Suffolk Closeup: Affording a Home in Suffolk County

A kind of good news is that the median selling price of a single-family home in Suffolk County declined—but, relatively, not much—from a record $760,000 in August to $740,000 last month, reported Newsday last week.

Some bad news is that the interest on a typical 30-year mortgage has gone up to an average of 7.4% this month, noted Newsday, “nearly a full-percentage point since July.” Newsday has been putting its pieces on housing under a label “Wallet Watch.” And, indeed, selling prices and mortgage costs take a huge bite out of wallets.

Also, the price of homeowners insurance is jumping with insurance companies especially nervous about settlements resulting from the extreme weather that climate change is causing. And then there are property taxes.

The alternative of renting also carries sky-high costs here now.

My SUNY Old Westbury investigative reporting students have related with dread their prospects for housing. Where can they go upon leaving their parents’ homes? Can they remain here?

As to my perspective regarding the absence of affordability in housing in these times, my wife and I rented our first living space, a basement apartment in Hempstead, for $50 a month in 1961. Unbelievable today. We bought our first house in Sayville, in western Suffolk, for $19,000 in 1964. The mortgage had 3% interest. Deciding to head east, we sold it for $39,000 in 1974, then using what we received we bought a century-old classic saltbox house in Noyac for $45,000.

One of my first series when I became a reporter in 1962 at the Babylon Town Leader were stories on the fear then of garden apartments in this town in the southwest corner of Suffolk County.

The fear was based, as residents I interviewed said, on Suffolk County becoming “another Queens.” Now I grew up in Queens and appreciate folks in Suffolk wanting—as I, too, prefer—a less congested housing environment than the two-family house, in a string of two-family houses, along Francis Lewis Boulevard in St. Albans where we lived.

I wrote about the new garden apartments in Babylon Town leaving room for that standard on Long Island and indeed the U.S., a single family house. Moreover, I interviewed folks who lived in those garden apartments who explained that without one, they would be hard-pressed to pay for housing. And that was then.

In recent years, public officials on all levels in Suffolk County are looking for ways to deal with what truly is a housing crisis. This includes, in addition to garden apartments, other types of housing, especially what’s being called the accessory dwelling unit, or ADU. It’s definition online is “a small, self-contained residential living space located on the same lot as a primary single-family home.”