Dan's Papers - January 11, 2008 - Reaping the Whirlwind

The Village of Southampton, which voted several years ago to relax zoning restrictions, is now reaping the whirlwind.

For example, there was the matter of a house proposed by a Mr. Gerry Ferrara of Westhampton, which he wanted to build on Post Lane, a road in Southampton that was laid out during the 1950s and which has on it about twenty modest homes of about 1,600 square feet each sitting on a quarter acre, side by side.

Mr. Ferrara had bought one of these homes, and his plan was to tear it down and replace it with a home of about 7,500 square feet. It would dominate the neighborhood and those on the upper floors of his home could look out into the yards of all the other little houses. The people in these little houses, many of them members of the families who had built them half a century ago, would want to be protected from this intrusion.

Now with the old zoning there would have been no way in hell that Mr. Ferrara could have even submitted the plans for this house with any hope whatsoever that it might be approved. Those that had made the zoning laws back then were dentists, schoolteachers, store owners and so forth and so on. There was, and still is, a passage in the Village ethics laws that says people in the building business could be in a position to pass the building laws.

But who knew, back then, that practically everybody in the village today, even the merchants, dentists and schoolteachers, would one way or another be in the real estate business? That ethics rule, about five years ago, began to be widely ignored.

Among those on the Zoning Board three years ago, when the zoning laws were loosened, was builder Gerry Ferrara himself. He is still in town government, but now on the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Why not repeal that ethics law if it is not going to be upheld?

Anyway, under the new zoning, what was formerly considered square footage no longer is. So a 7,500 square foot house is now considered a 5,500 square foot house, because you no longer have to count the attic or the garage among the square feet.

Of course, there are still setbacks and height restrictions that come into play. Or do they? They've been relaxed too. And so, Mr. Ferrara actually was now within his rights to build something that he was not able to build before.

The sequence to get a building permit in the Village of Southampton consists, in some cases - and due to a whoop and cry by the residents of Post Lane in this case - is to first go to the Architectural Review Board and get their stamp of approval, then the Zoning Board for a further approval and, with these two in hand, go to the Building Department to get a permit.

Mr. Ferrara never made it past the Architectural Review Board. He went once and all sorts of people from Post Lane showed up and the Board said he should make it smaller. He went away and came back with about 200 square feet off the proposal - a ridiculously small concession - and the Post Lane people showed up again and objected so loudly and so strongly that the Architectural Review Board rejected the whole thing saying that it was plain as the nose on your face that this giant McMansion did not belong on this tiny lot in this completely developed little local community. "It is massive and overbearing," they wrote in their decision. The reason? Well they didn't have a single thing to stand on now that the zoning was changed, so they just rejected it saying it didn't belong there.

Well, the McMansion is coming anyway. Mr. Ferrara took the matter to court and State Supreme Court Judge Martin Kerins threw the decision out. Basically, he looked at the law currently on the books and he looked at the planned McMansion and said, well, if you don't want it why did you zone for it? And there is simply no answer to that.

One of the peculiarities in this case is that those in favor of the McMansion - everyone not living on Post Lane - say that the proposed McMansion is a classic colonial home in the traditional Hamptons summer home cottage style.

Well, it is not in the colonial Hamptons summer home cottage style. That style features white shingle siding, wrap-around porches, oversized windows and, sometimes, turrets or windmills.

We have in our community become so accustomed to McMansions, which are not in that style, but are in another style, that when someone proposes a McMansion to look like all the other McMansions, we say it is in keeping with the community's 350-year-old history, which it is not.

Here are other arguments in favor of this enormous house, so out of scale in the community in which it will be built.

"If home builders and contractors were to pay for the materials to build a house," said a former ARB Chairman named Roger Blaugh, "pay their employees' salaries and the subcontractors' fees and everything else with only two dollar bills, do you know what you would start to see? In no time, inside the cash registers of every store out here, 75 percent of all the money would be two dollar bills."

One can say the same thing about restaurants, but that doesn't mean you want to build one on Post Lane.

"Today, when people come out here to enjoy their Hampton homes they expect to entertain large crowds of guests," said another former ARB member who wished to remain anonymous. "So they want and need larger homes, with professional kitchens, more bedrooms to accommodate their guests and so on. And what about all those people who host fundraising benefits at their mansions, which is to the advantage of so many charitable organizations? How could this be accomplished in an average middle-class home that usually has less than 1,600 square feet of living space?"

Probably pretty badly, if you ask me. But I will say that it will be the former Southampton middle class who will staff those parties, and they will do so from shabby villages eighty miles away rather from just down the street.

As we go to press, we learn that the Southampton Architectural Review Board is going to appeal this decision, which means the McMansion will not start being built on Post Lane until the matter is further settled. And guess what, the Southampton Town Board, the mastermind of these new horrible zoning regulations, is joining with the Southampton Architectural Review Board to challenge the judge for having agreed with the laws they had passed. Will wonders never cease?

About half of the Hamptons today consist of real estate upon which giant homes owned by summer people can be built. The other half is land with small houses where locals have lived for hundreds of years.