Shelter Island Town Board: Affordable housing takes center stage

A  lengthy discussion at the Town Board work session Tuesday afternoon with the team from Community Development Long Island (CDLI) and Urban Builders revealed the complexity of the affordable housing effort that’s still in its infancy on the Island.

The CDLI is a regional nonprofit organization combining government, business, and civic leaders focused on aiding communities with affordable housing issues. 

While the CDLI was responsive to questions about the process at Tuesday’s meeting, members of the public raised concerns. The CDLI group, working with Matt Gross of Urban Builders — a commercial and residential contractor and construction management company — have traveled this road for many years with other municipalities. Shelter Island’s last affordable housing project was 29 years ago, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs created several units of affordable houses for sale on Bowditch Road.

One important part of the process — which has been explained — is that a Memorandum of Understanding with a municipality is not a binding contract, but a step toward creating binding agreements pertaining to financing, construction and management of affordable housing.

A subcommittee of some Town Board members, Community Housing Board members and lawyers for each group met only a week ago to begin talking about the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in what Councilman Benjamin Dyett described as a positive beginning.

As one of the Town Board’s liaisons to the Community Housing Board, Mr. Dyett hailed the selection of the CDLI group as “such an impressive team.”

It’s a team known to the Town through work on the creation of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) with Shelter Island becoming the first municipality to get applications filed for those grants and the first in the state to finish an ADU. These units allow property owners to either adapt a main house to accommodate a tenant, or develop housing that could be in a separate structure on their property.

CDLI President Gwen O’Shea explained the Memorandum of Understanding the Town is drafting will spell out details of what will be a collaborative process between her team and the Island, which she hopes will lead to creation of binding agreements and, eventually, 10 units of affordable rentals.

For members of the public in the room and on Zoom, there was a desire for more specifics, especially in terms of financial information. Mr. Dyett pointed out the financial model to be created is a “living document” that will be adapted to specifics as the process moves forward. Ground breaking wouldn’t happen until and unless binding agreements are in place, he said.

Every financial model varies based on which grants, loans and other elements are known. There are also specifics of cost involved that continue to escalate year to year. Among the sources of funding are grants that could come to the Town if it meets the requirements to be named a “Pro-Housing Community” by New York State. The window of opportunity for those grants is currently closed, but expected to reopen in the spring of 2026 and could be awarded in July if those grants follow the pattern of timing that this year’s grants did, according to George Fabricatore, CDLI’s grant writer. He outlined some other potential sources of grants.

Mr. Fabricatore noted that as the State budget is being crafted, legislators have “member items” they can request and that can also be a source of some funding. There are also infrastructure loans and grants that could cover roads, septics and other needs to support the sites being looked at for the 10 units. 

There were questions about rents and what tenants of a unit could    Again, specific numbers aren’t available yet, although there were references to a percent of a community’s median income.

Community Housing Board Chairwoman Elizabeth Hanley pointed out that the mandate she and her colleagues were given was to work on creating ADUs, housing for middle income renters and housing for local workers.

There have been recent discussions about giving preferences to volunteers of the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Service, but no specifics have been determined.

To criticisms that the initial housing should be for seniors, some of whom are being priced out of remaining on the Island, Ms. Hanley said plans also call for future affordables to target other groups.

There will be many more meetings with the public going forward, Supervisor Amber Brach-Williams, said, with ongoing efforts to be transparent and to elicit more comments from the community.