Greenport native Joey Owens packed what he could fit in the car and drove west.

The 24-year-old supermarket clerk, whose family has been on the North Fork since the early 1900s, left for Oregon earlier this month with his sister Amanda Venne, 32.

Mr. Owens, who has worked full time at Southold IGA for the past three years, said he had been scraping by and watched many of his friends leave before making the same decision. The siblings jumped in the car with their Great Pyrenees-Newfoundland mix, Moose, and joined the North Fork exodus.

They are among many young locals who say the rising cost of living has priced them out of the chance to stay where their families put down roots.

“There’s no one there my age. Everyone basically moved away already, and there’s no jobs here that I wanted to work,” Mr. Owens said during an April 13 phone interview from Riverside Suites in Seaside, Ore., with The Suffolk Times. “It’s basically a retirement community. The few workers that remain here, you just don’t see them around really.”

Mr. Owens, who lived with his parents and two younger brothers in a three-bedroom Greenport rental, said he “tried for years to make it work” on the North Fork.

At the IGA, he made $2,300 a month, $900 of which went toward household expenses.

In places like Oregon, renters can often secure housing at a fraction of the cost of Long Island — with rents roughly 40% to 50% lower and overall living expenses about 24% cheaper than New York, according to data from LivingCostIndex.

“If I’m making the minimum wage, I’ll still be able to afford an apartment,” he said. “You can’t do that on Long Island.”

Southold Town Councilwoman Alexa Suess, 32, who campaigned on housing affordability and has described her peers as the “missing middle” of residents priced out of the market, said the issue is one she hears about often.

“Nearly every person I know under the age of 35 has struggled with the decision of whether to stay or whether to leave,” Ms. Suess said. “This conversation about an ‘exit plan’ is one that’s discussed so casually that you may as well be talking about the weather.”

The move had been a topic of conversation nearly every day at home. Mr. Owens’ brothers are saving up to leave as well, and his parents, Craig and Dana, are weighing whether they can afford to stay.

“I still have a lot of family out here, but they all own their own house and they’re older,” said Ms. Owens, who graduated from Greenport High School in 1992.

She said their decision depends on whether her husband is named manager of Orient Beach State Park, where he has worked for 25 years. 

“I just want to go somewhere where I don’t have to work so hard just to get by,” said Ms. Owens, who has worked in the ticket office at the Cross Sound Ferry terminal in Orient Point for the last three and a half years.

For year-round renters on the North Fork, rising housing costs and limited inventory are forcing difficult choices: stretch beyond their means, accept substandard housing or leave altogether.

Corcoran’s fourth-quarter 2025 report shows the median price for a single-family home on the North Fork reached $999,000, reflecting a market increasingly out of reach for many local workers.

Short-term rentals also pose an issue for local housing inventory, with about 1,500 homes flagged as transient rental properties last summer, according to town attorney Ben Johnson.

For some, leaving isn’t an option — but finding suitable housing within an average worker’s budget is no small task.

Rae McMahon, a 29-year-old mother of three, said her housing search included unlivable, unwelcoming or pricey apartments and homes.

The family of five had lived in a three-bedroom house in Greenport from May 2024 to May 2025 and were paying $3,000 a month in rent. She recounted a laundry list of issues: mice, mold, “hazardous odors,” lack of ventilation in one of her children’s rooms in the summer months, an exterior door with a broken lock and heating bills higher than the estimate at move-in.

The estimated annual propane bill costs provided by the landlord — $1,200 — turned out to be just one month’s heating bill, said Ms. McMahon, who works at Aldo’s Coffee Company in Greenport with her husband.

“Since the house was not insulated, I was spending at least $1,000 a month,” she said. “I mean, we had it as cold as we could possibly have the house with it being safe for the kids.”

In the summer months, her son wound up sleeping in his parents’ room because of the heat. Ms. McMahon added that the mold issue made her feel ill and created breathing issues for their oldest child.

“When you have kids … you’re looking at it and your option is deal with it or risk not having a house for your kids,” she said.

The family eventually found a new apartment through connections at work. The rent is more expensive than what they had been paying, but Ms. McMahon said the family is happier where they are now.

“I’m sad to think about all of the people who don’t have the same happy ending that we do,” she said.

Dinni Gordon, chair of Greenport Village’s affordable and workforce housing committee, said the difficulty of finding housing has become one of the defining issues for younger residents.

“There’s a general pattern of the difficulties for finding ways for young people to live in Southold these days,” she said, “but from my perspective, housing is preeminent.”

Ms. Gordon said Mr. Owens and Ms. McMahon aren’t alone in their struggles. 

“I just know there are many others,” she said. 

Mr. Owens urged Southold Town to find a way to fix the problem for renters. 

“The Town of Southold definitely needs to address the situation,” he said.

The post Priced out: Young North Fork residents leaving as housing costs soar appeared first on The Suffolk Times.

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