Even with high prices in much of the country, the real-estate market has been laid low, mainly by higher interest rates. This has been filtering through to the job market, in both construction and sales activity. The latter sector involves many players but especially the broker/agents. It’s hard to get a national read on thisContinue reading “Home-Sales Pinch Is Felt by Those Smiling Realtors”
Category Archives: Hamptons Land
No Room for the Inns at Long Island’s Mecca
On hotels, as well as housing generally, the Hamptonites of New York are conflicted. They don’t want more homes that crowd their landscapes and roads, but they do want residential “affordability” for their kids and service workers. They don’t want weekend AirBNB rentals in their neighborhoods, but they do want to curb an alternative: additionalContinue reading “No Room for the Inns at Long Island’s Mecca”
Add Express Lanes to Reflect Long Island Growth?
It’s rather quaint to read of an effort to widen a Long Island, N.Y., highway–reminiscent of the days when Robert Moses and others carved out easier traffic routes to bring the isle’s eastern reaches to within just a few hours of New York City. But as Newsday reports, that’s what Republican officials in Suffolk CountyContinue reading “Add Express Lanes to Reflect Long Island Growth?”
A Developer’s Faded Mark on the Hamptons
Readers of placed obituaries in the Southampton Press this week might have puzzled over the one for Francesco Galesi, who died last month in Palm Beach, Fla. at age 95. There was no mention of any connection to “The Hamptons”–perhaps he was just one of many grandees on the winter-summer circuit between the two pocketsContinue reading “A Developer’s Faded Mark on the Hamptons”
40 Years of Opening Up Hamptons Public Spaces
“Public-private partnerships” usually refer to some kind of development project. But they can also be the opposite, a form of nature preservation. That’s been a frequent occurrence in recent decades on the East End of Long Island, N.Y. One form this has taken is a willingness of civic groups to look after properties that aContinue reading “40 Years of Opening Up Hamptons Public Spaces”
Fretting Before Long Island Officials Buy the Farm
Farmland and other open-space preservations are becoming more limited opportunities on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., despite abundant tax money now available for such purchases. The main reason is a dwindling number of such parcels, even as competing bids for residential real-estate development escalate. But sometimes the hangup is disagreement over just whatContinue reading “Fretting Before Long Island Officials Buy the Farm”
Republicans Turn Out the Lights in East Hampton
Another epitaph for the “old Republican Party” was written this week in the township of East Hampton, N.Y., where no GOP candidate has filed for the top position, supervisor, in the November election. This story in the East Hampton Star lays out the contemporary context of the party’s demise there, which mirrors what has happenedContinue reading “Republicans Turn Out the Lights in East Hampton”
Socialist Mayor’s Surtax: An Idea for Hamptons-Like Homes?
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push* for a “pied-a-terre tax” on the sparsely used homes of putative plutocrats is not staying in NYC. At least one legislator from the northern Hudson Valley exurbs is seeking allowance for a similar punitive levy on such properties there. That shouldn’t be surprising: Resentments toward wealthy seasonal visitorsContinue reading “Socialist Mayor’s Surtax: An Idea for Hamptons-Like Homes?”
The Passing of a Pine Barrens Partisan
Decades after hydrologists and other Earth scientists had identified the Central Pine Barrens of Long Island, N.Y., as sitting atop a vital aquifer and fostering a complex ecosystem, the 120,000 remaining acres were still being treated as scrublands. By the 1970s they separated the increasingly precious Hamptons and farm belt of the eastern end fromContinue reading “The Passing of a Pine Barrens Partisan”
Chicken or Egg: A Farm May Disturb Hamptons-Adjacent Rusticity
It’s a conceit on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., that the agricultural character of the area should be preserved. Attempts to do that go back half a century, to when land values rose to the point that farm families wanted to sell out to subdividers. But the gloss of today’s version–mostly vineyards andContinue reading “Chicken or Egg: A Farm May Disturb Hamptons-Adjacent Rusticity”
