Build.In.Kind/EastHampton advocates for change.... to policy, regulations, codes, and mindsets. And, we advocate also for voices: the voices of residents and all those who cherish our community and speak out with care and concern....your voices.
As we wrote in our September 2022 blog piece "Voices Carry":
"Folks have asked me why Build.In.Kind isn’t a “.org” and if I’ll start fundraising to further the cause. Maybe one day I might find the need to do that, but for now, my goal here is not to raise money—my sole purpose is to raise voices...
"Our boards and departments do need to hear from many. They need to know that the community at large really freakin’ cares -- only then will our priority become their priority. Now is not the time for cynicism or timidity. Don’t hush, don’t keep it down now, because, as the song goes, voices carry."
As part of the advocacy, I try to explain the why and how to, and to rally you, motivate you, inspire you, wheedle you -- and sometimes throw in a soupçon of guilting you -- to make the trip to "the room where it happens" ... to go to Town Hall and walk up to the podium and comment directly in person (or virtually by dialing in) to the Board members during the time set aside at each and every meeting to hear from the public on any matter.
But of course, equally important is "the power of the pen"...your pens.
Happily, our local papers provide critical forum for any one of us to express our straightforward ideas and our unvarnished and uncensored opinions in writing at any time we are so moved to put pen to paper, or more likely now, fingers to keyboard.
In the last couple weeks, there have been some purposeful and piquant and right-on pieces from the public published on the pages of the East Hampton Star and the East Hampton Press addressing the core issue of development and the impertives of rethinking and rebalancing the Town's land use regulations and zoning code.
I hope many of you are already supporting local reporters and newspapers with subscriptions, but for anyone without direct access, and for everyone's convenience, here's a grouping of that opinion writing from the last few weeks.
As we like to say, the overdevelopment issue is not just about aesthetics...it is existential, and that theme runs through all of these writings reposted here.
Fantastic Waste
Amagansett
July 26, 2024
To the Editor,
Years ago in Montauk, I heard Peter Beard the photographer-adventurer tell me, “Get to know nature before we discombobulate the whole thing.” And I once called dear Peter Matthiessen when the Chinese river dolphin went extinct, and he answered, “I’m afraid it won’t be the last.” We are running out of elders who knew the beauty of a more stable Earth. Recently, science has told us six out of the nine tipping points for the Earth have been passed. A vote for Democrats this fall is a vote for freedom and survival. It will be an existential election.
With 100-degree temperatures manifesting in the Russian Arctic, and dozens of people dead from the heat wave in the West, we are in new territory. As a whole, we are less environmentally healthy now than generations ago. Not just in earning power — except for grotesque amounts earned by a very select few recently on the stock market — but across the entire social spectrum. In 1990, America ranked sixth in the world for education and health care. Now, 27th and falling. And it is not just the recent eruption of the coronavirus which has made it so, it is the false promise of the American Dream which has nosedived.
America, we have sacrificed ideals to purely materialistic principles. We had the aspirations of the 1960s and we find ourselves at ground zero, almost having to start all over again. Except that, this time, the country and the world don’t have 10 years to experiment with. Today, existence is at stake, not just socially but environmentally. Humanity, its essence, is now an endangered species.
In 1982, as the media has made abundantly clear, slaughterhouse workers made $24 an hour. Today: $14. Cheap goods have replaced higher-paying jobs. Economists have studied the math of the social disparities and the unemployment rate, but America’s malaise runs much deeper. We have taken democracy for granted, and if things don’t improve by the end of the year, this experiment might run into the ground. Because today’s parameters are not just social and economic but run into the depths of our cells, our very biology.
Years ago on Baffin island, at an Inuit cooperative for artists who make some of the most remarkable lithographs on Earth, I spoke to a 20-year-old Inuit who showed me the town. He described how his people’s lives had changed and how his people’s culture had been turned upside down by outsiders, their way of life, and the changing climate. He emphasized how almost everything his people needed came from the sea and how strange it was that in America everyone was in the pursuit of bigger homes. He then said, “And then what?” We wanted bigger cars. And then what? And larger towns. And then what? His questions went to the heart of our character as a people in the south who waste too much and for whom the environment has always been out there, beyond where the eye can reach. Now, finally, in the last year or so, most people in the U.S. finally admit the reality of climate change and its enormous impact. But we have dawdled too much. It may be too late to make any larger-scale difference. We can only mitigate what nature will unleash in the coming decades. Most of the North Pole was covered in 10 feet of ice, as the early 20th-century explorers experienced. That may never come back in the time scale of human civilization.
For decades now, the fantastic waste of gigantism — bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger earnings, bigger profits, bigger weapons, the demeaning monster of the superfluous — has held sway over the American psyche. And in the process we have become seduced, flummoxed, mesmerized, possessed, and even possessed by our possessions. But we are in danger of losing a larger reason for being — our ideals, and they are intangible. The struggle for democracy hasn’t been resolved. Nor can it be. We are too large. As D.H. Lawrence so astutely observed, “Men have reached the point where, in further fulfilling their ideals, they break down the living integrity of their being and fall into sheer mechanical materialism. They become automatic units, determined entirely by mechanical law.”
America is the unhappiest it has been in a generation or more. The size of one’s house doesn’t bring happiness. Debt is overwhelming. Many people cannot pay their water bills and evictions are soaring. Unemployment and homeless numbers are not where they should be. Lawrence offered — in strict contrast to the Puritan, native-killing sensibility — an alternative, which is that America should embrace the best of herself. His vision was one of inclusion. “Let America embrace the great dusky continent of the Red man.” And while the terminology may be awkward in America’s striving to fathom the enormous cosmology of her first inhabitants, he at least recognized the native mind as a force of nature, as great at the elemental grandeur that makes America unique. In his essay “America, Listen to Your Own,” he recommended that Americans not stand bewildered by Europe’s cathedrals but relish her “aboriginal spirit” that makes America truly great, her land. Nowhere in Europe is there a Grand Canyon. Nowhere else is there a Yosemite. Or Denali or any of her other treasures that are simply incomparable.
America now needs to fight for these. Her lands are not mere nature parks, or theme parks. Or Nature’s versions of Disneyland. They are the blood, bones, and sinews of what is left of this country. Disasters will befall the country under the torment of floods and fires but the mantle of America’s spirit, like that of her people, will manifest in the greater collective to safeguard what is left of life and her land ethic because it is eroding. As a contemporary version of the Great Depression looms, combined with climate change and a health crisis, we are being transformed into a bona fide third world country.
Prophetically, Lawrence wrote, “Now is the day when Americans must become fully self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility.” Vote for those with vision, not those who make you fear the future. Vote for the inclusive, not those who separate and divide one person from another. And vote for the children and their ability to inherit posterity. It is not the size of the R.V.s and the length of her highways, nor the number of billionaires that make America great — it is the land that supports us all, its blood, its rivers and lakes and oceans, and its soul, the collective tangible dream that there is something greater than any one of us. It is the absolute horizon that makes this land possible and it is not just an ideal, it is real.
We have had a rugged but competitive individualism for too long. What used to be an abstraction, ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, needs concrete answers: compassion toward others, active responsibility as citizens, and the pursuit of a viable planet. Otherwise, we all lose. The soil is withering. Hurricanes are getting stronger and more frequent. Liberty is being crowded out by the increasing Berlin Wall between those who have and those who have not. And happiness is hard to calibrate when the world is literally melting. We should discover a new impulse in the very needed realities directed toward saving life and revamping health care and education, saving those who cannot feed themselves, saving wetlands and streams and rivers from would-be polluters, getting off fossil fuel emissions so the 21st century makes it to the 22nd century.
What used to be abstractions are now very tactile ends and they affect everyone who breathes, not just the dispossessed or the superwealthy. What all our strivings should strive for is not the superindividualism but a greater rescuing collectivity. It starts by honoring the farmers who grow the food and immigrants who help collect the food and in many comparable ways. It is by renouncing bigotry and recognizing that the Earth has been under assault by our species for far too long. The ground is literally trembling and shaking and melting beneath our feet and we can no longer let the assault on Mother Nature continue.
The Doomsday Clock is set for a few seconds before midnight, when a generation ago it was 20 minutes before midnight. We have run out of time.
Ideals have existed in the mind. There is no equality as we had envisaged it. No oneness. No brotherhood of man. But microscopic enemies are multiplying at every turn and the soil is buckling everywhere. Biology and the environment are not abstractions. Now, the heart has to take over. It is the only organ that will rescue us from our divorce from the planet. An American encyclical following the pope’s “Declaration for the Earth” should be to acknowledge this fragile moment and have America reverse course with discipline and fortitude and integrity in the next few months. Integrity which we are surely lacking. We need to cohere into something larger — and fast, because the flag is starting to tear.
Otherwise we risk losing America and the world.
CYRIL CHRISTO
The Time Is Now
Wainscott
July 22, 2024
Dear Editor,
The time has come. Really, it has passed. But there is time still to act for the benefit of our community; for future generations of humans, animals, and plants; for our environment.
Natural abundance and resilience are at stake, threatened by intense, irrational development and growth, stressed to the maximum by self-interested action on one hand and counterintuitive inaction on the other.
We know better. Our governing officials must follow reason and intuition for an outcome that will benefit the greater good. They must address the root cause of the surging rivers of traffic; of the egregious lack of affordable housing; of the thoughtless destruction of historic character; of the grievous loss of fertile farmland, keystone woodland, and fragile coastland.
Our current zoning code (adopted in 1984 with subsequent amendments) laid out a grand vision in the “purposes” to achieve objectives that include: guiding and regulating orderly growth; promoting proper use of land; sustaining character (sense of place); protecting hamlets and neighborhoods; providing for and protecting housing affordability; ensuring town sustainability; addressing coastal resiliency; promoting natural resources conservation and historical resources preservation; encouraging open space protection, and avoiding density and congestion.
The time is now. It is time to fulfill campaign promises and deal with the numerous challenges and threats to our community’s character and sustainability. The East Hampton Town Board must act thoughtfully and deliberately yet swiftly and decisively to make the proposed zoning code changes that have been labored on for over a year. Before they proceed, however, they must address a significant omission: It is crucial they revise the formula for house size proportional to lot size.
These changes are past due. We are paying for this delinquency already. So many of us are frustrated, hopeless, angry, and grieving. To act now and make these changes is the ethical thing to do. In supporting these changes, we will stand on the right side of history. When the time comes.
ESPERANZA LEON
Money Always Wins
Springs
July 15, 2024
Dear David,
It’s terrific that the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Foundation are monitoring water quality all around the South Fork. Important work and important information. God bless them.
And, likewise, that Mecox Bay has formed a group, the Mecox Bay Conservancy, to attempt to remediate that blighted body of water, following the examples of people living around Georgica Pond and Lake Agawam, where similar groups have been formed to deal with those equally blighted bodies of water.
But every article about the grim state of water quality out here, particularly cheery stories about monitoring and remediation, are incomplete without a very forceful, honest few sentences explaining why this is all needed.
Who is to blame for our polluted ponds, bays, and harbors? Us. We did this. Now we are trying — and I emphasize trying — to clean it up.
The source of the pollution is overdevelopment that we allowed and continue to allow. “Over,” you might ask? Yes, “over.” Because if we were underdeveloped or safely and properly developed we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Had the Suffolk County Health Department (the agency whose sign-off is required for all septic systems) and had local municipalities done some research and calculations after this literal development shitstorm began in the 1980s, they might have said, “Sure, keep putting septic systems in the ground and keep allowing more development and thus the use of more landscape fertilizers and chemicals, but eventually you won’t be able to safely swim in many of your ponds and bays nor will you be able to eat the shellfish or fish from those bodies of water.”
It was obvious back then (there was a county study in the 1980s that warned of the ills of overdevelopment) where we were headed, that we would exceed our land’s — nature’s — carrying capacity and that many of our ponds and bays would turn to . . . shit. (Many don’t realize that every toilet east of the Shinnecock Canal flushes into the ground — that, after all, is what septic systems are, elaborate holes in the ground that rely on nature to filter out some but not enough of the bad stuff — with the exception of those served by the region’s only, and small, sewer system, in the Village of Sag Harbor.)
But money always wins. We just kept selling and building, with ever more people pooping and peeing into underground leach fields and fertilizing our lawns and spraying toxic insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides on our plants and . . . voilá, we‚ are now spending time and millions of dollars monitoring and shutting down swimming and shellfishing, and cleaning up the mess we created. All for what? Every dollar made by the voracious development industry out here is going to cost us millions in water cleanup, a cleanup that is basically going to go on forever. That immense and costly effort was never fully considered when our woods and farm fields and dunes were sliced up for houses.
A generation ago we could have said no more. No more houses, no more septic systems, no more lawns, no more of everything that’s poisoning nature out here. But we didn’t. That would have been political suicide and regarded as unfair, elitist. “Close the gate” would have been torched with outrage. Yet a place can sustain only so many. Just pay attention: Nature is speaking with ever greater urgency: Please, no more!
And, still, we fail to heed. Just take a paddle around Georgica Pond or Lake Agawam. How many Friends of Georgica Pond and members of the Lake Agawam Conservancy have planted filtering buffers along those ponds’ shorelines? How many have reduced the size of their lawns, let beautiful nitrogen-fixing clover push up in their grass? How many of those enormously rich people have dug up their traditional septic systems and replaced them with systems that remove harmful nitrogen? Too few.
It bears pointing out that the Agawam conservancy’s own study, conducted by the New York State Department of Environment Conservation, determined that septic waste accounts for about 70 percent of the nitrogen loading there, a figure that is likely similar for the region’s other distressed water bodies, including Georgica and Mecox. Yet the vast majority of the houses around those three bodies of water are served — inadequately and shamefully — by traditional septic systems that do nothing to remove nitrogen.
It’s astonishing that even as we have known for years that many of our treasured water bodies are so polluted that we can’t safely swim or fish or clam or collect oysters, and even as we are told that septic waste is a major contributing polluting factor along with lawn fertilizers and other chemicals, we cling to sweeping lawns, we delay or decline using all the government financial incentives to switch out our septic systems, and we continue to allow development on a scale that has never before been seen here.
So, good luck and godspeed, Fred Thiele and Jay Schneiderman, who are the new leaders of the work at Georgica and Mecox. You are going to need it.
BIDDLE DUKE
Close the Barn Door
East Hampton Press -- 27East
Editorial Board on Jul 24, 2024
The Wall Street Journal last week visited the South Fork for a story about “a nation obsessed with supersizing” and places, particularly enclaves of wealth, that are “scrambling to curb mansion bloat.” East Hampton, in fact, led the narrative, with an advisory panel raising the idea of cutting the limit on house sizes from 20,000 to 10,000 square feet.
As Planning Director Jeremy Samuelson noted in the story, the current limit is actually larger than the town’s ban on big-box stores, which is just 15,000 square feet. Apparently, for some people, the idea of living in a Walmart would be unappealing, in part because it’s just a little too cramped.
The Journal points out that this region isn’t alone: “Towns from Aspen to Martha’s Vineyard are in a big-house brouhaha. Critics say mushrooming mansions cramp scenic vistas and local charm, consume excessive energy and inflate prices.
“The challenge? The horse — or rather, the thoroughbred — has already left the barn.”
But, of course, it’s a big barn, and there’s a parade of horses, with many more to come. To follow the analogy through: Closing the barn door now won’t recapture any of the lost steeds. But it might stem the seemingly endless flow still galloping this way.
At some point — books could be written about when — the South Fork lost its battle with greed and allowed its charm to be swallowed up by lustful suitors. Today, “quaint” still can be found here, but it’s much more of a recluse than it once was. It’s much easier to find evidence of grotesque affluence, the real estate equivalence of “manspreading” in a pair of silk shorts: tacky at any price, taking up space needlessly and offensively.
The conversation in East Hampton Town began moving toward limits, with the working group allowing a trial balloon to escape skyward — and the development community came back hard, objecting to restrictions on residential spread, falling back on the notion that private property and market pressures are all that really matter. Translation: Leave that barn door wide open, thank you very much.
Perspective matters here. At one Planning Board discussion on affordable housing, the notion of creating an entire town made up only of the wealthy and a permanent underclass that serves it was brought up as a cautionary tale — as if it weren’t already playing out in front of our eyes.
A “house in the Hamptons” has always been aspirational, and the growing income disparity has allowed more and more newly minted millionaires to find their way from Wall Street to Toilsome Lane. What’s different now? The address isn’t enough: It has to be the setting for vulgar, porcine edifices, blown out to whatever the edges are, a giant middle finger to neighbors and the world.
The town should move to stop that. It should encourage the creation of affordable housing with urgency, and not just for economic reasons. Modest homes on modest lots are not just workforce housing — they can be entry points for families with less ravenous appetites. People who actually make a community rather than a destination.
Is it too late? A pessimist would say that if you’re asking the question, you’ve already acknowledged that all is lost. An optimist, however, would point out that perfect can’t be the enemy of good — there are plenty of battlefields all around us to testify to the lost battles, but the war is yet to be won.
Town officials should gird for battle, recognize that excess is a cancer that kills, and begin the hard work of slamming shut the barn door, if only to preserve what barn is left.
A Stark Truth
Springs
July 22, 2024
To the Editor,
The recent Star article "All Eyes on Town's Zoning Code Overhaul" discusses contrasting views between "business interest" and "those who want the code strengthened to preserve what they say is a town that is quickly losing, or has already lost, its character."
I'm with those who want to preserve and protect the character of our community through zoning changes. The concept of constant growth is not sustainable. Eventually, constant growth will end badly for our community. Ever so slowly, East Hampton will become unrecognizable as the one we know, respect, and love.
Those favoring current zoning always argue that new zoning will result in lost jobs for locals. Unquestionably, jobs for local residents are a crucial consideration. However, the traffic congestion that plagues our roads daily reveals a stark truth: Many of the jobs created by way of current zoning benefit out-of-town contractors and not exclusively local workers.
Developers and real estate interests benefit most from current zoning, not the community at large. Future zoning regulations should be in sync with the values of our community residents and not yield to the few who financially benefit. East Hampton needs a shift toward a more sustainable model of development. Thoughtful changes to current zoning can preserve and protect the character of East Hampton. Additionally, the town should study ways to protect jobs for locals over out-of-town contractors.
William Pickens of Sag Harbor is correct to ask, "Are we a community or are we a commodity?" That brilliant simple statement says it all.
FRANK RIINA
Execrable Carbuncle
Amagansett
July 21, 2024
Dear David,
In these frustrating times, one could be forgiven the temptation to think rather ill of one's neighbor. I respectfully submit the following prescription as an antidote to any mild case of misanthropy: Watch the video of the town board's work session on July 16.
Let me describe it to your readers. It's the middle of a workday, in the middle of July, in the middle of traffic-snarled East Hampton. A perfect beach day. And, mirabile dictu, a standing-room-only crowd waits patiently in Town Hall. The subject is zoning. Movingly, inspiringly, citizen after citizen steps to the podium. Many faces, in many voices, speak with clarity, intelligence, and civility to the assembly. The message is clear. Our zoning code is broken.
The proposals currently "on the table" are timid. Desirable, yes, yes, yes. Of course. But sufficient? Hardly. The velocity and intensity of residential construction is quite obviously unhealthy for the environment and for those living here. It's far beyond sustainable.
Development and construction are important industries; we can all recognize that. Good jobs are precious and vital to the community. But we can do without obscene profiteering by a relative few to the permanent cost of many. Our code is the single most important lever we have to lower the temperature and restore balance. A zoning code that does not cool this raging fever to build monstrous structures on often newly cleared land is not just flawed. It's broken.
I propose the following test. If the code revisions won't absolutely prohibit another execrable carbuncle like the architectural rape victim at 175 Atlantic Avenue or the "housal abuse" looming over the Ditch Plain lot, they just aren't good enough. Our biggest risk is not that we could go too far with changes to the code. That's unlikely. And it's fixable. The far bigger concern is not doing enough.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to those at the work session. What a great community!
Respectfully,
DAN MONGAN
A Meretricious Din
Montauk
June 1, 2024
With apologies to William Butler Yeats:
Turning and turning in diminishing landscape
The ospreys cannot find their home;
Tradition falls apart; the center cannot hold;
More density is loosed upon our shores
The foul stench septic tide rises from beneath
The quaint innocence of past is drowned;
The boards lack conviction, while the outsiders
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some salvation is at hand;
Surely a Bonac Savior is at hand.
Savior, Salvation! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Hamptons Magazine
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of Atlantic Beach
A shape wearing a Brunello Cucinelli unbuttoned shirt
A gaze blank and pitiless as a twenty thousand G.F.A. house,
Is converting earth to stone, while all around it
Reel shadows of indignant piping plovers.
Darkness is dropping despite the White Party revelry
The four centuries of sleepy small-town lore
Are now vexed to nightmare by a meretricious din
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
LOU CORTESE
Comments