Early within the night of Dec. 30, Julio Florencio Teo Gomez, a carpenter from Guatemala Metropolis who had shifted round totally different residing conditions on Lengthy Island for greater than a decade, went searching for cash he was owed for a job he had accomplished earlier than the vacations. Like so many different day laborers working within the far reaches of Lengthy Island, he had discovered the work at a roundup one morning within the parking zone of the 7-Eleven in Southampton. All through the ultimate week of the 12 months, he visited the lot a number of instances within the late afternoons, when painters and millworkers, handymen and others within the constructing trades are dropped off on the finish of the workday. He hoped to seek out the contractor who had uncared for to pay him and acquire what he was due.
Whether or not he managed to get the money is unclear, however on the finish of his mission, Mr. Teo Gomez got down to go to his brother 17 miles away in Riverhead. Though they’d been residing collectively for a time, Mr. Teo Gomez’s house was now an encampment within the woods in Bridgehampton. It was shortly after 6 o’clock when he walked towards a bus cease on County Street 39, a stretch of highway that runs from Shinnecock Hills to Water Mill and passes one of many nation’s most unique golf golf equipment, a McDonald’s and the grave of Gary Cooper. Crossing at nighttime, he was struck by a sedan. Law enforcement officials arrived and administered CPR. The driving force remained on the scene of the accident and was not charged. Mr. Teo Gomez, who was 48 and had a spouse and 5 youngsters in Guatemala, died later that night time at a close-by hospital.
For share of his grownup life he had been a part of a piece drive essential to the high-season rituals of Lengthy Island’s East Finish, the place the maintenance of pricey property is meticulous and fixed. The employees, who’re for essentially the most half undocumented immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, are saved sufficiently busy throughout the stretch from April to September, when constant landscaping work is offered they usually could make $100 to $150 a day — sufficient for a room in a home or residence, or at the very least a chosen couch someplace.
However the colder months — when there isn’t a crucial to trim the hedgerows — demand options. Some employees discover them within the rhythms of the harvest, shifting to the North Fork in October to choose grapes at native vineyards after which touring to Florida to choose oranges throughout the winter. Others stay, and after they can not afford a room, they dwell within the woods.
Encampments have emerged over time as actual property values have soared and the least well-paid among the many working class have had fewer choices by way of the place and the way they dwell. There may be not a everlasting homeless shelter on this a part of Suffolk County. Throughout the winter, the encampment inhabitants reaches about 100; it could double over the summer season, when demand for employees — and the price of lease — are a lot increased.
The out of doors residing preparations are achievements in found-object design — mattresses positioned underneath jury-rigged tents, meals ready over an open fireplace or on propane cooktops. Water is hauled in gallon jugs, introduced in from parks and comfort shops. However the encampment Mr. Teo Gomez lived in with two different males stands in such disorienting proximity to an Elle Decor evocation of the Hamptons which you could see the aspect of a Shingle-style home by the naked bushes on a hill within the distance.
Over time, those that keep by the winter have benefited from the attentions of some native officers and charities and most just lately from a skilled social employee named Marit Molin, herself an immigrant from Sweden. When she and her household moved to the East Finish full-time from Manhattan 9 years in the past, she was struck by the way in which her youngsters’s associates marveled at how a lot meals she had in her fridge. As a summer season resident, she’d had little sense of how many individuals struggled in such a lavishly rich place.
The youngsters of housekeepers and different low-wage employees, she quickly found, typically spent summer season days at the back of their dad and mom’ automobiles, ready for his or her shifts to finish. Unsettled by the disparities, she began an artwork camp the place 40 % of youngsters might attend at no cost. Two years later, in 2020, she based Hamptons Group Outreach, with the objective of protecting individuals fed and serving to financially strained owners make repairs they may not afford.
Ms. Molin first heard in regards to the encampments three years in the past when somebody talked about to her that there have been individuals residing outside and that sometimes they froze to demise. She and an outreach group started recurrently delivering meals, typically equipped by native eating places she commandeered into service, in addition to heat garments, to the boys residing in them.
Poverty just isn’t a brand new phenomenon on the South Fork, nonetheless incongruous that may appear inside the context of $100-a-plate lobster salads. Neither are the efforts to alleviate it. Within the early Eighties, a bunch in Southampton bought collectively to determine tips on how to assist those that couldn’t make ends meet. Their effort grew into Coronary heart of the Hamptons, a meals pantry that offered greater than 347,000 meals final 12 months. In 2002 a company known as Maureen’s Haven, named after a nun of the Dominican order, arose to assist women and men residing on the fringes. Primarily based in Riverhead, it supplies shelter throughout the winter in roving places, typically in church buildings.
However in lots of circumstances, the supply of shelter is refused, as Gina Laferrera, detective sergeant on the Southampton City Police, defined. Individuals are delay by shelter guidelines — strict instances of arrival and departure, baggage checks and a compulsory breathalyzer check. Amongst day laborers residing in encampments, ingesting is a method to remain heat and relieve the tedium of lengthy days with none work.
Regulation enforcement tends to go away the encampments alone. The police will ask that they be taken down when they’re erected on personal property, Sergeant Laferrera mentioned, however this not often sparks battle: “I can’t keep in mind anybody ever resisting.”
Two weeks after Mr. Teo Gomez died, there was a memorial for him at a funeral house in Riverhead, which highlighted the close-knit nature of the day laborer group. About half of the 40 individuals who got here lived in encampments. They arrived on a bus organized by Hamptons Group Outreach, which had raised hundreds of {dollars} to cowl bills, by a submit on Instagram. “Julio had huge hopes and desires, however life was not at all times simple,” Ms. Molin mentioned in a quick eulogy. Others talked about their buddy’s heat and the unhappiness they now carried in his absence.
Genaro Garcia and Sergio Hernandez, the 2 males who had lived with Mr. Teo Gomez within the woods, stood in entrance of his coffin, which was open with white roses and hydrangeas beside it. Mr. Garcia had met Mr. Teo Gomez solely a month earlier than he died. He had grow to be homeless after separating from his spouse, and was sleeping behind a Kmart in Bridgehampton, the place Mr. Teo Gomez found him and invited him to dwell within the encampment he and Mr. Hernandez had quietly constructed within the predawn hours final spring. That they had used bamboo stalks lower from bushes they discovered rising close to the native prepare station to carry up tarps and create sleeping areas. There was a cooking spot a couple of ft away and sufficient privateness that they remained off the radar.
Throughout their time residing collectively the three had grown shut. On the funeral, the boys needed to honor their buddy’s reminiscence, however it was onerous to talk, they usually each broke down crying. “The assistance and recommendation he gave me won’t ever depart my coronary heart,” Mr. Hernandez, who has been in the USA for 18 years, mentioned later.
4 days after the service, Ms. Molin visited the encampment, reached through a brief stroll into the woods on a comparatively clear path. It was 20 levels, and there was snow on the bottom. As a result of the climate was so unforgiving, she supplied to place the boys up in a motel, as she had finished for Christmas.
Ms. Molin has used scenes like this one — the encampment had papers and bottles scattered on the bottom, a sheet functioning as a door to the tent — to attempt to elevate consciousness and cash within the hope of delivering extra help. In a video she posted on Instagram prematurely of a February charity occasion for her group, she stands in entrance of a messy tent pitched between two bushes and says, “Welcome to the Hamptons: A spot the place individuals dwell in mansions, and the place additionally they dwell like this.” On the occasion, which raised $60,000, she introduced plans for a job-training program that might assist individuals discover extra profitable work year-round. Even throughout the summer season, the competitors for touchdown day jobs is important.
The housing disaster that has bothered a lot of the nation has been particularly extreme in seaside and ski cities the place astronomical real-estate costs, pushed even increased throughout the pandemic, and the low, fluctuating wages widespread to service work and infrequently tainted by exploitative labor practices could make it virtually unimaginable to discover a residing house.
In East Hampton, 78 % of two-bedroom leases are priced above $6,000 a month; the most affordable fall between $3,000 and $4,500. In Southampton, the determine appears much more unsustainable, with 85 % of two-bedroom leases exceeding $6,000 a month.
In recent times, there was some motion to fight the scarcity of housing for employees on the East Finish, replicating related efforts in resort cities across the nation. In November 2022, voters in East Hampton, Southhampton and Southold authorised a proposal to levy a 0.5 % tax on the sale of houses and property above $400,000, the proceeds of which might go into an reasonably priced housing fund. However precisely the place reasonably priced housing ought to go breeds countless debate and litigation.
One other technique presently being sorted out could maintain extra promise. In tandem with a developer and the city of East Hampton, Christopher Kelley, a lawyer who has served on many alternative group boards over three many years, is devising a plan that might require tweaking the zoning code to permit employers to construct higher-density housing that may very well be leased to their very own moderate- and low-income employees. The present code in East Hampton permits for under eight housing models per acre, however was written in 1984 to accommodate the constraints of sewer expertise, which has since superior.
One in all Mr. Teo Gomez’s closest associates (an undocumented immigrant who requested to stay nameless) was finally in a position to connect himself to a single contractor and get common work, which has allowed him to lease a room in Riverhead for $700 a month all 12 months spherical. In the summertime months, he could make about $800 per week, he defined by an interpreter, and is ready to avoid wasting of it. When he and Mr. Teo Gomez bought collectively, they talked about work and the ways in which some employers had mistreated them: denying water on sizzling days, or hiring for 2 days of labor after which demanding the job be accomplished in a single.
Within the view of his associates, Mr. Teo Gomez was the one to carry everybody up, to get them by these difficulties — to vow them that there could be higher jobs, that some day there could be more cash, new ladies, a reprieve from a lot loneliness and isolation. It was not his ambition to stay on Lengthy Island eternally. His hope was to get again to Guatemala and construct a home for his household. Sixteen days after he died, his physique was flown house.
Anna Watts and Manuel Sosa contributed translation.