Wainscott Redux

So, after its humiliating defeat three years ago, working family affordable housing in the Wainscott School District is again on the front burner, this time in the form of a 37-unit across-the-highway complex on Route 114 near Sag Harbor.

In 2015, affordable housing advocates were confident the East Hampton Town Board would approve a plan to develop a 49-apartment project in back of Stephen Hand’s Path. The need for the housing was obvious and longstanding. Larry Cantwell, then the town supervisor, seemed to be enthusiastically on board. The town Democratic Committee voted to support the proposal, with only one nay vote. Democrats controlled the town board four to one and even its only Republican, Fred Overton, favored it.

Twelve million federal and New York State dollars would enter the town. Forty-nine local working families would have apartments with rents within 30 percent of their income, and even the most pampered of our town’s exclusionists could not complain. The project would be located north of the highway, remote from our wealthier enclaves.

It was a win-win all around — for working families, town coffers, and our business community, which was contending with a diminishing labor force because of the area’s soaring housing costs.

Then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

The Wainscott School Board complained vehemently that the working families project would raise the district’s taxes and that children from the apartments would overwhelm their small school’s unique and superior education culture.

Actually, Wainscott, East Hampton’s richest hamlet, has by far the lowest tax rate in the town, about one-fifth that of Springs, the town’s poorest hamlet. And a report by the town Planning Department, based on an approaching residential build-out in the Wainscott School District and the number of school-age children residing in existing local working family affordable apartments, concluded that the school board’s estimates of added students from Stephen Hand’s “appear to be too high by 13 to 45 percent.”

But after a visit to the school, Supervisor Cantwell declared it was indeed unique and excellent and urged the Stephen Hand’s developer, a Windmill Village corporation, to work out a deal with the school board to lower the number of children who would reside in the project by designating a portion of the apartments for senior citizens.

Discrimination by private landlords against families with children has been against U.S. law at least since 1988 and New York State law for nearly a century, since 1921. Affected individuals may sue landlords for damages.

If it is not okay for a private landlord to discriminate against children, how does it become okay for the East Hampton Town supervisor and town board to do so by telling the developer to alter the tenant mix and shutting down the project when they don’t get their way?

Negotiations for such a dilution never really started, and the town board rejected the plan. The arduous grind to provide reasonable housing at reasonable rents for East Hampton’s labor-force families was thwarted by a complaint from a hamlet school board.

Though serious and lovely, Wainscott’s little school is not Choate. It is an American public school, paid for by American public funds.

The surrender to the town board in early 2016 came from what had been a proud, effective, peaceable group of advocates, some of them antiwar demonstrators from the Vietnam era, who in the 1990s were to put their jobs and futures on the line by championing affordable housing for working families and seniors and for strong local implementation of disabilities rights laws.

They had fought hard battles over long years. Their heroes were ordinary people who do extraordinary things, such as Crystal Lee Sutton, whose story was made into the movie “Norma Rae,” and Erin Brockovich. Their bumper stickers proclaimed “Speak Truth to Power” and “Tax the Rich.” Their bulletin-board-posted wisdoms tended to be from the speeches and writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

For almost 20 years, I was a part of this group and think of it as a highlight, perhaps even a justification of my long, full life, a culmination of my New Deal Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Depression era’s faith-in-democracy upbringing and my lucky, snafu-ridden survival of World War II.

So, why did these advocates so passively accede to our town government’s insistence on weaponizing seniors to exclude their grandchildren from housing they needed?

The answers I get from them are that knowledgeable people at the county level warned them of dire repercussions if they confronted the supervisor and that the present Windmill board is more town-establishment oriented than previous Windmill boards. Others simply cited burnout.

I don’t see these as reasons for advocates to default — to just present an appeal to a town board brown bag meeting, write a few indignant letters to The Star, and then shut their toolbox and slink off without a serious exploration of the legal possibilities available to them. The Stephen Hand’s demise is not parochial to the East End of Long Island. It is an example of the frivolous power of money, a symptom and symbol of decay in our country’s democracy and soul. Skilled, principled civil rights lawyers exist in abundance in our universities and civil rights groups. Plaintiffs with standing can be found on our housing waiting lists.

I also know of no attempt by Stephen Hand’s backers to interest our major national press. I expect The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal would be fascinated.

It lingers and stings. Now we have another chance. Let’s not blow it again.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton.