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From the
Daily News:
The skies above northeast Queens have become deafening as helicopters comply with new routes designed to decrease the ear-splitting noise — for residents of Long Island.
Local leaders are calling on city and federal agencies to give residents a bit of peace and quiet and suspend the loudest routes.
“The noise and the vibration are unbearable,” said Alfredo Centola, president of the Malba Gardens Civic Association, which represents the wealthy, Queens community.
“It starts between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. and continues well past midnight,” Centola said of the noise, which is worst on weekends. “The houses shake. Things are falling off your shelves.”
The roar got louder last year after the Federal Aviation Administration mandated that choppers traveling between middle of Long Island and the Hamptons fly over water instead long-suffering dry-land residents.
As a result, many Hamptons-bound pilots fly over northeast Queens to reach the new Long Island route, a faster, cheaper and, for Queens residents, more annoying, way to go.
From the
NY Post:
It’s Grandma vs. Goliath in the Hamptons.
A plucky 83-year-old Southampton Village woman is going to court in an attempt to rid her hood of massive McMansions.
Evelyn Konrad claims in a new federal lawsuit that her high-powered neighbors — many of them finance honchos — have turned her subdivision into an overcrowded “Queens by the sea” because of an improperly adopted zoning code.
The suit doesn’t seek money — it seeks demolition.
Undeterred by her wealthy opponents,The brassy Stanford law graduate once skewered the supersized digs as “multimillion-dollar penis enlargements,” in a letter to a local newspaper.
“It’s a ‘Mine is bigger than yours’ thing with these people,” she said yesterday.
From
NBC:
With beautiful homes and breathtaking landscapes, the real estate in East Hampton sells itself. But pop into a town hall meeting and you'll find residents saying it's turning into a place they don't want to live.
“Children from four different families are registered to the same address,” said Carol Buda during a town hall meeting on January 5th.
Year-round residents like Buda say several people are illegally living in the town by overcrowding single-family homes. Most of the complaints are about the hamlet of Springs where Buda lives. She has photos of the homes she says are proof of the problem. Snapshots she brings to the town hall meetings. The images show modest homes with so many cars they don't fit in the driveway.
"Parking on the grass, the front yard, the backyard the side yard,” said Buda. “And it affects property values."
Some of the complaints during the town hall meetings are not only about the overcrowded homes but the people living in them as well.
From the
NY Times:
When one thinks of the Hamptons, what jumps to mind are masters of the universe and their mansions by the sea. But a strong, steady stream of immigrants has been flowing to the area for years, drawn by a service economy that demands hedges be trimmed and houses be cleaned. In the Springs, a hamlet in the town of East Hampton, where most of the houses are small and the year-round population is relatively large, the Hispanic population has tripled in the past 10 years — and tension has emerged.
Some longtime residents of the Springs and similar areas complain that homes are being illegally crowded, that houses with half a dozen cars parked outside are a blight on the street, and that the many children living inside are overwhelming the local schools and causing property taxes to rise.
The pockets of tension are concentrated in year-round communities, where the immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to live alongside the landscapers and the contractors with whom they are competing for business. These areas are far less affluent than the southern end of town, where Manhattanites spend the summer by the ocean, in homes hidden behind 12-foot hedges.
From the Daily News:
