The developer of the Riverview Lofts apartment building in downtown Riverhead has proposed a 40-unit rental apartment complex with ground-floor retail space in Riverside.
Georgica Green Ventures, a Jericho-based development firm, has applied to the Southampton Town Community Housing Fund for a $2.4 million grant to help cover the purchase cost of about an acre of land off Flanders Road near the Riverside traffic circle.
With the funding and state tax credits, Georgica Green would build an apartment complex with a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom rental units priced for low and middle income tenants that the company would maintain and manage and a handful of retail shops along the Flanders Road frontage.
Rents would be capped at prices deemed affordable — meaning a tenant would be paying about 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities — for those earning between 60 percent and 100 percent of the area median income.
The Southampton Town Board will hold a public hearing on the CHF grant request on August 12 at 1 p.m. The town’s Community Housing Fund Advisory Committee has recommended that the town grant the funding award.
The Community Housing Fund draws revenues from a half-percent sales tax on most real estate transactions and earmarks it for housing-related funding programs intended to increase the supply of residential units affordable to low and middle income residents increasingly priced out of the housing market by soaring prices driven by second-home and investment markets.
“Our housing and planning departments have been working together on this for a long time and making sure that Georgica Green’s plans fit in with the Riverside revitalization design plans,” Southampton Town Councilman Michael Iasilli said this week.
“This would be an important project, these would be affordable apartments in perpetuity and the affordability would run with the property even if [Georgica Green] sold it, so it will always be affordable housing,” Iasilli said.
The project will not move forward until the planned Riverside sewage treatment plant is completed. The town recently cleared the property for the plant and is currently designing the sewer system, though the Town of Riverhead has sued Southampton because the designs for the plant do not allow for the county center and criminal court building to be connected to it.
The Flanders Road project has been on the town’s radar for about six months, Iasilli said.
The apartments would be built on three properties that Gerogica Green will purchase at 47 Flanders Road, just steps from the Riverside traffic circle and on the fringes of the land that the town has targeted to anchor the revitalization of the Riverside hamlet.
Kara Bak, the town’s director of housing and community services, which administers the CHF grants, said that the project would be designed to allow for connections to new roads that are planned for the regions just to the south of the property, where the town’s consultants have recommended creating new development that mixes commercial and residential space.
Georgica Green Ventures specializes at tapping the complex state-managed tax credit system that has long been the main source of funding for the development of most housing projects that will be offered at a below-market rental or sale rates.
The company has partnered with the South Fork towns to build most of the largest affordable housing developments built in the region in the last 15 years, including the Sandy Hollow Cove apartments in Tuckahoe, the recently completed Green at Gardiners Point on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton and is working with the Southampton Housing Authority on a proposal for land on Montauk Highway in western Water Mill.
In Riverhead, the company has built Riverview Lofts, which is currently the downtown area’s largest apartment complex. Georgica Green Ventures has four projects in the hopper in Riverhead Town. Three of those projects are proposals for mixed-use apartment buildings near Riverhead’s Long Island Rail Road station, although only one of them, a market rate 133 market-rate unit building dubbed The Vue, has received town approvals. The fourth is Northville Commons, a campus-style mixed-use affordable and workforce housing development near the First Baptist Church of Riverhead, which requires a zoning change that Riverhead Town officials are anticipated to act on soon.
-With Alek Lewis
This article was originally published by the Express News Group on 27East.com and reprinted here with permission.
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