Letters

Your newspaper continues to be a service for which we are deeply grateful.

I do hope I have sufficiently recovered my composure to write to you constructively in response to your recent article headlined “A Vision For Housing” [Express, June 16], which just as well may have been titled “A Dystopian Vision For Housing.”

After giving this Adam Potter every benefit of the doubt until now, and sometimes defending him (and his not-so-transparent “backers”) to other longtime village residents, asking them to await more definitive information before rendering a verdict, we can now conclude that Mr. Potter is a clear and present danger to this village.

His pharaonic vision is described by this newspaper as worthy of Robert Moses, or perhaps more accurately Nicolae Ceausescu. “Affordable housing” is simply his stalking horse to transform this village into something very different than what it is now. His true intent surely lies elsewhere. But where? Shouldn’t we find out?

I will not even trouble you or your readers with a diatribe on Mr. Potter’s proposed design aesthetic. I have faith in our village government and boards at every level to check Mr. Potter’s grandiose plans (and those of his shadowy backers, whoever they are).

Please do not be taken in by this “affordable housing” ruse. We must figure this problem out. But the village can, and should, continue to untie that Gordian knot in other less convulsive ways.

One more (timely) point on the subject of “affordable housing” as stalking horse: I have heard it myself — quite a few local Realtors seem to be running around promiscuously telling a new generation of would-be buyers from New York City or Texas or Mars or somewhere (who often lack genuine understanding or sympathy for this historic village) that they now, by law, have the automatic right to put in bathrooms, etc., and turn into “affordable housing” every tool shed and garage and outhouse on every plot in the village, no matter how small the plot may be, no matter how may contingent neighbors, no matter what the specific context or circumstance. When, in fact, the true desire is to turn these structures, often historic, into pool houses, guest houses and/or servants’ quarters. Let’s be real.

Here, too, I have every confidence in the village’s elected officials, the Building Department, (laudable) volunteer boards and highly professional civil servants to check this “bad-faith” exploitation and nonsense. Every case should be judged on its own merits. Utterance of the phrase “affordable housing” should not act like “open sesame” and flout the sincere good intentions of the village’s newly enacted laws.

Please do not allow Mr. Potter to merge these various village plots together.

Steven Barr

Sag Harbor