BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. — At the Candy Kitchen diner on Main Street, the staff juggling orders of pancakes is short by seven members — and not one job seeker has dropped off a résumé this year.
At Blue One clothing store down the street, the owner raised the hourly pay from $15 to $18 to lure workers.
And at Almond, at the end of the street, the restaurant’s co-owner is sharing his two-bedroom home with three seasonal workers who could not find housing.
“Right now it is full season in the Hamptons and we are closed Sundays and Mondays; we don’t have enough cooks,” said Eric Lemonides, the co-owner of Almond, which is typically open seven days a week. “It’s just been harder than it’s ever been before.”
The Hamptons is experiencing the same constellation of factors that has contributed to a national employment crisis — but here it is supercharged by elements unique to the upscale towns: Untold numbers of New York City residents fled during the pandemic, gobbling up the housing stock and driving up prices as they turned the summer escape into a year-round residence.
Plus, a spate of recent laws designed to limit the number of shared houses — seen by some as nuisance party houses — has sharply limited places where summer workers say they can afford to stay.
“You have people that basically came out here last year in March, and they stayed,” said Patrick McLaughlin, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman, a real estate company.
Data collected by the company showed that the inventory of available houses in the Hamptons — the collection of towns and hamlets along Long Island’s South Fork, from Southampton to East Hampton and all the way out to the peninsula of Montauk — fell at its fastest rate in over a decade in the first quarter of the year. The number of sales and prices surged.
“Towns are cracking down on the share houses, and that makes it harder as well,” Mr. McLaughlin said.
There are other factors behind the shortage. Across the country seasonal immigrant workers are in short supply. It is a holdover from a sweeping ban in 2020 on temporary work visas that the Trump administration said was vital to protect employment for Americans who lost jobs during the pandemic. The ban has expired.
Some economists believe the extra $300 a week from expanded unemployment benefits, a program that runs through September, is also responsible for keeping some workers home. And while teenagers are finding it easy to land jobs, after a year away from friends, busing tables and standing behind a cash register can have less appeal than frolicking as a camp counselor.
In the Hamptons, where the high season lasts about 12 weeks, the crisis has led some restaurants, already reeling from lockdown closures, to suspend service on certain days of the week at what is typically their most lucrative time because they are unable to staff shifts.
Gus Laggis, the owner of Candy Kitchen, has been working a lot of overtime: “You don’t even want to know,” he said. At Almond, Mr. Lemonides says instead of his typical role as maître d’, he now fills in as the restaurant’s handyman, power-washing sidewalks and even renting a cherry picker to fix twinkly lights over the patio dining. “There is no one else to do it,” he said.
Some say service has suffered: At The Golden Pear cafe on Main Street, where only two international applicants arrived this year to fill over a dozen spots typically taken by foreigners, according to a manager, a line snaked out the door several times over Memorial Day weekend as the handful of servers struggled to dish out its locally renowned curry chicken salad.
“Our customers understand,” said the manager of the Bridgehampton location, Karmela Delos Santos. “Hopefully.”
In the spring, Honest Man Restaurant Group, which runs the celebrated East Hampton restaurant Nick and Toni’s, among others, hosted its first job fair, offering a $25 gift certificate to new hires. Few showed up, according to reports.
The issue has even impacted the local government. Jay Schneiderman, the Southampton Town Supervisor, said the municipality has struggled to recruit people for town positions. It has been without a town accountant since May of last year, and for months has been unable to fill vacancies for six secretarial positions and three building inspectors as well as other roles, according to the human resources department.
“We can’t pay them enough to live in the community,” Mr. Schneiderman said.
“We need to create more affordable housing, we do. It is creating issues for so many businesses,” he added. “It’s not just the town, and certainly not just restaurants: it’s the hospital needs nurses, the schools need teachers and custodians. Everybody is priced out.”
But there are no plans to relax the laws to deter share houses, some that serve as party crash pads split by dozens of young people and often result in noise, garbage and police complaints.
These rules, versions of which exist in each of the towns that comprise the Hamptons, limit how many unrelated individuals may rent a house together. Violators, who are identified by code enforcement officers who go door to door, or turned in by their neighbors, are subject to fines. About six years ago, East Hampton and Southampton began requiring that rental houses be registered with town authorities, further curtailing the practice.
“We had people who were renting spaces in the basement by hanging sheets up and it was very unsafe,” said John Jilnicki, the East Hampton town attorney.
Even before the pandemic, formerly working class neighborhoods like the hamlet of The Springs, in East Hampton, were seeing an incursion of wealthy renters, and this year, even the most humble homes were snapped up by out-of-towners, Mr. McLaughlin, of Douglas Elliman, said. Workers now priced out of the Hamptons have been driven to less booming real estate markets like Riverhead.
But with a single train track running the length of the South Fork and narrow Route 27 as the main thoroughfare, traffic snarls for hours, and the commute itself deters workers. In 2018, East Hampton’s Town Board put out a request for proposals for a pilot program to permit employers to house seasonal workers in R.V.s or tiny houses, but it was abandoned because of a lack of response, said Mr. Jilnicki, the attorney.
In typical years, in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, job-seekers from places like Jamaica and Ireland on temporary employment visas would stroll between the towns’ shops and restaurants, looking for work. Sometimes as many as five such people a day would approach Maeghan Byrne, the manager of Bobby Van’s, she said.
This year not one has come through the door.
With so few staff, she scrambles to accommodate requests for days off — she has no replacement workers and lives in fear of a disgruntled employee quitting. “We have lots of jobs, but nobody to fill them,” Ms. Byrne said.
There are some notable exceptions to the trend. Nationwide, more 16- to 19-year-olds are working, a peak of student employment not seen since 2008.
At Hayground Camp, more than 190 jobs were swiftly filled, primarily by teenagers or college students, said Doug Weitz, the camp director. After a year of remote learning away from friends, he said, his staff feel that camp jobs with peers are a welcome way to socialize.
Plus, Mr. Weitz added, “We have an advantage: very few of our staff members have to support a family.”
The crisis has long been building, employers say, but this year it has been pushed to the extreme. With record low unemployment rates before the pandemic, Long Island has long had a dearth of workers, said Shital Patel, an economist with the State Department of Labor who focuses on the region. But this year, though the unemployment rate is over 5 percent, different factors are contributing to the shortfall.
“Many people still remain nervous about the virus. They worry about bringing it home to their kids,” said Ms. Patel. “It is always hard to bring people back to work after being unemployed for so long.”
Richard and Danielys Cadrouce, a brother and sister who live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, were excited to work at Almond this summer, eager to make up for the slump of last year when restaurant work in the city all but disappeared.
But after paying $1,000 each to keep renting their New York City apartment, as well as $120 a week each to share a room without air conditioning in a house near Almond, they said they were barely breaking even. They are considering quitting.
“This isn’t helping me achieve my dreams,” Ms. Cadrouce, 24, said.
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