This evening at long last, the East Hampton Town Board is expected to reduce the cap on houses relative to the size of a given piece of land. There have been limits in place for a long time, of course, but they have not been able to stop the supersizing of construction on small lots that has marred many a streetscape.
I covered the zoning board for the paper in the early 2000s, settling nearly every Tuesday night into a chair in the old Town Hall to listen to the proceedings. The pressure on the zoning board members to give more than the town code allowed was constant and sometimes shocking. I recall being struck by the inventiveness of applicants and their hired guns, asking, for example, for a swimming pool in protected duneland because of grandmother’s sciatica, or what have you, then flipping the house as soon as the ink dried on the certificates of occupancy.
There was always some excuse or another, half-believed by the board because, odds were, the property owners or the architects or the lawyers had at least an equal eye on finessing the law to maximize return on investment. The more amenities and square footage, the more money could be made was — and remains — a truism in real estate. For all the back-and-forth at zoning hearings, flat-out denials were rare, and most applicants got permits to build more or less how they wanted.
The net effect of what I and others saw as a too-lax town code became too big to ignore later, as houses got bigger, as seen in the nearly wall-to-wall new houses along the Amagansett lanes. It was property rights against sense of place. For my taste and that of a lot of people here, less was more, and the big houses just felt wrong.
The fight is now at the level of individual properties, with a few large and looming exceptions, like the Wainscott sand mine redevelopment plan. Builders will always want to build right up to the line, literally, as in size and height limits, and figuratively, as in pushing the bounds of good taste and being neighborly. I am pleased that the town is taking a stand to rein it all in, having watched firsthand on many a night how the old rules were not quite up to the task.