Built on a barrier island that Mother Nature designed to wash away, 6' above sea level, a trailer park becomes a haven for billionaires

Snotty Philistine sends along this article of interest: A Trailer in the Hamptons Sells For a Record $3.75 million.

An off-market listing for an 800-square-foot oceanfront Montauk trailer is in contract to sell for a record $3.75 million, which equates to a cool $5,000 per-square-foot, The Post has learned.

Located in Montauk Shores, the price point is several times the previous record in the area, where the last highest recorded sale was $1.85 million for a trailer that traded hands in 2022.

It’s a high price to pay for sure. When compared to New York City’s luxury market, roughly the same price per square foot — $4,998 — is getting a deep-pocketed buyer a 3,951-square-foot penthouse at the Robert A.M. Stern-designed 30 Park Place in Tribeca that’s now also in contract, according to StreetEasy. However, that Hamptons trailer’s price per square foot pales in comparison to that of a nearly 17,550-square-foot penthouse that listed at Central Park Tower in late 2022 for a colossal $250 million — $14,249 per square foot — which would set the record for the priciest home ever sold in the US if it trades hands for that royal sum.

“The Ditch Plains area in general is very special. It is an oasis for surfers and beachgoers, and in the past several years has been subject to an extraordinary amount of growth and transformation,” Gold told The Post.

Custom-built by John Hummel, the two-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home boasts high-end finishes with a modern beach vibe.

“I know quite a few billionaires here,” Fred Stelle, resident and architect in Montauk previously told The Post. “The most appealing aspect is the park’s quality of life. It’s a classic throwback to a summer community — relaxed and low-key in a funky way, like what Southern California must have been like in the 1950s, and it’s safe for kids.”

In the past year alone, and apart from the previous record sale, at least 10 mobile homes there have sold between $675,000 and $1.4 million. And trailers closer to the beach are even more expensive.

I used to camp out here in the 60s and surf fish, but it was “discovered” in the 70s by the uber-rich looking for a new way to look shabby chic, and it’s been downhill ever since. The blue-collar types were priced out, and the trailer trash moved in. This old NY Magazine article disagrees with my assessment of the new residents, but that’s because it’s a New York magazine article.

DEC. 9, 2005

The Mobile Montauk Vacation Home

There’s no such thing as trailer trash on the East End. At least not when Jimmy Buffett is getting in bidding wars over $430,000 beachfront mobile homes. The manufactured dwelling of his dreams is located in a trailer park near Ditch Plains in Montauk, right down the road from an enclave of Stanford White–designed mansions. High-end caterer Janet O’Brien won out over Buffett, even though he offered $30,000 more: The owner decided to go with O’Brien because she’d called about the property first. “It overlooks the break right there!” raves O’Brien, who, like Buffett, surfs. She’ll rent it out when she’s not riding waves. “It’s the latest trend, living in the Hamptons and having your second home in Montauk,”she says. [Tell that to those illegal Mexicans she’s got serving canapés at her parties — Ed] “Honestly, it’s waterfront! It’s a good investment. I didn’t even look inside it before I bought it.”

I found a pretty good article in Bloomberg about the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of taxpayer money being spent to temporarily protect the billionaires’ homes in this Ditch Plains neighborhood, and you can read it here. I’d say that it was really good, except for my irritation that the reporters, after noting that the battle to hold back the encroaching sea “has been going on for eighty years” (and before that, there was nothing much there to protect) go on to focus on global warming as the cause. A little knowledge of geology, and a bit of reflection on how much imaginary warming was going on eighty years ago. But never mind, they get the gist of the problem right.

If you happened to be in Montauk, N.Y., when the trucks started rolling in this summer, you’d get a sense of how much sand $171,000 buys. Load after load tumbled onto Ditch Plains Beach, one of the Atlantic Coast’s better surfing spots, carved along one of the richest stretches of the Hamptons. It’s a short walk from an exclusive trailer park where hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb and other wealthy surfers store their beach gear.

The local government funded the sand infusion after winter nor’easters and an early summer tropical storm narrowed the beach and exposed the dense layer of hardpan beneath the sand. For three days before the Fourth of July weekend, dump trucks and tractor trailers dropped roughly 100 loads along a few hundred yards of waterfront. Soon the freshly graded beach was packed with surfers and tourists.

The delivery was one of several this year to beaches in the town of East Hampton, at a cost approaching $1 million, to help restore what’s been carried off by currents and storms in a perpetual ebb and flow intensified by the rising seas. The realities of climate change mean this beach renovation is clearly a temporary fix. It’s also a small preview of things to come, except the federal government will largely be funding any subsequent infusions of sand.

Over the next three decades the U.S. will spend at least $1.5 billion to help shore up about 80 miles of Long Island waterfront as part of the ongoing Fire Island to Montauk Point project, or FIMP. Under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested in dredges that pump offshore sand back onto beaches—much more efficient than the trucks, at hundreds of times the scale. Thousands of residences, many of them beachfront homes, will be lifted off their foundations onto stilts.