Square feet

In the shadow of the oldest lighthouse in New York, summer in the Hamptons and Montauk once meant strawberry ice cream cones from a mom-and-pop shop, and Necco wafers and Pop Rocks from a candy store known for its fudge. For locals, an influx of new faces would wane at the onset of autumn.

By the winter, commercial areas sat speckled with darkened storefronts as vacationers retreated to New York City boroughs and beyond. Snow would blanket a softened East End landscape, tucking its year-round residents in for a season all their own.

“That dichotomy of life is kind of over,” said Jason Biondo, 47, a lifelong Montauk resident and local builder who retrofitted the lighthouse keeper’s quarters several years back.

Confronted with the pandemic , much of the summer crowd that fled from Manhattan to the Hamptons has remained, and the residential real estate swell has sparked commercial change. From health care to dining, new businesses have popped up in the Hamptons. While more health care facilities are welcome, there are mixed feelings about some of the new restaurants.

“I could probably count on one hand, the places between East Hampton, Amagansett, Montauk and Springs, that’s a really affordable place to take all your kids out to dinner where you’re not dropping 300 bucks,” Mr. Biondo said. “I’m not complaining, because I’m also reaping the benefits as a builder, right? So I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me; but it’s impossible to ignore the elephant in the room.”

From April 2010 to April 2021, the population of the town of East Hampton, which includes the hamlet of Montauk, climbed from 21,457 to 28,385, a 32 percent increase, according to U.S. census data. In Southampton, the population rose about 22 percent, from 56,790 to 69,036, in the same time frame.

The New York Times talked to major hospitals and small business owners about their decision to follow people to the summer resort area.

N.Y.U. Langone Health Medical Associates — Bridgehampton

N.Y.U. Langone Health has a Westhampton facility in the works, after opening a 3,500-foot ambulatory care facility in Bridgehampton in May 2021.

“We really saw the opportunity out there way before the pandemic, and we thought there was a real need for quality health care on the East End of Long Island,” said Vicki Match Suna, the executive vice president and vice dean for real estate development and facilities at N.Y.U. Langone Health.

The hospital’s Bridgehampton lease, on a prominent corner along the Bridgehampton part of Montauk Highway, began in June 2019.

“Most of what’s available is small, retail kinds of spaces, which really didn’t work for us and our use; so there was limited availability and it did take some time for us to locate a site that we thought could work for our needs,” Ms. Suna said.

At the Bridgehampton facility, N.Y.U. Langone Health tried to integrate the area’s culture: Interior walls are decorated with art made by local artists. Accent pieces are made of driftwood, sea glass, and other local materials native to the beachside community.

Poppy Heart — Montauk

Tiffany LaBanca-Madarasz saw a “For Lease” sign on a Montauk storefront that for decades housed the toy store, “A Little Bit of Everything,” and took the opportunity to open a business of her own in July 2021. Poppy Heart is a shop, a cafe, a gallery, and an art studio — a one-stop shop for creativity and community and a pivot for Ms. LaBanca-Madarasz, who worked as the head of employee communications and engagement for PayPal for two years following 25 years in the communications industry.

Though she raised her two children in Manhattan, Ms. LaBanca-Madarasz said her family rented a house every summer in Montauk.

“I rented when my kids were growing, every summer, so it’s always been in the back of our minds, like, ‘This is our happy place, this is where we’ll eventually come full time,’” Ms. LaBanca-Madarasz said. “With Covid and the kids going to college, we thought, ‘let’s accelerate that plan and see if we could actually buy a home.’”

She said turning 50 gave her some new perspective. “I was really ready for something bigger, and more interesting, and entrepreneurial, and Poppy Heart was born.”

Poppy Heart provides consistency in an area accustomed to a seasonal cadence. “There really isn’t a lot to do in Montauk, particularly in the off season, and on rainy days, so I built it for Montauk,” she said. “You can paint pottery, you can paint canvases, you can play with clay, you can make jewelry.”

One section of the store is called “A Little Bit of Everything,” and sells nostalgic toys to pay homage to her predecessor.

Il Buco al Mare — Amagansett

As an established restaurant owner, Donna Lennard resisted bringing Il Buco al Mare to the Hamptons for years. The right opportunity presented itself, however, when the pandemic did.

“It was definitely not in the works before then,” Ms. Lennard said of the pandemic, insisting that she still didn’t want to operate a restaurant in the same place that she owned a country house. “It was feet in the mud, intractable Donna, no way, no how am I ever going to have a restaurant where I go to relax.”

Ms. Lennard dipped her toes in first, with a summer 2020 pop-up at the Marram hotel in Montauk. She describes it as, “almost like a little kiosk, with like 80 outdoor seats on a big terrace overlooking the ocean.”

As the summer was ending, Il Buco team members told her they were happy out east. An acquaintance had offered to show Ms. Lennard a space in Amagansett more than once, and she had declined.

“We had about a dozen people working in Montauk, and they said, ‘let’s just go see the space in Amagansett,’” she said. “So we did, and everybody loved it, and we made an offer, and they rejected our offer. So I was like, phew!”

Come January, Ms. Lennard had the same acquaintances over for drinks in front of a fire. She asked who had taken the place and found out the deal had fallen through. By Memorial Day 2021, Il Buco al Mare was open for business in Amagansett.

Ms. Lennard has definitely warmed up to the new location. “From kicking and screaming, I’ve really embraced it.”

Weill Cornell Medicine — Southampton

“It’s a natural progression, I think, that in the last couple of years a lot of medical buildings have been popping up,” said Aaron Curti, the Douglas Elliman broker who leased space to Weill Cornell Medicine to open a clinic last summer.

Mr. Curti, who has lived on the East End year round for 25 years, said that as the Hamptons has transitioned into a full-time community for many of its residents, full-service medical facilities were sorely needed.

During the pandemic, he added, Weill Cornell learned that a lot of their doctors and employees also had houses in the area.

The clinic, which fills 4,000 square feet of space on the very-visible corner of Montauk Highway and Flying Point Road, was designed to promote patient and staff wellness while honoring the natural elements of the location, said Emil Martone, the organization’s director of design and construction in capital planning.

The new practice is specializing in primary care — internal and family medicine care — and reproductive medicine. Weill Cornell Medicine plans to offer additional specialties as needed, potentially including dermatology and cardiology, according to a representative for the organization.

Kissaki — Watermill

At Kissaki, a Manhattan restaurant that opened a Watermill location in June 2020, the omakase counter experience can cost about $100 per person or more. But pricing varies based on location.

“I’m sure that not every person who lives in Southampton is interested in paying $200 a person to eat out at dinner,” said Justin Marquez, the director of operations at the restaurant. “There’s probably a little bit of a push-and-pull with the locals about just what’s reasonable everyday dining.”

The need to adapt is familiar to the Kissaki team. The first Kissaki location, in Manhattan, opened in January 2020 and closed in March — “along with the rest of the city,” said Mr. Marquez. The owner and chef partner pivoted, building a successful to-go business. They decided to open a branch of Kissaki in the Hamptons for a number of reasons, including dropping rents in the area.

“By June of 2020, there were plenty of Hamptons landlords that were willing to be more flexible on price,” he said.

Kissaki, which also opened “O by Kissaki” in East Hampton in August 2021, is working on its flexibility, too.

“In order to be good partners to the local community, we are aggressively re-evaluating our price structure in order to make sure that we’re not just there for the high season and to take advantage of the tourists, but that we’re there as a good partner providing a good quality product year round,” Mr. Marquez said.

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here . Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate .

IT was a police operation worthy of prime-time TV. A half-dozen officers armed with search warrants stormed into a six-bedroom house on Laura Court in the Southampton, N.Y., hamlet of East Quogue at 6 a.m. on a Sunday last August. The 30 or so people inside, all in their 20’s or 30’s, were rousted from mattresses strewn throughout the house. According to people who were there, bleary-eyed young men stumbled out onto the front lawn and winced in the daylight.

First the Conscience Point Inn, a favorite eastern Long Island reveling spot, is shuttered, and now this. The long tradition of dozens of young people crowding into a Hamptons house for a summer of wild abandon is under attack. A rush of activity last year in East Quogue — neighborhood spying, morning police raids and, perhaps most effective, authorities’ use of a television documentary by Barbara Kopple to identify offenders — has led to a crackdown on Hamptons share houses this year.

The Town Board of Southampton, which shut down six houses last year in East Quogue, has tougher penalties ready for housing code violators this year, and other Hamptons towns and villages are greeting the new season with beefed-up inspection squads and stricter rules.

The crackdown is hardly the death of summer shares. There are still plenty of classifieds in the back of The Village Voice and New York magazine hawking shares, and a recent Google search for ”Hamptons group homes” yielded dozens of Web advertisements. But local laws typically cap the allowable number of unrelated adults living in a house at well under a dozen, and active enforcement could put a further crimp in a party scene already subdued by an uncertain economy.

”The market is definitely much slower this year,” said Cass Almendral, a homeowner in Southampton village who has sold shares in his house in the past. At a recent party in Manhattan at which owners of six share houses were recruiting renters, he said, ”only about 40 people showed up.” In the past, he added, ”you’d see 300 people at an event like that.” Some potential renters are also turned off by the problems with group houses last year. ”It’s definitely something people are worried about,” Mr. Almendral said.

Controversy about share houses is not new, but it took on new life a year ago when Sandeep and Nina Dmietrieff Mehta bought a weekend house on Jeffrey Lane, a street perpendicular to Laura Court in an isolated wooded area just south of the Sunrise Highway. The neighborhood is deceptively peaceful in April, the month the Mehtas moved in. But it is filled with six- and seven-bedroom houses with pools, hot tubs and tennis and basketball courts. Many are owned by investors or out-of-state residents who hire young house managers to recruit potential renters and take care of things during the summer.

”Everyone knows that area is notorious for professional group homes,” said Richard Casabianca, chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee, a volunteer community group in nearby Hampton Bays. ”But they were so isolated that no one was really bothered by it.”

No one, it seems, except the Mehtas. By Memorial Day, a neighbor said, the Mehtas realized that their weekend retreat felt like a frat house thanks to the late-night parties, noise and frequently crass behavior at houses on either side.

The Mehtas complained to the Town Board, but the most officials could do at first was issue parking tickets or write citations for noise violations. The partying continued.

The Mehtas soon found allies. Lydia Staiano, an East Quogue resident and member of the Citizens Advisory Committee, and the committee chairwoman, Elizabeth Haderer, had long been concerned about share houses and worried that neighbors might be too intimidated to complain. Now, with the help of the Mehtas and Ms. Haderer, Ms. Staiano set out to collect enough evidence for the town to get a search warrant.

On Saturday nights, when the deck parties near the Mehtas’ house were in full swing, Ms. Staiano would show up and take notes. ”The music would just be blasting from the deck next door,” she said. ”Cars would be parked everywhere, blocking neighbors’ driveways. Any given weekend night there would be dozens of people drinking out on the deck.” What is more, she said, people from the group houses were in continual motion back and forth between parties. ”These kids were constantly trampling over the couple’s lawn, urinating, yelling, what have you,” she said.

Then, Sunday morning, while the revelers were sleeping, Ms. Staiano would arrive, Polaroid in hand, to document the party aftermath at the various group houses. ”It was a nightmare,” she said. ”Whole garbage cans of beer bottles were dumped on the lawns, garbage was everywhere.”

Inside houses like the ones in East Quogue, more chaos reigned. Daisy Sosa, a 26-year-old graduate student, bought a share in a group house in Hampton Bays last year with a group of 15 friends and friends of friends. ”We had four bedrooms, each with four or five people, and two bathrooms,” she said. ”That was O.K., but it didn’t take long for everyone to start bringing their friends out. At one point we had six guys sleeping in the basement. You never knew from one weekend to the next who was going to be there. I was in the kitchen one morning and this guy comes upstairs and says, ‘Can you drive me to Turtle Bay?’ I said, ‘Excuse me, do I know you?’ ”

Meanwhile, at the town hall, officials were dealing with complaints from the Mehtas and some of their newly emboldened neighbors, as well as Ms. Staiano’s Polaroids and her handwritten logs of infractions. Ms. Staiano also gave officials a videotape of the ABC program ”The Hamptons” by Barbara Kopple that had been broadcast in June. One of the prominent characters in it was Josh Sagman, a part-owner of the group house next door to the Mehtas. In addition to showing a close-up of the giant pulsating outdoor speakers, the film had recorded Mr. Sagman presiding over crowded parties on the deck of the house and at hot spots like Conscience Point, the club where Elizabeth S. Grubman, a New York publicist, had backed an S.U.V. into a crowd in the summer of 2001. During one of the deck party scenes, a bunch of young men were shown lifting another man upside down while he chugged from the spout of a keg of beer.

”I made every effort to be a good neighbor,” Mr. Sagman said in an interview this week. ”Remember, those scenes in the documentary were filmed the year before. As soon as Memorial Day, when I knew the new neighbors were concerned about our house, I made sure we kept quiet and I personally made sure all of the trash was picked up each morning. Most of the photographs the neighbors took weren’t from my house. But because the documentary showed me as some kind of super partier instead of a person, I became the poster child for share houses in the Hamptons.”

A strong part of the case against share houses developed last summer when someone in town noticed that a group house was advertising a Fourth of July party on the Internet for $15 a head, a violation of the Southampton town code that prohibits operating a business on residential premises. So many people showed up at the party — more than 3,000, town officials estimated — that the police barricaded Laura Court to stop any more from coming. ”That party was the finishing straw,” said Eileen Powers, acting town attorney. ”Right after that we executed the search warrants.”

In each of several houses on Jeffrey Lane and Laura Court, inspectors found as many as 20 housing code violations. In some houses it was wall-to-wall beds. ”We even found beds near the furnace,” Ms. Powers said, ”and that’s a fire hazard.” The six houses that the town ordered vacated included the one run by Josh Sagman next door to the Mehtas.

It was apparently too late for the Mehtas, who sold their house last October. Attempts to contact them for comment were unsuccessful. (Mr. Sagman and his partners have also sold their house.) But year-round Southampton residents kept up the pressure, and the Town Board increased the penalties for having more than five unrelated adults living under one roof to $1,000 a day from $250 a day. ”That’s enough to be meaningful,” Ms. Powers said. ”Before, the owners just figured the fines were part of the cost of doing business.”

Other Hamptons officials have taken up the cause. Thomas Lawrence, a code enforcement officer for the Village of East Hampton, said the village had added a third code enforcement officer in preparation for the coming season. And the Town of East Hampton, which governs part of Sag Harbor, Wainscott, Amagansett, the Springs and Montauk, has a new rule requiring 75 square feet of sleeping space for one person and 50 square feet each if two share a room.

The new rules and enforcement on Hamptons share houses also apply to rental properties overcrowded with waiters, landscapers and other laborers — people whose services are needed in the Hamptons but whose housing needs are largely unmet.

Of course this problem isn’t unique to the Hamptons. Ocean Bay Park and Kismet on Fire Island and Spring Lake on the Jersey Shore are among many other towns known for packed share houses despite local laws that restrict the number of occupants. Grace Corradino, owner of Fire Island Living, a real estate company, said, ”Until the neighborhood changes or someone complains, group homes are a fact of life.”

Some activists worry that the crackdown in the Hamptons will not go far enough. ”There’s been a tolerance of share houses on the part of town officials for years,” said Mr. Casabianca of Hampton Bays. ”The problem won’t be solved until the people who come out to these houses get the message that renting a summer share in the Hamptons is not a license to be a jerk.”

On the flip side, some homeowners say the crackdown is misguided and ill-timed. ”It’s unconstitutional to tell people they can’t rent their homes, whether it’s to a group or not,” said Don MacPherson, the publisher of SoHo Journal and a former investor in share houses in the Hamptons. ”And in this economy this could be the nail in the coffin for the summer rental market.”

And Mr. Almendral said he and about 25 other homeowners were researching the possibility of a class-action suit against the Town of Southampton, charging that the laws discriminate against single people.

For their part, local officials contend that they walk a fine line between the private business of owners renting their properties and the public nuisances that some houses become. The Town of Southampton, Ms. Powers said, wants to make it clear that if group houses make problems for their neighbors, they can expect enforcement. But at the same time, she said, ”We don’t want to ruin anyone’s summer.”