What People Need

The East Hampton Town Board appears ready to finally take steps to adopt legislation curbing new home sizes in the town, following a process that included public hearings and much revision based on input from all sides.

At this point, it comes down to a simple question: Is there such a thing as too much?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to consider the alternative. If the town offered no such restrictions on size, or more or less allowed mammoth structures on large lots, what would be the result?

A quarter century ago, a house rose in Sagaponack before Southampton Town had such limits. Ira Rennert’s Fair Field is well over 60,000 square feet, with the total floor area of all buildings topping 110,000 square feet. Because it’s on 63 acres, a 29-bedroom house with 39 bathrooms, all of it the size of a low-end Walmart Supercenter, has plenty of room for sprawl.

Is it hard to imagine that the same desire — for more, bigger, to max out whatever is available, cost be damned — would manifest on East Hampton Town lots if there weren’t limits in place?

So it’s not a question of whether to limit, but how much those limits should allow. If that’s the case, it’s hard to argue against East Hampton Town’s rigorous approach to test some limits, and to revisit those after getting feedback at public hearings.

The latest proposal would set the maximum gross floor area of a single-family home at 7 percent of lot area plus 1,500 square feet. Both are slightly smaller than limits set in 2016. On a 1-acre lot, that would still allow a house bigger than 4,500 square feet. More than 97 percent of houses in 2023 were less than 5,000 square feet — so that’s still a very, very comfortably large, luxurious space.

Jaine Mehring, who launched Build.In.Kind three years ago as a movement to “stop overdevelopment,” took a great deal of time to research the issue before launching a campaign to encourage the town to take action. Spurred by the changes in her own neighborhood in Amagansett, she first went through the local Citizens Advisory Committee, making the case that, with excessively large houses, “it’s about clearing; it’s about groundwater; it’s about the environment; it’s about impact on neighbors. It’s about so many things.” She took her case, eventually, to Town Hall.

After considering an even tighter limit, the final proposal is a compromise, a nod to the concerns of the real estate industry, which certainly has reason to argue for houses as big as the market desires. There’s always a demand for more trophy houses in East Hampton. But is that what East Hampton really needs? Would it improve the community?

In the end, Catherine Casey of the East Hampton Housing Authority — speaking as a citizen, not wearing her official hat — made the salient point: “What people need, it’s relative. If you can’t get happy in a 6,000-square-foot house, you are not going to be happy in an 8,000-square-foot house.”

And those numbers will keep going up — if there isn’t something in the way. There’s no better argument for a limit.