Southold Town’s shortage of affordable housing has been decades in the making, but its consequences are increasingly reaching far beyond the people struggling to find a place to live.

The shortage is making it harder to put teachers in classrooms, nurses in the hospital and younger volunteers on fire trucks, while pushing families with children out of local school districts and eroding the year-round population that keeps the North Fork functioning after the summer crowds go home.

That was the broader warning that emerged Monday evening at a North Fork Civics housing forum at CAST in Southold, where educators, health care officials, firefighters and residents described a housing shortage increasingly reaching into nearly every corner of local life.

“The lack of affordable housing in our town impacts all of us,” said Katie Stokes, chair of the civic’s Housing Working Group, which organized the forum.

Southold Town’s own comprehensive plan declared the shortage of affordable housing to be at “crisis proportions” in 2019, Stokes noted. Since then, home prices and rents have soared, while much of the town’s rental inventory has migrated toward the short-term market.

(On Tuesday morning, the Orient Association posted a video of the forum to YouTube, embedded below.)

‘Consistency matters’

Panelist Amy Brennan, principal of Cutchogue East Elementary School, said the consequences are showing up in classrooms.

Several faculty members commute at least 45 minutes each way, Brennan said, complicating everything from child care and family responsibilities to participation in after-school activities. At least five valued teachers have left Cutchogue East in recent years for jobs closer to home.

Sometimes Brennan finds an excellent candidate in the spring, only to get a call before school starts saying the teacher has taken another position closer to home.

Then the hiring process begins again, in August, when the candidate pool has dwindled.

“Each one is a relationship with children, colleagues, families that we have to rebuild with a new staff member,” Brennan said. “In elementary school, consistency matters a lot.”

Housing is affecting the other side of the classroom door as well.

Brennan recalled meeting with the parents of a fifth grader whose landlord decided to renovate their rental house and turn it into an Airbnb. The family had to leave the district. The child had been receiving significant support at Cutchogue East and was doing well, Brennan said. The parents were so desperate to keep her there that they asked whether they could pay tuition themselves. They could not afford it.

Other students bounce among Mattituck-Cutchogue, Southold, Greenport and Riverhead as their families search for housing, sometimes leaving and later returning.

“That’s challenging for kids because you don’t have continuity,” Brennan said.

Declining enrollment is reshaping the Mattituck-Cutchogue School District. Brennan said the district is leasing out the Cutchogue West building, which houses administrative offices, and relocating administrators to Cutchogue East and Mattituck High School.

‘Can I afford to live here?’

The same housing pressures are playing out several miles east at Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital. Chief Administrative Officer Paul Connor said that when he began working at the Greenport hospital in the late 1990s, about 75% of its employees lived on the North Fork or nearby.

Today, that figure is about 48% to 49%.

Many employees commute from farther west, some for an hour or more, Connor said. The hospital’s recently hired chief nursing officer commutes from Lindenhurst. That leaves Eastern Long Island Hospital in the peculiar position of recruiting health care workers who may pass several other hospitals on their way to Greenport.

“When candidates consider joining our hospital, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘Can I afford to live here?’” Connor said.

With Southold Town’s median home price at roughly $1.45 million, he said, the answer is increasingly difficult even for professionals earning good salaries.

“We can build new programs, purchase state-of-the-art technology and expand services, but none of that matters if we don’t have physicians, nurses, technicians, therapists and support staff that we need to care for our patients,” Connor said.

Then there are the people who respond when those patients call 911.

‘A true emergency’

Southold volunteer firefighter Mike Gaunci, 27, described a department with a striking generational divide: a small group of regular responders younger than 30 and many members in their 50s and 60s, but comparatively few in between.

Gaunci believes the missing generation reflects people who left the North Fork and could not afford to return and raise families.

That matters in a volunteer fire service where some calls require firefighters to climb ladders carrying roughly 100 pounds of equipment, and where an ambulance call involving a trip to Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead can consume more than two hours of a volunteer’s time.

Many volunteers are already working 40, 50 or 60 hours a week before giving another 10, 20 or 30 hours to their departments, Gaunci said.

“A lot of the people who are putting in a lot of the hours are getting a little bit tired,” he said.

Zoning and subsidies

The implications drew a blunt response later in the meeting from Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi, who was sitting in the audience.

“We have a true emergency, and we need to treat it like an emergency,” Stuessi said. “We need to treat this like a three-alarm fire and start finding some solutions.”

Stuessi said residents should pay particular attention to the number and ages of active — rather than simply enrolled — members of local volunteer fire departments.

“You’d be frightened,” he said.

Greenport is considering allowing accessory dwelling units and additional residential space above downtown businesses, but Stuessi argued that incremental measures will not be enough.

“All of that is like trying to kill an elephant with a BB gun,” he said. “It’s not going to work. We’ve got to do some things at scale.”

Former Greenport Mayor Dave Kapell, speaking from the audience, put much of the blame on zoning rules that he said have failed to provide the multifamily rentals young people traditionally use as their first rung on the housing ladder.

He pointed to underused and vacant properties in Southold that he said could potentially accommodate housing.

“There are developers out there that want to do this,” Kapell said. “They need the zoning, and they need subsidy. The subsidy is available, but the zoning is not.”

‘We have a true emergency, and we need to treat it like an emergency.’ Greenport Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi

Southold Supervisor Al Krupski said the town already allows some accessory apartments and is working to develop a subsidy program to encourage more of them. But he acknowledged that the town’s zoning code has evolved piecemeal over decades, complicating efforts to expand housing options.

“The town code over the years is kind of like all those pieces of that glass,” Krupski said, gesturing toward towering stained-glass windows at CAST, “except they’re not in orderly fashion. And right now we’re trying to realign all the different sections of the town code so that we’ll be able to subsidize that sort of housing also.”

Southold Councilwoman Alexa Suess told the audience towards the end of the meeting that her landlord had recently informed her that her rent would rise to more than $4,000 a month, forcing her to find another place to live, according to the Orient Association’s video. Suess, a local businesswoman who grew up in Greenport, said virtually no one she went to school with who is her age still lives here.

“I’m in my early 30s and I work in town government and I don’t know anybody my age that I went to school with that is still here. I can maybe count one or two people,” Suess said.

Joey Owens, a 2019 Southold High School graduate who grew up in Greenport and Southold and spoke at the forum, said his high school friends have left as well.

Owens described watching friends leave for college, jobs or simply somewhere they can afford to live. His own family, he said, remains here largely because their landlord charges them substantially below market rent.

In winter, he said, neighborhoods empty out and Greenport can feel like a “ghost town.”

“It’s hard watching your friends leave and not be able to stay,” he said.