Drawing for Housing List

With affordable housing in acutely short supply, more than 30 hopefuls attended a home ownership lottery drawing on May 31 at Town Hall in East Hampton, where numbers that had been randomly assigned to applicants were drawn and sequentially entered onto a waiting list.

The town’s Office of Housing and Community Development maintains the waiting list for the resale of single-family houses built as part of the town’s affordable housing program and manages construction of affordable housing for the town.

There are no houses or condominium units available at present for purchase through the housing office, Tom Ruhle, its director, said yesterday. But the town is in the process of developing a 12-unit condominium project at 181 Accabonac Road in East Hampton. That complex is to include three buildings, each consisting of one one-bedroom unit, two two-bedroom units, and one three-bedroom unit. The project has preliminary site plan approval from the town’s planning board.

“We’re negotiating with a builder,” Mr. Ruhle said yesterday. “I anticipate that soon we will start construction.”

Applicants are contacted and vetted for eligibility as opportunities to purchase become available. Applicants must have sufficient income and credit to qualify for a conventional mortgage, be first-time home buyers, live or work year round in the town, and be citizens or legal residents of the United States. Eligibility will be determined by the order drawn.

An existing list is down to around 10 names, Mr. Ruhle said. “Knowing that this 12-unit project is out there, it would have been imprudent not to have a new list,” he said. With the new list, “if somebody came up with a 35-unit project, we’d be ready to go,” he said.

Three hundred and thirty-six applications were received in the latest solicitation from the office of housing. On May 31, 331 numbers were drawn, the remainder discarded as they were duplicates from the same applicant, Mr. Ruhle said.

The numbers were placed into a tumbler, and the Rev. Steven Howarth of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, the vice chairman of the town’s ethics board, was tasked with drawing them, one at a time, from the tumbler. Mr. Howarth handed each to Mr. Ruhle, who gave them to Linda Norris, an administrative aide in the housing office, who recorded them.

“The list of names is not present in this building at this time,” to assure a random, unbiased drawing, Mr. Ruhle told those in attendance. “We couldn’t even look it up if we wanted to. . . . Good luck, everybody.”

The result of the drawing — the sequence in which each randomly assigned number was drawn — is posted on the town’s website.