A fight over sewage is preventing Long Island from solving its crippling housing crisis

• Suffolk County, Long Island's heavy reliance on septic tanks is contaminating its groundwater.
• It's also restricting the construction of dense housing as home prices and rents soar.
• Sewer issues are sometimes used as an excuse to avoid building more housing, activists say.

When you flush the toilet, you probably don't consider where its contents go.

The people of Suffolk County, Long Island, need to start considering it. That’s because the county — which encompasses the eastern portion of the island, including the Hamptons — relies overwhelmingly on septic tanks and cesspools, rather than a public sewer system, and those outdated systems are contaminating its groundwater aquifers.

And the sewer issue is also making another, much more politicized, problem worse: housing affordability.

Like most of the suburbs surrounding New York City, Suffolk County is suffering from a major shortage of homes. The county makes it illegal to build anything but single-family homes in the vast majority of its residential neighborhoods, keeping supply low and prices inflated. Its inadequate sewer system makes it difficult or impossible to build denser housing in much the same way that its restrictive zoning laws do.

Some housing advocates believe local officials are using the county's sewer issues as an excuse to prevent new and denser housing construction. Hunter Gross, president of a nonprofit pro-housing group in the town of Huntington on the county’s western edge, said local elected officials hide behind wastewater issues in order to dodge the housing debate.

“They realize that if they do build the needed sewer system, then they would have to build the needed housing,” Gross said.

No upzoning without sewers — and vice versa

Long Island has public sewer lines, on-site sewage treatment plants, and individual septic tanks. But about 75% of Suffolk County properties rely on outdated septic systems that don’t remove nitrogen from the water, Newsday reported. Excess nitrogen in the water supply — which also comes from fertilizer runoff — can be dangerous to consume and disrupts ecological systems, causing harmful phenomena like algae blooms that poison wildlife, plants, and people.

The county's traditional septic systems and cesspits are designed to allow treated sewage to safely seep into the ground soil, but when tanks aren't regularly emptied, the water table is high, or the system floods, untreated sewage pollutes nearby water.

The most common reason local elected officials cite for not upgrading their wastewater management is cost. Even in a county where the median household income is almost $50,000 more than the national average, policymakers say they simply can’t afford it. Last summer, the Republican members of the county’s legislature squashed an effort to slightly increase the county’s sales tax to pay for sewer upgrades.

But there's still hope for the effort. Earlier this month, Suffolk County’s recently elected executive, Ed Romaine, backed a similar measure raising the sales tax to fund the sewer system and individual septic tanks. In December, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced she'll send $59 million to Long Island to deal with water contamination and sewer upgrades.

Romaine, a Republican, made housing affordability central to his agenda while campaigning and says he needs more state and federal funding to pay for the sewer and other infrastructure projects.

“The governor has said she wants to see more housing on Long Island. Great, governor, you’ve got to give us money for sewage because the type of housing you want, we can't build,” he said, adding that he supported President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. “How about some of that money? Why should Long Island get shortchanged?”

Edmund Smyth, the town supervisor of Huntington, Suffolk County, said he’d like to see the federal government commit billions of dollars to expanding and upgrading sewer lines and treatment plants across the US to protect the water supply and boost development.

“If the governor's plan requires the town to adopt certain housing policies, and that doesn't come with a very large infrastructure check along with it,” Smyth said, “there's nothing to talk about.”

Long Islanders can't afford to live where they grew up

Anti-development NIMBYism is rampant across Long Island, and its eastern half is no exception. Suffolk County has allowed less new housing to be built over the last 10 years than almost any other county in the US. It also has a higher proportion of single-family homes than nearly any other county — more than 80% of its homes are detached, single-family houses.

Last year, Long Island public officials led the charge against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s effort to boost housing construction around transit hubs, end single-family zoning, and other measures to encourage development, particularly in the New York City suburbs. Last summer, opponents of allowing accessory dwelling units, like basement apartments, in Huntington warned against “changing the complexion of this beautiful community” and bringing in “migrants, pedophiles, or criminals.”

But many residents, including homeowners who’ve benefited from soaring home values, are feeling the pain of the housing affordability crisis and want change. Businesses are struggling to attract workers, who can’t find decent housing. Baby boomers are concerned their own children and grandchildren can’t afford to live in the communities they grew up in.

“We're creating a lot of jobs here, but that's not going to continue if we don't have places to live for the people who have those jobs,” said Ian Wilder, executive director of the nonprofit group Long Island Housing Services. “The only thing we're creating is a market in illegal and, some of it, dangerous housing because people have no choice about where to live.”

Sewers tie into a long history of exclusionary housing policy

Like many similar suburban regions, Long Island has a long history of enforcing racial segregation through housing policies. Levittown, the famous master-planned 1950s suburb designed for WWII veterans, excluded Black residents. In 1988, the Supreme Court found in a landmark case that the town of Huntington perpetuated racial discrimination with zoning laws that prohibited multi-family housing construction in largely white neighborhoods.

While civil rights laws have since changed, the county is still one of the most segregated in the US. In 2019, Newsday published a three-year investigation finding that residential real estate brokers and agents regularly discriminated against Black, Hispanic, and Asian clients.

Infrastructure is just as key to expanding the housing stock as land-use laws are. Sewers and zoning are “two sides of the same coin,” said Nathan Cummings, a law clerk who published a paper in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 2022 on wastewater treatment and urban development. You can’t change land-use laws to allow for more density when the sewer capacity isn’t there, and you can’t build out the sewer system when the land-use laws don’t allow for more density.

“It's very easy for local policymakers to fall into a trap where they say we can't upzone because we don't have infrastructure and we can’t build infrastructure because our zoning doesn't permit anything above a certain level of development,” Cummings said. “If you want to build more densely, it's a two-step process where you do both and ultimately what it takes is the political will.”

The connection between anti-sewer and anti-housing activism isn’t limited to Long Island. Similar communities, like Old Lyme, Connecticut, have been accused of blocking wastewater projects in order to stymie denser housing construction and prevent lower-income people or people of color from moving into a community.

Alarm bells go off for Cummings in cases where a community’s water is being contaminated by waste and it refuses both to build out its sewer system or install an alternative wastewater treatment system.

“If you don't want either of those things, even as your groundwater is getting polluted, and you're having to pay the upkeep cost for your septic system, it just starts to look a little bit less rational,” he said.