What Is the Law Regarding a Legal Two Family House Long Island
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LI Index: LI needs to create a legal path for accessory apartments
For many years now, Long Islanders have constitute their own way to accost 2 problems endemic to the region: the growing number of homeowners having problem keeping upwards with their mortgages and the urgent need for more affordable housing. Their answer has been accessory apartments in single-family homes: separate, secondary, dwelling units typically of much smaller size than the primary domicile, either in the house itself or in a railroad vehicle business firm or converted garage.
Almost four decades after some Long Island towns began cautiously issuing permits for accessory apartments in single-family homes, this housing type is broadly accustomed in Suffolk Canton fifty-fifty as it remains controversial in much of Nassau. At the same time, despite any number of crackdowns, amnesties and code changes, both counties continue to contend with rampant illegal apartments whose owners are uninterested in finding ways to be legal. Unbeknown to many, several Suffolk jurisdictions have all only resigned themselves to the illegal rentals by quietly assessing extra taxes on presumed scofflaws who refuse to allow inspectors access to their homes.
Only if accompaniment apartments oasis't turned out to be a catholicon, they have however proven their worth as the nearly affordable blazon of rental on the marketplace and a stabilizing strength in many Long Island neighborhoods, as noted in a new report that I have written for the Long Island Alphabetize titled "Home Remedies – Accompaniment Apartments on Long Island: Lessons Learned." As Babylon Supervisor Richard Schaffer says, "I call up we've learned it is extremely necessary to accept legal accompaniment apartments – as an option for housing, only also as an selection for the homeowner to be able to maintain his or her quality of life, to be able to pay their bills."
The single-family neighborhoods that defined Long Island'southward appeal are at present home to shrinking families struggling to cover the costs of all those empty bedrooms, even as Long Island'south work force faces a shortage of moderately priced rental housing. So, it is lilliputian wonder that unmarried-family homeowners responded to this demand for rentals by installing an estimated 90,000 illegal apartments by the mid-1980s, according to the Long Island Regional Planning Lath.
The introduction of accessory apartments in that magnitude was possible considering they don't require large infusions of capital, new roads, new sewers or expansion of the electric grid. Instead, existing neighborhoods absorb the rental-seeking population similar a sponge, while stabilizing finances for taxation-strapped homeowners. Accompaniment apartments also provide affordable housing that is blended throughout the customs rather than clustered. And having a resident homeowner usually means that the apartment will be kept upward improve than typical rental homes.
Accessory apartments are clearly part of the Long Island landscape whether legal or not. Today, nine of Suffolk'due south ten towns take established procedures to legalize or authorize accessory apartments for not-relatives. In Nassau, but the town of Hempstead has done so. Of 97 Long Island villages with zoning powers, seven issue permits for accessory apartments, while another 4 allow continuation of apartments that predated their codes. Another 24 permit apartments only in limited circumstances. But 62 do not permit them.
The challenge is to ensure that a greater proportion are legal. And Long Island's experience offers valuable insights in that regard.
Babylon, for example, decided to insist on owner occupancy later on studying residents' complaints related to ii-family houses: Absentee landlords endemic but ten percent of the boondocks's two-families, simply their properties sparked 50 per centum of all complaints near them.
The town of Hempstead has a "senior residence" police force that allows the apartments if the homeowner or spouse is 62 or older. In 2009, Hempstead broadened rules on mother-daughter apartments to include siblings as well. Every bit of 2012, Oyster Bay's "parent-kid" apartments allow step-family members, in-laws and grandparents and grandchildren.
Westhampton Beach has canonical accessory apartments for burn down and EMS workers, graduates of Southampton High Schoolhouse, local employees or those of low to moderate income; Sag Harbor and Southampton Village have designed similarly community-centered let programs.
At this point, quite a few of Long Island'due south local governments can legitimately claim expertise in
regulating accessory apartments, and the Long Isle Alphabetize report includes an appendix detailing
the policies of every city, town and incorporated village in the region in this regard. Information technology only makes sense for Long Islanders to survey the experiences of their neighbors in finding locally appropriate ways to see the urgent demand for more affordable housing in the region.
Moore is a longtime old Newsday reporter, freelance writer and journalism lecturer.
accompaniment apartments apartments Long Island Real Estate 3:00 pm Friday, July 14, 2017 Long Island Business News
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Source: https://libn.com/2017/07/14/moore-long-island-needs-to-find-legal-path-for-accessory-apartments/
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