No Place to Stay

An old acquaintance wrote recently to ask on behalf of a friend if we knew of any year-round rentals in the Southampton Village vicinity. The friend, a medical professional who is frequently on call to see emergency patients at very short notice, had indicated it might be necessary to leave the area if a place to live proved impossible to find. If this isn’t an example of a housing crisis, we don’t know what is.

At a different end of the workplace spectrum, a look at the classified ads in this week’s Star suggests that employers are having a tough time finding staff, due to no small degree, it is safe to assume, to a lack of housing. The summer of 2015 is shaping up to be worrisome for businesses that can’t find enough help.

There’s more evidence, of course. The so-called trade parade of eastbound morning traffic through Southampton has become a fact of life drawing little notice. Still, when the two-lane Sunrise Highway is backed up and barely moving from well before the Hampton Bays-Riverhead exit, as it was at 7:15 last Thursday morning, there is something far out of whack.

Those businesses that do not provide housing for their employees find themselves in desperate competition for help, and workers themselves are consigned to either battling the traffic or living in illegal and sometimes unsafe group rentals.

One number jumped out at us from a story in last Thursday’s Star, too. According to a town official, less than a third of the houses in Wainscott are occupied year round. The other 70 percent or so were seasonal. Of the small portion who live in Wainscott year round, an even smaller number could be expected to be employed here, be it as waitstaff or newly minted professionals with lots of degrees.

It is a safe guess that vacation rental websites like Airbnb have eaten away at the availability of year-round or reasonably priced seasonal rentals. The ease of online bookings has turned anyone with an extra room or cottage into a host, with the promise of good money and less wear and tear on properties. It is hard to imagine how local officials can figure out how to put that particular genie back in the bottle, but something has to be done.

An obvious step, though one that town and village governments would be loath to take, is to sharply limit all new development until studies are concluded giving material recommendations on providing work force housing, as well as adequate infrastructure. To permit growth without taking its impact into account is foolhardy. Finding ways to assure places to live for the people who keep the South Fork humming — and even some of us alive — should be a top priority.