SHELTER ISLAND ‘TERM’ WARFARE
Owners in property-rights fight vs. LI town’s quickie-rental crackdown
SHELTER ISLAND, NY — Fierce hurricanes and storms have walloped Shelter Island over the years, leaving homes and businesses battered. But the fiercest tempest now raging on this idyllic enclave off eastern Long Island isn’t weather-related — and it may leave even more collateral damage.
A battle over property rights is tearing the close-knit community apart, pitting neighbor against neighbor and drawing sharp divisions between economic classes in what one town-council member called “the most emotional issue I have ever seen on this island.”
Last year, when the local government in the tiny town of 2,500 people nestled between the North and South Forks legislated against home rentals of less than two weeks’ duration, hundreds of islanders signed a petition protesting the law. A group of 100 residents scraped together enough cash to hire a lawyer to sue the town last August.
They took their battle to federal court, where they are seeking the protection of nothing less than the 14th Amendment — the prohibition of any governmental action that “deprive[s] any person of . . . liberty or property, without due process of law,” according to legal documents.
The six plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the town board of Shelter Island are all women, many the sole supporters of their families. They have rented out their homes during the summer months, when tourists visit the island’s beaches, in order to survive, they say.
“Historically, a substantial number of the short-term rentals on Shelter Island have been by families with children and women,” court papers say. “Using income from the short-term rental of their houses, most of the plaintiffs have invested that income in the upkeep and maintenance of their homes.”
Residents have advertised online using Airbnb, Facebook and Vacation Rentals By Owner, often to those looking for a long weekend away. The average rental period is three days, court papers state.
“I don’t think they understand how devastating this is,” said Julia Weisenberg, 44, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. She told The Post that she uses the $40,000 she makes from renting her family home in the summer to sustain her family of three children and a disabled husband for the entire year. During the periods that she rents her home, Weisenberg and her family live with a neighbor, she said.
“I make no profit on my rental,” said Weisenberg, who also works as a fitness instructor. “I do it to survive.”
FOR Kathryn Klenawicus, 49, a financial planner who has lived on the island since 2011, the $10,000 she makes from renting out her Victorian in Shelter Island Heights — a neighborhood of stately houses near the island’s commercial center — for a few days at a time goes to finance the medication for her husband, David, 61, for a full year. He was born on the island and suffers grand mal seizures that prevent him from working, she said.
Klenawicus, a 9/11 survivor who fled the 73rd floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks, said she also resents the myriad rules that the town has now imposed for property owners on the island. Those include applying for a license, maintaining a rental registry of all guests “for examination by the town” and providing a local contact person to be on call in case renters make too much noise or cause other disturbances.
“This is Big Brother to the 100th degree,” said Klenawicus, adding that one of the directors of her neighborhood association has even requested a meeting with all renters. Fines for noncompliance are about $1,000 per violation.
But proponents of the law say it is no different than the rental rules long imposed in tony Hamptons enclaves such as East Hampton and Quogue.
“We don’t want 16 people staying in a three-bedroom home,” said Jim Colligan, one of the councilmen who spearheaded the rental law and a Shelter Island resident since 2007. Colligan lives with his wife in a stately home in the Silver Beach neighborhood, surrounded by million-dollar properties.
His opponents say he and the other upper middle-class residents on the town board who have purchased sprawling homes in beachfront neighborhoods want to turn Shelter Island into Palm Beach, an exclusive enclave with myriad rules for residents.
Colligan mocked those who need to rent their homes to make ends meet by e-mailing a cartoon that “depicted a mobile shortterm rental bungalow on a ‘Beverly Hillbilly’-style truck” last year, court papers say.
Colligan was unapologetic about his stand.
“We don’t want to be Montauk,” he told The Post.
For years, residents of Shelter Island, an 8,000-acre expanse of land accessible only by ferry, have prided themselves on being distinct from their Hamptons
neighbors. More than one third of the island is covered by the Mashomack nature preserve, and its coastline is cut by expanses of white, sandy beaches overlooking tranquil, turquoise bays. Sylvester Manor, a former slave-holding plantation that once occupied the entire island in the 17th century, now operates as an educational farm and museum.
ISLANDERS take fierce pride in being what one resident called the “Un-Hampton” — a place where flip-flops and department-store bathing suits still vastly outnumber Gucci sandals and Eres bikinis.
And the locals have been renting out their properties to summer guests — mainly families with children — for as long as anyone can remember.
“They had short-term rentals when I was a kid,” said Kolina Nevel Reiter, 80. Reiter owns Bob’s Seafood Market and Restaurant, and Bob’s Fish Market, a business that stemmed from the scallop shop she started with her husband, Bob, in 1962.
Reiter is a “hare-legger,” the term islanders like to use to refer to those who are native-born. Years ago, when the Shelter Island ferries that connect residents with mainland harbors in nearby North Haven and Greenport arrived only intermittently, islanders had to run as fast as wild hares to catch a ride. Today, ferry service, which accommodates delivery trucks and cars as well as walk-on passengers, runs every 10 minutes. It’s an eightminute ride to the mainland.
Like most business owners on the island, Reiter relies on the steady stream of summer visitors to keep her afloat. She makes most of her money in July and August when the island’s population of 2,500 balloons to more than 25,000.
Following her husband’s death last year, Reiter runs her modest market and restaurant with her family. On a recent visit, her 16year-old granddaughter, Amelia, was working the counter.
“Some of this is really being blown out of proportion,” Reiter said wearily, as she steadied herself with her cane.
Reiter says she mostly supports short-term rentals, provided that there are proper controls in place. At her restaurant, which features deep-fried flounder, lobster fritters and Mississippi mud pie on the menu, she is not shy about kicking summer patrons out if they misbehave.
“We had some trouble with a couple doing their necking thing at the table,” she told The Post. “So I went up to them and said, ‘Excuse me, this is neither the time nor the place to do that,’ and I told them to leave.”
In fact, most long-term residents of the island say they have little tolerance for the summer visitors who think they are in an extension of the Hamptons. Many bristle at the comparison between their beloved island and what they perceive as a party mecca, crammed with drunk celebrities and hedge-funders.
“When I hear people from Manhattan say, ‘I’m going to Shelter,’ like they have taken ownership of the place, I have to keep my hands firmly in my pockets,” said a longtime resident. “It’s always been a fight between us and the summer people.”
The battle escalated in 1997, when Manhattan hotelier André Balazs took over a beloved local motel and snack bar and turned it into Sunset Beach, a luxury boutique hotel and restaurant where guests arrive in chauffeur-driven black Cadillac SUVs and Porsches and dine on $46 steaks accompanied by $450 bottles of Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Champagne. A “Sunset Deluxe King” room featuring bay views is $695 per night, and the hotel boutique sells bathing-suit cover-ups for $675. Dozens of celebrities, including Lady Gaga and magazine editor Tina Brown, have been spotted at the resort.
“I would say that Balazs ushered in the era of Eurotrash on Shelter Island,” said the resident, who did not want to be identified. “I learned to swim on that beach, and my father took me after softball games to eat clams at the snack bar. Balazs kept none of that character and at the beginning, didn’t even give jobs to locals. All his waiters and waitresses had to be beautiful so that it felt like Saint-Tropez.”
Long-term residents worried that outsiders only wanted to make a profit and did nothing to contribute to a communityty where the average age of volunteer firefighters is now 65.
Despite some resistance from islanders in the past, Balazs may now be a local hero to some. He recently told Shelter Island Town Supervisor Gary Gerth that he supports short-term renters.
Gerth, who was elected to his post as the rental battle was raging in April 2017, opposes the law. Next month, in a busy schedule that will see him presiding at town meetings on eel grass and the island’s fresh water supply, he’s hoping to introduce an amendment that would allow year-round residents on the island to rent out their homes without limits.
“We’re not Cape Code or Nantucket,” said Gerth, a Republican and Navy veteran who has lived on the island since 1979. “People who rent their homes are not using the cash to go to Las Vegas. They do it because they need to pay their mortgage or hire a caregiver.”
Gerth, who is also a pastor and fond of quoting lyrics from John Denver songs, told The Post that he is sad that the battle has become entrenched in a community that is so small the local high school’s graduating class comprised just 20 kids last month.
“This is the kind of place where peopleple resolveresol things at the post office aand the [grocery store], not in court,” he said. “People here are really low key.”
Shortly after moving to the island, Leon Uris, the famed “Exodus” author and a resident until his death in 2003, dialed Gerth’s number by accident and ended up inviting him to his home for cocktails, he said. Gerth also runs into virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman at the supermarket. Perlman and his wife, Toby, have run the Perlman Music Program, a summer-long music camp for children between the ages of 12 and 18, since 1995.
“I’m a people person,” Gerth said. “But the way things are going, this issue may only be resolved at the Supreme Court.”
BAR owner and longtime resident Jack Kiffer, 75, isn’t happy with the town board, and he bristles at the mention of the highest court in the land. But his issue is toilets, or the lack of public ones, on the island, and he’s been fighting elected officials in court for six years. He says visitors coming off the north ferry from Greenport stop by Dory’s, his bar and restaurant, to use the facilities.
“My cesspool simply can’t handle the excess,” he said while sitting at the bar last week. “I’m not backing down on this.”
And the law barring short-term rentals?
Kiffer and the regulars at the bar — construction workers and a volunteer fireman — simply shrugged. The plaque over the bar seemed to say it all: “This is my ship and I’ll do what I damn well please.”