Illegal immigrants who mow the lawns and paint the mansions of wealthy Hamptons residents are being forced to live in hovels hidden in the woods due to the sky-high cost of residing in the summer playground of celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Joel and Jay- Z and Beyoncé, The Post has learned.
Squalid encampments exist around the tony town of Southampton, including just off the main highway and in the waterfront village of Westhampton Beach.
“I work for very rich people in the Hamptons but I can’t afford somewhere to live,” lamented Juan Antonio Morales, 40.
“I am paid very little and an apartment costs too much money.”
The Post found the native Guatemalan spread out on a tattered chaise lounge in a heavily wooded area behind an abandoned gas station along the Montauk Highway in Westhampton Beach last week — as Aston Martins, Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers buzzed past nearby.
Morales said he’d spent most of the day hanging out at a nearby 7-Eleven store where contractors pick up day laborers to work off the books.
Juan Antonio Morales, a day laborer, lives behind an abandoned gas station in West Hampton.Kevin C Downs
Morales said he is paid too little to afford an apartment in the neighborhood.Kevin C Downs
Squalid encampments exist around the tony town of Southampton.Kevin C Downs
“I work at big houses that are very beautiful,” he said in heavily accented English.
Morales and other laborers The Post interviewed said they had no idea who owned the properties where they work.
Morales, who’s been in the US for about 15 years and has a wife and two kids in Guatemala, said he usually gets hired two days a week and makes about $200 a day.
Morales said he’d spent most of the day hanging out at a nearby 7-Eleven store where contractors pick up day laborers to work off the books.Kevin C Downs
“Every day it is luck if I work,” he said.
“Maybe in Guatemala I would get more work but I don’t have enough money to get home.”
Morales usually sleeps in a makeshift, tarp-covered shack with other migrants but uses a piece of carpet hung over a line between two trees as shelter if the tents are full. He bathes in a gas-station rest-room, he said.
A man sleeps behind an abandoned gas station in West Hampton.Kevin C Downs
Nely Lopez, a landscaper who is also from Guatemala, said he’s able to sleep rent-free on a couch in an East Hampton apartment but prefers to live part-time in a camp behind the Southampton Full Gospel Church on Route 27.
“I sleep on cardboard here in the woods at least three nights a week,” Lopez, 38, told The Post. “I like it here.”
The woods where the camps are located are so dense, and the camps so secluded, that the workers feel free to leave their belongings there, even stashing expensive landscaping equipment.
Morales and other laborers said they had no idea who owned the properties where they work.Kevin C Downs
“I like the Hamptons,” said Julio Cardona Fuentes, 54. “It’s a safe place to live and there are no problems with migration or police.”
One camp features a fire pit surrounded by cast-off chairs and a table made out of saw horses.
A large tarp covers the sitting area, which is ringed with makeshift shacks filled with mattresses and rough-hewn beds.
One camp features a fire pit surrounded by cast-off chairs and a table made out of saw horses.Kevin C Downs
But the residents clearly aren’t Boy Scouts, with piles of trash — mainly beer and liquor bottles — strewn about.
“We all have a drinking problem but there are no drugs here, just beers and cigarettes,” said painter Jorge Mendosa, 34.
“We’re not a danger to anybody.”
The Hamptons are famous for their luxurious and expensive homes.TODOR TSVETKOV
Westhampton Beach resident Gina Webster, whose home on Mill Road is near woods that hide an encampment, said the situation was an open secret among residents.
“People like to pretend homelessness doesn’t exist in the Hamptons bubble,” Webster said.
“It’s the Hamptons and we like to pretend real-life problems don’t exist here.”
The Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, which said it counts some of the workers among its clients, decried their living situation as tragic.
“It’s an absolute tragedy that we have hard working people working tirelessly to improve the lives of all who live here but can’t afford a safe place to lay their heads,” said Bryan Browns, chief legal operations officer at the organization.
“At the legal aid society of Suffolk County, we have resources including food, tents, and clothing to help any person that is homeless in Suffolk County thanks to the generous donations of ordinary citizens in the US.”
Beer and liquor bottles were scattered about the encampment.Kevin C Downs
Dan O’Shea, who runs the Maureen’s Haven Homeless Outreach program in Riverhead, said that “most communities” on Long Island’s East End have “people living in the woods that have nowhere else to live.”
But in an ironic twist, O’Shea said, the wealth of the area’s residents helps the homeless workers blend in better than in other areas.
“You’re used to seeing a homeless person pushing a shopping cart on a city street,” he said
“The Hamptons is a generous community,” he noted. “The homeless often have brand new work boots from the church and could be wearing a brand new jacket they were given after a coat drive.”
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