Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Zillow
Banning the mega megamansion was one thing. There were, of course, some murmurs of disagreement when the East Hampton Town Board voted in December to amend the local zoning code and halve the 20,000-square-foot size limit of new builds to a mere 10,000 — or around the size of the Lenox Hill Whole Foods. After all, it was only a handful of really, really rich people with large enough lots on, say, Further Lane who could have gone that big anyway.
But things grew considerably more testy when the town board started talking about shrinking the maximum home size for new construction for the vast majority of the lots in the town, which includes Wainscott, Springs, Amagansett, and Montauk. That kind of change would mean that everyone from speculators razing tiny cottages and replacing them with resort-style party houses to the Montauk lifers who bought one of the few remaining “starter” homes in the area would be at the mercy of the new code.
All of East Hampton had something to say about it. One resident pleaded with the board to “consider younger generations” who have taken years to “save a plan” for renovations that may, come this year, be off the table. A local builder sounded downright existential in an email he fired off to every brokerage in town after catching wind of the effort: “The consequences of this decision will not stop at property values,” he warned.
The monster mansion replacing a 100-year-old beach shack in the estate sections isn’t a new phenomenon in the Hamptons. (”The trend is bigger, bigger, bigger,” an East Hampton broker told the New York Times back in 1999. “We’ve had magnificent houses to show, and people won’t even look at them because the square footage isn’t enough.”) But the pace of that development has accelerated in recent years. Suddenly, it seems like every private road and tiny street — including the ultraquaint and seemingly sacred surfers’ paradise Ditch Plains Beach and the Dunes in Amagansett — became fair game for developers. Spec houses dot the landscape, and home prices raced ever upward, as available homes priced under a million dollars dropped from nearly 70 percent of the East Hampton market to 10 percent of it over the last 20 years. Environmental concerns began to percolate over the dunes, traffic, and trash.
“What’s that going to look like when the dominos fall on every street in every neighborhood?” Jaine Mehring, a local advocate for preservation and smaller square footage who has been crunching these numbers, tells me.
It didn’t help that many of the new houses popping up were, well, kind of ugly — glass and steel and knot-less cedar monuments went up next to the hydrangea-fronted landscapes of the East End. “We are all at the mercy of those with more money than taste,” says a homeowner from Springs. Or as another resident of the same once-sleepy, mostly saltbox-and-bungalowed hamlet put it: “When the houses start to look like hotels or airport terminals, there’s something wrong.”
So while the volume and particular tastes of new construction will remain untouched by any zoning changes — there’s consistently between 100 to 120 permits each year (not counting the 1,000-plus permits for smaller add-ons and patios) — the town board started discussing whether the new builds will have to shrink. So how much house is too much house in East Hampton?
About 90 percent of the lots in East Hampton are smaller than two acres. The current formula holds that people can build up to 10 percent of their lot size, plus 1,600 square feet. The build formula that emerged in early meetings took those numbers down to 7 percent plus 1,300 square feet. That means the person with the smallest lot in East Hampton — barely a tenth of an acre — could build a 2,700-square-foot house plus a 600-square-foot attached-garage lot, plus a finished basement — which, at least according to rising national averages, is still a lot of house. (Not that anyone could agree on that: “I once did a 2,000-square-foot house and it was really tight,” a real estate agent from Sagaponack complained during a working session.)
As the working sessions dragged on, support for that formula started to fade. The conversations became circular. Even the board members seemed fatigued at the math. “We split the baby and go to the 1,500,” one councilmember said during the most recent meeting in January. “I would just like to get to the public hearing.”
And so it will go to a public hearing in March, where the town will surely fight it out some more. And why not? The resulting questions are heady. Is a 2,700-square-foot home “small” or just Hamptons small? Do people need a 3,500-square-foot home, or is everyone just trying to keep up with the Paltrows? Is preserving the character of a town worth a larger mudroom or extra closet? “It’s just a flex,” said one resident who feels exhausted by living in a permanent construction zone. “Everyone’s bored and wants to show off and spend money nonstop.” Or as another told me: “Selfishness has become a style of architecture.”