Hardship in the Hamptons
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The story (with snarky comments from a blog I follow):
"Look how terrible times are for them. The change of residence get turned into a New Trail of Tears."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/realestate/coronavirus-second-homes-.html
Turning a Second Home Into a Primary Home
Those who are lucky enough to have a weekend house have discovered that living there full-time can require some adjustment.
When the pandemic slammed into New York City in March, Sally Fischer, a lifelong Manhattanite, assumed she would take refuge with her family in their apartment in Columbus Circle. But in May, Ms. Fischer, her husband, Elliott Upton, and their 22-year-old son, Jack, picked up and moved to their weekend home in Southampton.
Although they only went to the Long Island property seven times last year, they now plan to remain there at least through October. “This experience has rekindled our love for this house,” Ms. Fischer said.
Ms. Fischer, whose company, Sally Fischer Public Relations, represents entertainment, food and fashion clients, is working remotely. She has filled her home with many of the career treasures that once adorned her now-vacant Manhattan office, including a poster of Jeremy Irons, her longtime client, in the movie “Moonlighting,” and a pencil holder and paper tray she bought years ago in Florence.
As the specter of a confusing fall looms, with the pace and methods of how businesses and schools will reopen still murky, New Yorkers lucky enough to own second homes have begun embracing those places with newfound devotion and are converting them into their primary homes — at least for the foreseeable future. While there are some who cannot wait to return to their busy city lives, many others have discovered the joys of living outside the city and are considering whether and how best to prolong their time there.
“Look how terrible times are for them:”
Some second-home owners are buying new furniture and reconfiguring their properties to better accommodate their new habits, like remaking guest bedrooms into home offices and getting the necessary items to work and school from home. Others are considering more expansive renovations to their properties, such as upgrading aging kitchens or building additions. There are those who have relocated their businesses to their weekend houses — potentially for the long-term — and others who are adding their children’s names to school rosters in these towns as an option come September.
While living full-time in places that usually get much less wear and tear, these homeowners share many of the same difficulties as anyone dealing with the coronavirus lockdown — working in communal spaces where their children now are present 24-7, discovering items in their homes that need updating, and then renovating a home while they are living in it. In addition, these homeowners must adjust to living in relatively unfamiliar towns, often far from friends, family, or creature comforts like a favorite bagel shop or longtime barber.
Are you kidding me?
Are you, as British people say, taking the fucking piss, mate?Then there are the inherent tensions between second-home owners and year-round residents, who initially feared the spread of Covid-19 and who were resentful of the weekenders who arrived in the off-season and never left.
Michelle Smith, who lives on the Upper West Side, decamped for her weekend home in the Hudson Valley with her son in March, when the pandemic was just beginning to take root in Manhattan. The house, located in the town of Newburgh, is large with a pool, “a family compound meant for entertaining — not work,” said Ms. Smith, who is the chief executive of Source Financial Advisors, a boutique wealth management company. As the single mother of Dylan, 18, who has special needs, Ms. Smith has found the experience challenging.
“As the British say: This is the absolute limit.”
“I’m working more than normal, and there is no downtime,” Ms. Smith said. “I used to leave the office and go to Starbucks for a vanilla latte, or just take a walk around the block. Now, if I want coffee I have to walk by my son into the kitchen, so there is no break between work and being a mom.” Ms. Smith spends her days working from her bedroom — locking the door when she doesn’t want to be disturbed — while during the school year, Dylan attended classes on Zoom from the butler pantry.
“Literally millions of people are forced out of work by policies the New York Times champions but the Times also wants you to shed some tears for this woman who has more work than ever -- because she can't go out to get a Starbucks vanilla latte.
Now, the next part is going to read so absurd you're going to think I made it up.
But I did not make it up.
This is real.
This is completely 100% real.”Ms. Smith’s mother has come to live with them to help out, but “I feel like my life went from 100 m.p.h. down to 10 m.p.h. in a day,” she said. When the pandemic hit, she went from dining in restaurants multiple nights a week and having the help of a sitter who did much of the meal prep for her son, to sharing full-time cooking duties with her mother and not eating a single meal outside her home in four months.
Living in Newburgh is also a return to home, of a sort, for Ms. Smith. She grew up in the town where she now has her country house and has a unique perspective on the sometimes difficult relationship between weekenders and full-time residents. “There is definitely an attitude up here of ‘the city people’ rushing with all their money to rent or buy anything they can get their hands on,” she said, adding that there is fear, particularly in popular hiking areas, that it is now “full of city people exhaling Covid germs.”
Still, despite the challenges, Ms. Smith would rather be in Newburgh than in Manhattan, where her family would be squeezed into an apartment and isolating would be harder. Looking toward the fall, Ms. Smith, who co-founded the school that her son attends, The IDEAL School of Manhattan, is keeping an open mind. “I will likely do some combo of remote and in-class, depending on the safety and what unfolds,” she said, adding that her work plans also remain “up in the air.”
To accommodate their new realities, Ms. Smith is making some changes to the house, including upgrading her bedroom work area with office furniture, and is considering building a separate office space using a prefabricated office shed, so she can conduct meetings with colleagues and have some space from her family.
Ned Baldwin has also been making changes to his weekend house, now that his family is spending nearly all of their time there. Mr. Baldwin, the chef and owner of Houseman, a restaurant in Hudson Square, temporarily closed his business in March and relocated to Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island.
“I packed up the entire walk-in and I took everything that was perishable and sent a spreadsheet to friends in Orient,” said Mr. Baldwin, who is also the author of “How to Dress an Egg.” “Everyone placed orders and I packed up 40 shopping bags and drove them out in a friend’s pickup.” He waited at a shuttered farm stand, huddled against the wind, while his friends came by to pick up their food and Venmo payment. “And that was it. It was basically the last time I was in New York.”
Mr. Baldwin’s weekend home, a circa-1968 kit house which he bought some 15 years ago, needed upgrades to work as a primary residence. Chief among the changes was a larger bed for his 13-year-old daughter, Hazel. “The bed was a foot too short. For two weeks she had been sleeping on the couch, or with us, and I hadn’t even noticed,” recalled Mr. Baldwin, who also lives with his wife, Jordana, the director for cultural engagement at Everytown for Gun Safety, and their 15-year-old son, Irving. Mr. Baldwin built his daughter’s new bed himself, then he built her a desk so she could do her schoolwork.
Mr. Baldwin has returned to work at his restaurant, which has reopened, but his wife will likely continue working remotely for the foreseeable future. The family is planning to return to Manhattan in September as the children’s schools expect to open with a combination of remote and in-person learning.
Not everyone is convinced that the fall school semester will necessitate a return and some are contemplating remaining in their secondary — now primary — residence until the pandemic subsides. Joshua Rahn, co-founder of the venture fund Ocean Ventures, his wife, Jessica Contrastano, and their three children have been living in their home in Amagansett since mid-March. “It’s great here. I mean, if I didn’t know there was absolute chaos in the world, and if I didn’t have teenagers who miss their friends, I could do this forever,” he said.
Mr. Rahn’s children were set to attend the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School and the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies in September. “So they are all going to high-density environments,” he said. “As owners in Long Island, we pay taxes and the schools are great here, so we will wait and see.” He expects to make a decision on schools in the next several weeks.
Some are taking the changes in stride. “I work on a lot of charity boards with Covid-19 funds, donating and doing fund-raising,” said Jean Shafiroff, a philanthropist who is on the board of the Southampton Hospital Association and is a national spokeswoman for American Humane’s Feed The Hungry Fund, which cares for animals abandoned during the pandemic. “It puts everything in perspective. If we can’t go out for a year, we will survive. It’s fine.”Ms. Shafiroff, whose primary residence is an apartment on Park Avenue, has been living at her weekend home in Southampton since mid-March. “It is my husband, two grown children, a boyfriend and our housekeeper, who is fabulous and we love like a family member,” she said. They also have five rescue dogs. “I’m grateful that my family can be together, and no one has to be alone.”
While the house is spacious, and everyone has enough room to work, Ms. Shafiroff never got around to decorating her bedroom, and has no plans to do so now. “The walls are bare, but empty is good. Less is fine with me.”Lorraine Heber-Brause and her husband, Ken Brause, who purchased their home in Litchfield County, Conn., in 2008, partly in reaction to 9/11, have spent much more time in the home than they normally do. Ms. Heber-Brause’s stepmother died in the terrorist attack and the family wanted “a Plan B,” she said. “We weren’t the people who were like, ‘Let’s leave the city.’ But we were like, ‘Let’s get a place where we could go, a safety net.”
In addition to purchasing some office furniture to make the quarantine more comfortable, the couple, who have two college-age children, also felt it was an opportune moment to begin upgrading the property. “We were there, looking up during a rainstorm, for example, and saw rain coming into the skylight, and thought, ‘Maybe now is a good time to replace it.’” So far, the construction has been going well. “There isn’t a lot of new construction right now, so the builders were wonderfully accessible.”
“Lovely.
They're accessible because they're laid off and are living on unemployment and PPP loans.
But it works out nicely for your fucking skylight renovation.
I want to print this out in 10,000 copies and hand them out to antifa's arsonists and Street Thugs.
Just for... inspiration.”
While some homeowners see this as a good moment to begin some renovations, contractors are urging clients to hold off on major changes. “Now is not a great time to tear apart your house,” said Jared Loveless, the president of Vector East, Ltd., a general contractor on Long Island’s North Fork. “We just came out of a shutdown, supplies like lumber are really sparse, delays are inevitable.”
Towns have had to put their permitting and approval processes online, adding to the confusion, he said. Then there is the unease around Covid-19. “The etiquette of social distancing — what to do if a client isn’t wearing a mask and you feel uncomfortable asking them to put one on, for instance — it can be a challenge,” Mr. Loveless said.
While renovations may not be easy right now, they may be necessary, said Chuck Petersheim, a homebuilder based in Sullivan County. “My biggest concern as families transition their weekend homes to their primary residence is about safety,” he said. A home built in the 1970s, for instance, was not intended to have multiple computers, iPads, phones and other devices plugged into its electrical outlets, and could pose a fire hazard. Overworked septic systems and the safety of well water are also a possible concern.
The advent of Covid-19 has been a major boon for Mr. Petersheim, whose company, Catskill Farms, designs and builds homes. “In the months of April, May and June we did a year’s worth of business, while turning away twice that number,” he said.
The majority of those who own second homes recognize their good fortune.
“I was born and raised in Manhattan, so at first, I thought it was better to stay put,” said Ms. Fischer. “But we are so happy to be out here. You love the one you’re with, as the saying goes.”
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Unbelievable!! I thought that this was quite irony:
"Ms. Fischer, whose company, Sally Fischer Public Relations, ......."
Being a public relations company owner, how did she not understand how dumb this makes her look?
Based on her unawareness, I am not sure I would want to hire her. LOL
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I stopped reading at one point, but I don't get what's the commenter's problem. What I read of the article lays out how the affluent are handling the changes they are undergoing re the pandemic. They're affluent, so they have second homes; the article goes into how they're adjusting. What, they're supposed to lie down in the gutter and die because they have money?
The guy's a brat.
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@Catseye3 I think it is kind of the "ivory tower" thinking.
Rich people/people in power, etc. try to be "just one of the guys" and their stories and they way they act often just make them look even more out of touch.
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@Catseye3 said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
I stopped reading at one point, but I don't get what's the commenter's problem. What I read of the article lays out how the affluent are handling the changes they are undergoing re the pandemic. They're affluent, so they have second homes; the article goes into how they're adjusting. What, they're supposed to lie down in the gutter and die because they have money?
No, apparently they're supposed to make their own latte's, and walk past their children! Isn't that enough for you?????
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@taiwan_girl Yes, and I also think there's a touch of "I'm rich, so the virus can't touch me" in their thinking, even if subconsciously. Then COVID comes along and is like, "Oh yeah? Watch this."
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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@Catseye3 said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
@taiwan_girl Yes, and I also think there's a touch of "I'm rich, so the virus won't touch me" in their thinking, even if subconsciously.
A co-worker of mine was fired because he said he'd be having to work remotely in June to take care of his parents, who were in a bad way. (By the way, it's July, and we're still remote, so what the hell is the problem).
Our department head, no, shit, said this about his request: "that's completely ridiculous. You show up to work in this department. Even I will be showing up once a week, he can get his ass into the office."
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@Aqua-Letifer said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
@Catseye3 said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
@taiwan_girl Yes, and I also think there's a touch of "I'm rich, so the virus won't touch me" in their thinking, even if subconsciously.
A co-worker of mine was fired because he said he'd be having to work remotely in June to take care of his parents, who were in a bad way. (By the way, it's July, and we're still remote, so what the hell is the problem).
Our department head, no, shit, said this about his request: "that's completely ridiculous. You show up to work in this department. Even I will be showing up once a week, he can get his ass into the office."
Sometimes I think maybe Stalin had a point.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Jolly said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
Look at the bright side...If times were really bad, the locals might descend upon them like locusts, unless they have plenty of armed security.
Honestly that's my fallback plan, if society and governments become undone. Always has been. I know exactly where I'd go, too.
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Money isn't the main reason we hate rich people, but of course it helps.
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Some of those houses didn’t seem that opulent. Even the litchfield one (with the aerial shot) is so far out from the city it probably wasn’t all that expensive.
If you get beyond commuting distance prices get much lower. Unless you’re on the beach or something.
Of the 5 houses neighboring mine, 3 of the families have second homes in the country or in one case in cape cod.. Only one I would call wealthy, the others are almost sorta house poor, though they’re well off income wise.
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@jon-nyc said in Hardship in the Hamptons:
I read the whole thing and didn’t come away a violent revolutionary.
We can’t invalidate their lived experiences.
Yeah, but you read it from your country retreat in The Berkshires.
