Brain Drain

As Housing Prices Rise, Younger People Take Off

Publication: The Southampton Press

By Gianna Volpe

  Apr 28, 2014 10:36 AM 
 Apr 28, 2014 3:41 PM

Call it what you will—“brain drain” or “birth dearth”—but a recent study by Community Housing Innovations Inc. claims young talent is becoming increasingly rare in towns like Southampton and East Hampton due to high costs of living as well as a lack of jobs and affordable housing and rentals.

Overall, Long Island lost 12 percent of its 25- to 34-year-olds between 2000 and 2010, according to the nonprofit housing agency. That stands in contrast to a 6-percent loss in northern New Jersey and a 3-percent gain in New York City. The study claims age disparity is most severe in Long Island’s wealthiest suburbs.

Housing Innovations found that higher income municipalities like Westhampton, which lost 57 percent of 25- to 34 year-olds, have lost far more young adults than lower income municipalities such as Patchogue, which registered a 4-percent gain.

Tom Ruhle, East Hampton Town’s director of housing and community development, said this marked sparsity of millennials that has already begun to show its face along the forks, threatening community vitality.

“Fire departments are having trouble recruiting and are having to hire year-round EMTs because they don’t have enough volunteers,” said Mr. Ruhle. “It raises the question of where are we going to be in 30 years if this continues.”

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Suffolk County residents are already older, on average, than people across the United States as a whole—with an average in Suffolk County of 39.8 years compared to 37.2 years nationwide. Mr. Ruhle said the Housing Innovations claim that the disparity is more severe in wealthier areas can be demonstrated when dissecting the neighborhoods in East Hampton Town.

The average resident of East Hampton Village, he said, is 55.5 years old. Amagansett and Napeague came in at 52.2 and 55.4, while in Springs the average age is only 38.2 years old.

“Our population is slowly skewing older and older ... and that’s a big picture issue that we all have to look at,” Mr. Ruhle said.
Southampton Chamber of Commerce president Micah Schlendorf said the trend is affecting local businesses, whose owners are reporting increased difficulty in finding quality employees.

“A big issue we hear from chamber members is that it’s hard for them to find talented individuals to work for them—even part-time high school students to get started working for the local businesses, maybe go to school and come back and be interested in working there later on,” Mr. Schlendorf said. “That, unfortunately, seems to be diminishing because a lot of young ones are not coming back after school is over.”
Mr. Schlendorf said he believes high real estate costs, along with stigmas attached to the idea of workforce, or affordable, housing, are to blame for Long Island’s dwindling millennial population.

Eric Alexander of Vision Long Island, an advocacy organization that seeks to help local communities adapt to a changing world, suggested that towns and villages need to be willing to accommodate many young adults’ partiality to lively, walkable downtown areas.
“If Long Island wants to take advantage of young people’s preferences, which seem to be toward more urban living, we can, if we choose, adapt our downtowns to make places amenable for young people,” said Mr. Alexander. “The challenge for the East End is a lack of flexibility in allowing for the building types needed to make activities affordable enough.”

The CHI study claims millennials will continue migrating up and off-island to lower-cost urban enclaves like Brooklyn until there is a change in status quo on the literal home front, in addition to adapting downtown spaces to fit changing lifestyle preferences.
Former Southampton Town Supervisor Patrick Heaney said he believes this to be true.

“The way the zoning laws are configured in the Town of Southampton pretty much ensure that the only type of housing that will not be greeted with public outrage, public opposition or lack of political will is a small McMansion—and that’s discouraging,” Mr. Heaney said. “Someone who just gets out of college doesn’t have the equity to buy a house or a condo, so communities need to realize that if we were to ever put flesh on the bones of the ideas in our Comprehensive Master Plan, we need to have the courage to implement the ideas that appear in these studies.”

Mr. Heaney, legislative director for the Southampton Business Alliance, said he hopes the current Town Board will adopt legislation that creates standards for multifamily housing proposals to be directed immediately to the Planning Board if proper criteria is met.

“That way there could be a rational discussion based on the need for housing rather than the topic of multifamily housing in a Town Board room, where it’s just politicized,” Mr. Heaney said. “I say that because I was there. I know how difficult it is to get affordable housing.”

Current Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst did not return a call for comment.

The Southampton Housing Authority is currently partnered with developer Georgica Green Ventures on a proposed affordable housing project called Sandy Hollow Cove, which 25-year-old Tuckahoe resident Noelle Bailly, who works in real estate, said she opposes in favor of accessory apartments in private homes.

“It’s a really small lot, so we’re basically trying to figure out who’s behind it and why it has to be on this piece of property and why they’re forcing 28 rentals and now they’re calling it workforce housing,” said Ms. Bailly, who added she does not believe there is a local “brain drain” of her age group.
To her, the loss of local young people is a natural progression, not a problem. “Kids go,” Ms. Bailly said. “They go. I’m not from here. I’m from Montana. I left Montana and somebody goes and takes my place in Montana."

Plugging in - As seen in the Southampton Press Drive! Supplement

  BY GIANNAVOLPE   

                   

     When it comes to designing new cars, CAFE is king―and not the kind where you order a meal.

   CAFE, or Corporate Average Fuel Economy, is the number of miles per gallon that car manufacturers must meet when averaging the fuel economy of their entire fleet of passenger vehicles and light trucks, or else incur a stiff penalty.

   These federal regulations, first enacted by Congress in 1975, are largely responsible for the leaps and bounds made toward developing more fuel-efficient―and now even fuel-independent―vehicles in the last few   years, local car dealers say.

   No matter where consumers decide to buy a new vehicle, they will find improvements in fuel efficiency in nearly all makes and models.

   “The new CAFE regulations have a goal of 36.6 miles per gallon in 2016 and 55.5 mpg in 2025, which is a long way off from where we are today at 27 and change,” said Stuart Schoener, general manager at Storms Motors in Southampton. “Manufacturers have chosen different paths in order to get there, but at the end of the day we’re all making huge strides in fuel economy very quickly. In addition to hybrid and electric cars, transmission and energy technologies are being developed to make the regular gas engine car way more   efficient. For example, transmissions were three-speed automatics 20 years ago, and now we have General Motors and Ford working together on a 10-speed automatic.”

   Mr. Schoener said the strict new CAFE regulations, which were announced by the Obama administration in August 2012 and have been endorsed by all 14 car manufacturers, also will cause a bump in the use of diesel as a fuel source for some passenger vehicles. “Chrysler does not seem to be headed down the road of electric cars,” he said. “They seem to be heading in the diesel direction. Americans have never been open-minded to diesel, but it’s about to be rammed down their       

   throats." Manufacturers will be hit with huge penalties if they don’t meet these requirements―so huge, some of them could ultimately be prevented from existing. It’s the reason Porsche and Volkswagen merged as a company. Porsche doesn’t build cars that are fuel-efficient, so they merged to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy of the fleet.”

   Other manufacturers are devoting significant resources to the development of fuel-efficient and electric cars. American car manufacturer General Motors, for example, took the plunge with the Chevy Volt, a car with a loyal following referred to in the industry as the “Volt cult,” said sales manager Les Corwin at Buzz Chew Chevrolet-Cadillac in Southampton.

   “The Volt is a little different than other pure electric vehicles, because it has a gas generator in it that kicks on to produce electricity after the battery dies,” said Mr. Corwin. “The battery has a range of about 40 miles for commuters, but you can’t get stuck in it because as long as you have fuel in it, it’s like any other car.”

   There is always the risk of running out of power in a fully electric car. Driving beyond the range of the car’s battery life, which for   most is about 100 miles, could leave the driver stranded.

   At Otis Ford in Quogue, marketing manager Tom Otis IV said the limited range of most purely electric cars, like the Ford Focus Electric, have made them less appealing to buyers looking for a primary vehicle, and more attractive to those who are locally based. “The Focus Electric is more of an around-town vehicle and would make sense for people in this area, because you could leave it here for weekends,” he said. The car has a range of about 75 miles, which, according to industry calculations, translates into the equivalent of 105 miles to a gallon. If the driver lives locally, he or she “could go back and forth to work every day and never fill up a tank of gas for the lifetime of the vehicle.”

   Mr. Otis said some commuters who make the daily trek to Manhattan have opted to buy an electric or hybrid vehicle to gain access to HOV lanes.

   He noted that it’s worth taking the time to research your needs and the rules of the road. “Our regular non-plug-in hybrid C-Max can’t go in the HOV lane, because you now need to have a plug-in hybrid in order to get access [to the HOV lane] when you buy a new car,” he said of the advantage to investing in a hybrid-electric vehicle. “We have people who buy the C-Max Energi specifically for that reason.”

   And though some argue against electric cars by citing the exorbitant cost of electricity―Long Island has some of the nation’s highest electric rates―Mr. Schoener said those costs are easily canceled out by equally high fuel costs in the area.

   “We’re talking about the relative cost to run your car in Southampton, so we don’t want to compare the cost of electricity here to the cost of gas in South Carolina,” he said. “We pay as much extra for gas as we do for electricity―if not more―so it balances out. And gasoline is also a lot more volatile from a price point than electricity, because it hits people immediately. When the gigantic meltdown we had in this country was $5-a-gallon gas, it hit you before the end of the week. You buy one of these plug-in electric cars and, depending on how many miles you drive, the nature of the drive and the accessibility to voltage, you can last a month without making a trip to the gas station.”

   Electric vehicles can be charged using standard 110-volt outlets. A Ford C-Max Energi will get a full charge if plugged in overnight. That time can be cut down to four hours by installing a 240-volt charging station at home. The number of 240-volt charging stations in public places is rapidly growing and can now   be found at some restaurants looking for a novel way to bring in customers.

   The future of electric cars is, however, uncertain. “Electric cars are not the future, they are the means to an end,” said general sales manager Frank DeBlanco at Apple Honda in Riverhead. “I think in the future, cars are going to run using hydrogen fuel cell technology, which is currently in the research and development stage.”

   Improvements in the performance, and the style, of alternative fuel vehicles is a priority of most car manufacturers, mostly because of increasing fuel consumption standards, but also to tap into a growing market of consumers who care about environmental issues.

   One manufacturer also recognized a need to offer a luxury version to the lineup. Tesla, a California-based car manufacturing upstart, this year released the Model S―an electric car that can go 265 miles on a single charge―a range that leaves most market competitors in the dust.  

   Advancements in electric and hybrid car technology is moving at a fast pace. “I think people should lease cars for the next four or five years, because the technology is moving so quickly,” suggested Mr. Schoener of Storm Motors. “Three years ago, in order to get 40 miles to the gallon, you had to buy the tiniest car you could find. Now you can drive out with a full-sized sedan that gets 40 miles to the gallon―and we’re only at the bottom of the hill. We’re only getting around 30 mpg, and we have to get to 55 average in a little over a decade.”

   Mr. Schoener said the increasing size of the fuel-efficient vehicle shows him that larger vehicles stand to benefit the most from the developing technology, because they have the room to hold enough batteries giving them a longer range.

   It is possible that eventually alternative fuel powered vehicles will become the standard―and all of us will be waving as we pass a gas station.