We should be discussing accessory apartments

If just 10 percent of Long Island’s single-family homes had legal accessory apartments, that could help solve our housing crisis by increasing the stock of safe, affordable apartments available to young people and older adults.”

As part of a five-year, $25 billion plan to increase New York state’s stock of affordable housing, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed legislation on Jan. 5 to permit accessory “dwelling units,” more commonly known as accessory apartments, across the state.
Nassau’s new county executive, Republican Bruce Blakeman, held a news conference last week outside an East Meadow home, surrounded by a cadre of like-minded GOP leaders, to denounce Hochul’s proposal, saying it threatens to “destroy” suburbia and turn the county “into the sixth borough of New York City.”
U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who plans to challenge Hochul in the gubernatorial primary, also came out against the proposal, calling it “radical.”
Both acted as if accessory apartments exist nowhere on Long Island. Funny thing is, there are many towns across the Island that allow them. In fact, most of Suffolk County permits them — and we haven’t heard folks out there complain that these housing units are wreaking havoc on their suburban way of life, whatever that might mean.
According to a 2017 map developed by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, using data supplied by the Long Island Index, accessory apartments are allowed in these Suffolk towns: Babylon, Brookhaven, East Hampton, Huntington, Islip, Riverhead, Shelter Island and Southold.
They are allowed on a limited basis in Southampton, and Smithtown permits them for family members and domestic staff. Only about a dozen tiny villages across Suffolk prohibit them.
Different government agencies manage permitting for accessory apartments. In Babylon, it’s the Accessory Apartment Review Board; in Huntington, the Accessory Apartment Bureau; in Islip and Southold, the boards of zoning appeals; in Brookhaven, East Hampton, Riverhead and Shelter Island, the building departments.
“Affordable accessory apartments” have been allowed in East Hampton in one form or another since 1984, but in 2016, the town loosened its zoning laws, allowing an even greater number of them.
Strangely, it seems, local governments in Suffolk have embraced the notion of accessory apartments, while in Nassau, most of our local governments have either allowed them in limited circumstances only or banned them outright. Why?
Let’s begin with why they’re so popular in Suffolk. According to a 2017 study by the Long Island Index — “Home Remedies, Accessory Apartments on Long Island: Lessons Learned,” by former Newsday reporter Elizabeth Moore — if just 10 percent of the Island’s single-family homes had legal accessory apartments, that could help solve our housing crisis by increasing the stock of safe, affordable apartments available to young people and older adults.
“Accessory apartments have proven their worth as the most affordable type of rental housing in the region,” the Index stated. “They can be easily accommodated because they don’t require large infusions of capital, new roads, new sewers or expansion of the electrical grid. Instead, existing neighborhoods absorb the rental-seeking population like a sponge, while stabilizing finances for tax-strapped home-owners. They also provide affordable housing that is blended throughout the community rather than clustered, and having a resident homeowner usually means that they are better maintained than rentals with absentee owners.”
Long Islanders pay among the highest taxes in the country, which are most likely to destroy the Island’s suburban way of life, not accessory apartments. High taxes, coupled with high mortgage and rental costs, have been driving young people out of the region to less costly parts of the country since the 1990s, and even earlier than that. They are also forcing older adults — retirees on fixed incomes — out of their homes.
Accessory apartments are a low-cost alternative for young people looking to strike out on their own. Many young people from around the country, even the globe, come to Long Island to study at our prestigious universities, but too many never stay past graduation because they simply can’t afford to live here. That’s a shame, because our region could use their talents as we strive to become one of the nation’s high-tech corridors.
Accessory apartments also give older adults, particularly those on fixed incomes, a way to offset their high property-tax burden, allowing them to stay put. Talk about a win-win.
Yet politicians like Blakeman and Suozzi eschew them because, some worry, accessory apartments might add a few extra cars to our blocks and a few extra kids to our schools. We encourage them to rethink their positions, considering all of the facts at hand.