Never Gonna Happen

The response of neighbors living near the Atlantic Golf Club on Scuttle Hole Road in Bridgehampton to plans to build a residential staff housing building on the golf course for as many as 16 workers said it all: Affordable workforce housing is never going to happen on the East End. Not as long as NIMBY neighbors continue to frame it as someone else’s problem to deal with — somewhere other than in their neighborhoods.

The golf club, recognizing the dearth of housing opportunities in the area for its employees — particularly in the post-pandemic world, when many rental opportunities have been snapped up by people escaping the city or sold by property owners capitalizing on the robust real estate market — is seeking to build shared housing on its own property fronting Scuttle Hole Road, to the north of Shorts Pond, a 6,500-square-foot building containing 16 bedrooms for workers.

It’s not the first club to look to provide more housing for its employees. The Bridge Golf Club is in the middle of plan to add housing at the club using converted storage containers.

Certainly, the Atlantic proposal must be scrutinized by the Planning Board for any irregularities, and to determine the least impact to the environment and neighborhood. That said, the plan seems reasonable and the continuation of a long-held national and regional practice of employers helping to provide housing for employees. That is long a tradition on the East End, dating back to the transformation of Sag Harbor Village from a whaling to an industrial town, when Joseph Fahys moved his watchcase factory there and provided reasonable housing for some of his employees.

But reasonableness didn’t appear to be on the minds of Bridgehampton residents opposed to the Atlantic’s plans. They raised the specter of a raucous late-night and weekend party house, replete with orgies in every room, pushing the occupancy from 16 to as many as 48 people on a given night. “Golf course employees work hard and play hard,” one neighbor said, perhaps an ironic statement, given that the golf course caters to the Hamptons elite.

Granted, the housing would be for seasonal employees, who, presumably, would come here to work hard and cash in during the short summer season rather than just party, and would not add to the region’s stock of permanent affordable workforce housing. But it would, in some small measure, ease the strain on other permanent workers looking to live near where they work.

The lack of affordable and workhouse housing on the East End has been a crisis for many years, made worse by the housing bubble following the pandemic. The only way it’s ever going to ease is if the community somehow pulls together and backs plans — large and small — to provide homes for workers who, day in and day out, are the life blood of the local economy.

If the reaction of the Bridgehampton neighbors is any indication, there’s still a ton of work to do on that front. Hopefully, those attitudes change before the housing crisis inevitably becomes a catastrophe.