Owners of rundown trailers along the eastern coast of Long Island are sitting on millions of dollars worth of property value now that house prices in the area have soared in recent decades. Although these trailers sold for just about $95,000 in the 1990s, they now cost as much as $20,000 a month for tourists to rent them and gain access to the high-priced lifestyle for those living in the Hamptons.
Meanwhile, working-class people living in the Montauk trailer park claim that they can no longer afford to live in the luxurious town. Instead, rich and famous people are buying up the trailer park because they love the “shabby chic” style of the area of the tourist trap.
While these mobile homes cost less than one hundred thousand dollars in the 1990s, they now cost upwards of five million dollars each. Because this Montauk trailer park is located close to the action of the resort town, the trailers cost as much as $20,000 a month to rent during the summer.
The Montauk trailer park was first built sixty-five years ago. Although it was supposed to be a location for working-class people and those who could not afford to live in the luxurious houses of the Hamptons, mobile homes in the Montauk trailer park are now owned by the rich and famous including singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, Vitamin Water co-founder J Darius Bikoff, and producer Karen Lauder.
This month, one of the trailers at the Montauk trailer park sold for $3.75 million. Although the mobile home was just eight hundred square feet, its price was high enough to command nearly $5,000 per square foot.
The trailer park is in such high demand these days because it’s located so close to all the action in the Hamptons, which is frequented by some of the biggest celebrities in the world, including Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert Downey Jr.
Only recently did the Montauk Shore trailer park gain the attention of billionaires and investors. These rich people began buying out the working-class people, jacking up prices so much that the working-class people of Long Island would no longer be able to live in the Hamptons. The rich saw that the trailer park was a marketable location due to its proximity to the surfing location Ditch Plains.
The trailer park is known as “Montauk’s best-kept secret.” But its secret is fading. The trailer park houses 152 individually owned lots with an additional forty-seven leased properties.
The new owners do not live in the trailer park. Instead, they are using the mobile homes as changing rooms and stop-overs on trips to the beach. Locals and hard-working people of the Hamptons are being priced out of their homes.
“When you read about the history of Montauk, it was a village of the workers,” Montauk Shore resident Kathy Pare told the New York Post. “Now, they’re being priced out and pushed out. When we first moved here, it was a much tighter community. On the weekends, we’d have parties, karaoke, and hang out with our neighbors — now, since a lot of people moved out, we have a lot of renters. They can get loud at night because they’re there to party. You don’t get to know people for a long period of time. They don’t respect the rules.”