Community Housing Fund “to help another family.”
In Southampton, Highsmith said he employs a strategy that assists homebuyers while keeping the house affordable in perpetuity. To do so, the town or nonprofit retains ownership of the land. He used an example: a parcel valued at $900,000 and a house at $300,000. Rather than seeking a mortgage for $1.2M, the eligible homebuyer needs to finance only the value of the house.
The agency writes an agreement that gets recorded in the county clerk’s office, acknowledging the joint investment. The agreement sets out resale provisions that include first right of refusal for the housing authority and reliance on an appraisal to determine fair market value.
Homeowners understand they won’t be permitted to make certain improvements — expanding the habitable area or adding expensive amenities.
Another potential non-construction use would be to help current homeowners maintain their affordable residences by providing home maintenance assistance. Some funding is already available through Community Block Grants and other sources.
Perhaps a home lacks modern doors and windows and, as a result, isn’t energy efficient, and escalating utility costs adversely impact its ongoing affordability, Highsmith said. Or it badly needs a septic upgrade, but the homeowner can’t pay the upfront costs.
“There are other ‘unaffordabilities’ other than the cost of the property itself,” he said.
Ruhle said that while Community Block Grant funding can secure money for home improvements, eligibility is limited to 80 percent of median area income. That means these resources don’t help middle-class residents who may be “holding on by their fingernails.”
Local Community Housing Fund revenues could help such homeowners pay for needed home improvements that help them stay in affordable homes, he said.
Community Land Trusts
East Hampton has used shared equity agreements like those described by Thiele but, like Southampton, also wants to retain the affordability of the properties it develops and manages. So it, too, has used the Community Land Trust model of maintaining ownership of the underlying land to aid in keeping properties affordable for low- and mid-income buyers.
Ruhle said it is thanks to the success of Community Land Trusts in other states that New York housing authorities can employ 99-year land leases, which government-backed mortgage financiers now accept.
“The big lending institutions now look at 99-year land leases, and it’s like, oh yeah, that’s no problem,” he said. “So it’s a
kind of synergy — everybody’s in the same business learning from each other.”
Highsmith said that programs that provide a homebuyer with downpayment assistance or remove the land value from the homebuyer’s share of the investment mean a mortgage applicant is more likely to qualify for what’s known as a conforming mortgage. As a result, they don’t need private mortgage insurance, which further reduces costs.
What about senior housing?
Highsmith, whose agency runs a 37-unit senior apartment complex, said, “the need for senior housing on the East End is absolutely paramount. There’s such a deficiency opportunity overall for affordable housing but more so for individuals who’ve spent their entire lives in the community.”
In his management capacity, Highsmith said he is sometimes the last person a senior resident will speak with. “I’m a spiritual man, and as part of my faith, I believe that we take care of our elders in the latter part of their lives.”
A concentrated effort is needed to create more senior housing and opportunities for recreation and socializing.
“Making all of our seniors feel like they’re a part of our community; they belong, and they matter — they matter most importantly,” he said.
Brach-Williams said that a recent survey of attitudes toward housing on Shelter Island gathered anecdotal information about people leaving the community who wished there were different options.
Part of the Island’s Community Housing Plan is to gather better data on what those options should be.
Why not use CPF funds for housing?
Thiele explained that it’s not possible to use Community Preservation Fund for housing — when voters approved them, they dedicated the revenues solely to land preservation. Voters later agreed to use 20 percent for water quality improvement projects.
However, none of the five East End towns had completed its open space plan. “That’s particularly true on the North Fork and Shelter Island, where they haven’t generated the kind of money East Hampton and Southampton have.”
Further, the towns haven’t come close to attaining the aims of their water quality improvement plans. “We’re not close to reversing the trends on water quality.”
Lastly, there are legal obligations. Where towns have bonded against their CPF revenue, “they’ve got to pay those bonds off.” He said bondholders wouldn’t “take kindly” to towns using the funds for other purposes.
Moreover, “housing is a discrete and distinct need. It deserves a long-term solution,” he said.
“If we thought that we could meet all of the needs for land preservation, water quality, and housing within the existing program … that would have been the easier thing to do,” he said. “It just isn’t possible.”
He also pushed back on the idea that housing competes with open space preservation or water quality; instead, each is worth pursuing. Thiele said the CPF is one of the most successful land preservation programs in the United States.
“We know this tool works,” he said. “There’s no reason why it can work for housing.”
Up to voters
“This is a critical opportunity for those who have been lamenting the housing issue here for decades,” Thiele said. “This is their chance to go to the polls and do something about it that will benefit generations to come.”
It’s up to voters to say whether the East End towns will become a place where “everybody is on vacation or retired” and, Thiele said, there’s “nobody to be in the fire department or provide services or run the shops on Main Street.”
“We’re at a tipping point,” he said. “This is a chance to reverse the trend and give people hope that there are tools available to meet affordable housing needs.”
Ruhle reminds voters the real estate transfer tax is a buyer’s tax, a “welcome tax” that serves as a price of admission for people investing in the community.
“You’re paying a little bit of a fee when you come to East Hampton or Shelter Island or Southampton or Southold,” he said. “And, you’re contributing to our community by buying and moving here.”
Those buying in at the highest levels contribute more than others, “but we’re not taxing people that currently live there and [already] contribute. We’re not taxing sellers. We’re taxing buyers.”
“You’re contributing your little part in advance, and we’re grateful for it, and, hopefully, if it passes, we will spend it wisely.”
