HOMELESS IN THE HAMPTONS
Immig workers toil on manses of rich & famous, but forced to camp in woods
Illegal immigrants who mow the lawns and paint the mansions of wealthy Hamptons residents are being forced to live in hovels hidden in the woods due to the sky-high cost of residing in the summer playground of celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Joel and Jay-Z and Beyoncé, The Post has learned.
Squalid encampments exist around the tony town of Southampton, including just off the main highway and in the waterfront village of Westhampton Beach.
“I work for very rich people in the Hamptons, but I can’t afford somewhere to live,” lamented Juan Antonio Morales, 40. “I am paid very little, and an apartment costs too much money.”
The Post found the native Guatemalan spread out on a tattered chaise lounge in a heavily wooded area behind an abandoned gas station along the Montauk Highway in Westhampton Beach last week — as Aston Martins, Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers buzzed past.
Morales said he had spent most of the day hanging out at a nearby 7-Eleven where contractors pick up day laborers to work off the books.
“I work at big houses that are very beautiful,” he said in heavily accented English.
Morales and other laborers The Post interviewed said they had no idea who owned the properties where they work.
Morales, who has been in the US for about 15 years and has a wife and two kids in Guatemala, said he usually gets hired two days a week and makes about $200 a day.
“Every day it is luck if I work,” he said. “Maybe in Guatemala I would get more work, but I don’t have enough money to get home.”
Morales usually sleeps in a tarpcovered shack with other migrants but uses a piece of carpet hung over a
line between two trees as shelter if the tents are full.
He bathes in a gas-station restroom, he said.
‘A safe place to live’?
Nely Lopez, a landscaper who is also from Guatemala, said he’s able to sleep rent-free on a couch in an East Hampton apartment but prefers to live part time in a camp behind the Southampton Full Gospel Church on Route 27.
“I sleep on cardboard here in the woods at least three nights a week,” the 38-year-old Lopez told The Post. “I like it here.”
The woods where the camps are located are so dense, and the camps so secluded, that the workers feel free to leave their belongings there, even stashing expensive landscaping equipment.
“I like the Hamptons,” said 54year-old Julio Cardona Fuentes. “It’s a safe place to live, and there are no problems with migration or police.”
One camp features a fire pit surrounded by cast-off chairs and a table made out of sawhorses.
A large tarp covers the sitting area, which is ringed with makeshift shacks filled with mattresses and
rough-hewn beds.
Gina Webster, whose home on Mill Road in Westhampton Beach is near woods that hide an encampment, said the situation was an open secret among area residents. “People like to pretend homelessness doesn’t exist in the Hamptons
bubble,” Webster said. “It’s the Hamptons, and we like to pretend real-life problems don’t exist here.”
Rich and poor
The Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, which said it counts some of the workers among its clients, decried their living situation as tragic.
“It’s an absolute tragedy that we have hardworking people working tirelessly to improve the lives of all who live here but can’t afford a safe place to lay their heads,” said Bryan Browns, chief legal operations officer at the organization.
Dan O’Shea, who runs the Maureen’s
Haven Homeless Outreach program in Riverhead, said “most communities” on Long Island’s East End have “people living in the woods that have nowhere else to live.”
But in an ironic twist, he said, the wealth of the Hamptons’ residents helps the homeless workers blend in better than in other areas.
“You’re used to seeing a homeless person pushing a shopping cart on a city street,” he said.
“The Hamptons is a generous community,” O’Shea noted. “The homeless often have brand-new work boots from the church and could be wearing a brand-new jacket they were given after a coat drive.”