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Doin’ the Nimby Trot

By Richard Rosenthal

It troubles me that the East Hampton Town Board has bowed to the Wainscott School Board’s demands and quashed the proposal to build affordable apartments off Stephen Hand’s Path for 48 of the town’s low-income working families.

It also troubles me that our Democratic Party committee people are not calling out the supervisor and the board’s other three Democrats for their nay votes. Eleanor Roosevelt, a hero of this town’s Democrats, and a fierce fighter for affordable housing, must be flipping in her grave. Even local Republicans supported the Stephen Hand’s plan.

Protecting our environment and warning the public of climate change are crucial, but so is seeing to it that working families have decent housing. East Hampton Democrats used to act on that principle with devotion and skill. I am a beneficiary of it, living in a house in Whalebone Woods, a development of more than 100 homes and a product of former Supervisor Judith Hope’s commitment in the 1970s and ’80s. But over the years since, the fate of people low on the economic scale has slipped in the town Democrats’ priorities. We should be asking why.

There is no doubt that the town seriously needs this housing if it is to sustain a viable work force and credibility to its claims that it truly cares about East Hampton’s housing shortage and the effects of the Hamptons’ rampant economic inequality on lower and middle-income families. The Stephen Hand’s plan would have brought $12 million and jobs to the town and cost us next to nothing. The town board’s recent approval of a 40-unit mixed-income project in Amagansett is a positive step, but not sufficient.

The town board’s rejection of Stephen Hand’s was in response to the Wainscott School Board’s assertions that children from these working families would inundate their small kindergarten-to-third-grade grammar school and destroy its “specialness.” The supervisor demanded that the developers of the proposed housing, the Windmill Village board of directors, increase to the satisfaction of the Wainscott School Board the proportion of units reserved for seniors, thereby reducing the number of working families and inevitably the number of school-age children in the Wainscott School District. No agreement was reached, and the town board’s nay vote ensued.

How did the school board pull off this daunting coup? The housing’s proposed site, north of Montauk Highway, does not intrude one whit on Wainscott’s wealthy or other residential sites, or materially affect the hamlet’s school taxes, which are by far the lowest of any school district in town. Nor would it injure Wainscott’s home values, which are the highest median price of any of the town’s hamlets. Further, the school board’s inundation claims are overwrought. A town planning board investigation came up with much lower school-age population figures than the school board’s, and federal rules limiting subsidized housing occupant density further diminish the school board’s claims.

Granting that I am not a lawyer, I see the town’s reasons for rejecting the Stephen Hand’s plan as a clear violation of the U.S. Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988 and the New York State Human Rights Law — and a housing discrimination against children case just screaming to be filed. 

The F.H.A.A. was enacted to empower government to protect children and other groups subject to housing discrimination from landlords and developers who seek to limit or exclude them. With Stephen Hand’s, the players are reversed, but the motives are clear and the result is the same. The developer, Windmill Village, sought to provide housing at low cost to working families. The government, our town board, backed the school board’s efforts to exclude children by demanding that the project be confined to or heavily tilted toward seniors’ occupancy.

Neat little game, isn’t it? And dirty pool. Display compassion for us old folks so you can lock out our grandchildren.

In 1968, when the first Fair Housing Act was passed, President Johnson said he had supported the act so it would no longer be okay to use “little tricks” to exclude people from housing. The town’s and school board’s tilting to seniors can certainly be construed as just such a little trick, and unbecoming of an East Hampton Town supervisor, town board, and town Democratic Party to indulge.

Wainscott is a public school, supported by public money. It does not and must not have the authority to decide where our children may be housed. It astonishes and horrifies me that it has, at the least, been awarded the right to veto a housing project for 48 East Hampton working families.

If we are to be progressive with climate change and other environmental challenges, we must also be progressive with economic fairness. Support of affordable housing is less altruism than a fulfillment of an area’s need: a work force with a commitment to community because they live here.

I am concerned that the Windmill Village board and management are dispirited by this defeat and fearful of retaliation from the town if they fight back. If this is so, I urge them to rouse themselves and decide how best they can challenge the town’s rejection of Stephen Hand’s in the justice courts and in the court of public opinion.

I grew up during the 1930s and ’40s thinking that the U.S.A. was the most just nation on earth, and if it behaved otherwise, especially toward its own people, it was my duty to help fix things. Not only was this my duty, but the country was so great I felt I actually had a chance of success. We are still this nation, and we the people shouldn’t forget it. 

Richard Rosenthal is the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire of wealth and power in the Hamptons.

 

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