Letters

That is why I, and many others, deplore Ralph Fasano’s misleading emphasis on “veterans’ housing” to hawk his projects. When we looked into the files, we found a great many applications from all over the tri-state area from agencies and services endorsing Mr. Fasano, complete with lists of “clients” at the ready to move right into his proposed 60 apartments. The number of veterans among the total was negligible.

Sad to say, “nonprofit,” as Mr. Distefano believes, does not mean “jobs for local people.” It doesn’t mean, let alone guarantee, “local” anything. Mr. Distefano should be careful not to conflate “patriotism” with patronage. And he should consider why Mr. Fasano’s project requires gates and a security guard and should be plunked onto County Road 39.

I also sympathize with Darrin and Katora Miller [“We Need Housing,” Letters, September 12], who are working and commuting more than they want to, and who want to live where they grew up, in a prime real estate location changed economically and demographically beyond their recognition, I am sure, by the influx of money, developer frenzy and shrinking land. This puts them in the same boat as roughly 75 percent of their generation struggling all over the country. And it is all over the country that Mr. Fasano casts his net. The Millers have more chance of hitting the jackpot at a casino and buying the home of their dreams than for their application for one of Mr. Fasano’s affordable apartments to be plucked from the town’s whirling lottery drum.

All sympathy aside, however, the shortsightedness, single-mindedness and aura of entitlement of the advocates for Mr. Fasano and his inappropriate housing scheme is breathtaking. My “neighborhood,” as referred to by both these letter writers with their “NIMBY” slur, is sinking under the town’s heinous “full-market” yearly tax reassessments, under the enormous monies shelled out to the Tuckahoe School to educate generations of children not our own, the unaffordable cost of basic property maintenance and escalating insurance, and by all the other out-of-control expenditures rampant out here. All of which have made our houses unaffordable and fodder for development.

What drum do they suggest we consign our “applications” to as we are forced out of our homes by McMansion fever and politically exploitable projects such as Mr. Fasano’s which import people, drain services and pay zero taxes? No thought or consideration seems to be given to that.

This is a dud and must not be made a done deal by Schneiderman and Company. Election coming!

Frances GenoveseSouthampton