Every summer weekend, thousands of visitors and locals alike inch eastward on Route 27 toward the eastern tip of Long Island, encountering what locals call the “Shinnecock Squeeze”—a legendary traffic bottleneck that occurs when the two lanes narrow, becoming one.
To most, it’s an irritation en route to the East End. Few realize they’re passing through an Indigenous nation.
“I could throw a stone and hit ‘Billionaires’ Row,’” Rebecca Genia says, gesturing toward Meadow Lane, the oceanfront strip adjacent to the plot she and her ancestors have long called home. Genia’s two-bedroom home is built on land owned by the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Fifteen years ago, the Shinnecocks became the 565th federally recognized tribe.
On the sandy shores overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, behind manicured hedgerows and secured gates, sit the estates of some of the wealthiest people in the world—titans of finance such as Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin, and Daniel Och. Another neighbor is Michael Loeb, whose 16,000-square-foot home, located in a seven-and-a-half-acre compound, was featured on the TV show Billions.
But on the 900 acres of the Shinnecock territory, the poverty rate hovers at around 20 percent—three times as high as the rest of Suffolk County. A single mother, Genia raised her children here in a shack that lacked electricity and running water. During wintertime, Rainbow, one of her three daughters, slept in a snowsuit and mittens to ward off the chill that permeated their uninsulated walls. “It was unhealthy, and it was unsafe, but I made it work,” Genia says.
This is the story of the other Hamptons, the one most summer visitors will never see, let alone know exists. “We’re surrounded by immense wealth, and yet so many of us live in homes filled with black mold, mildew, and swamp rats,” Genia says. “We don’t want mansions. We just want clean, safe, humble homes.”
Members of the Shinnecock tribe are well integrated into the local community. They buy groceries at the Stop & Shop in Southampton and the King Kullen in Bridgehampton. They serve on elected school boards. They volunteer for local firefighting and ambulance squads. But limited federal resources compound their housing challenges.
Partly due to their relatively small population—around 850 people live in some 350 houses on the territory—federal funds are difficult to come by. Last year, of the $1.1 billion in block grants the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed, the Shinnecock Nation received $110,531. With the president proposing some $1 billion in cuts to tribal programs for 2026, even these relatively modest resources face an uncertain future.
In 2019, Marit Molin, a Swedish-born social worker and longtime resident of the area, visited the Shinnecock territory. What she saw shocked her—broken windows taped over with plastic, trailers overrun by mold and mildew, families living without working plumbing or relying on gallons of kerosene to heat their homes.
“That night, I went home to my house, in Water Mill, and couldn’t sleep,” Molin says. “How could we live like this while our neighbors live like that?”
A year later, she founded Hamptons Community Outreach. Initially focused on food delivery and summer programs for the underserved, the nonprofit next turned its attention to the local housing crisis. Working closely with Shinnecock families, Molin began raising money, sourcing materials, and assembling a constellation of donors, builders, and volunteers.
Since 2021, her organization has renovated or rebuilt 65 homes, installed 20 heating systems, and constructed four new houses on the territory. But another 60-odd homes remain on the waiting list. The estimated cost to finish the work: $4.5 million.
The scale of Molin’s operation has attracted an unlikely cast of Hamptons characters. Among those who stepped forward to help is Alex Forden, a local contractor who runs Forden & Co. and whose firm typically builds $10 to $15 million homes. At first, he asked his subcontractors for small favors—a donated boiler here, new electrical outlets there. But as the scope of the work grew, so did the need. Some homes required full overhauls: new kitchens, floors, insulation, and plumbing.
Of the four homes he helped rehabilitate, one project left a lasting impression: building a brand-new home for a woman who had spent decades living in a 6-by-20-foot trailer that lacked running water, used propane-powered heaters, and whose roof was held together by orange tarps. She, like many on the territory, given its proximity to the water, lived with toxic black mold.
“I challenge anyone to set foot there and witness it and not open their hearts and wallets or volunteer their time,” Forden says. “If one kid or one family finds success out of 10 houses we do, to me, that’s a success. It’s going to change things.”
Court Golumbic, a former federal prosecutor and senior executive at Goldman Sachs, says the housing conditions he saw on the territory reminded him of impoverished parts of Appalachia. Golumbic, whose children attend public school in Sag Harbor, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and rallied other Goldman Sachs partners to follow suit. “People hear ‘Shinnecock’ and they think of the golf club,” he says, referring to the exclusive Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, where initiation fees are rumored to be around $250,000. “The key to solving this is here in this community, and we just haven’t tapped into it yet on the scale that we want to, but we will. We’re going to figure it out.”
One source, who preferred to remain anonymous, suggested that if just one or two of their Meadow Lane neighbors were to forego their landscaping costs for a season, the accumulated sum could fix the housing problem of their Indigenous neighbors in one fell swoop.
Despite progress, the challenges to upward mobility remain, and tensions with government officials and wealthy neighbors persist. In recent years, New York State courts sought to shut down the 60-foot digital billboards that line State Route 27. The revenue from these, says Lisa R. Goree, the chairwoman of the Shinnecock Indian Nation Council of Trustees, goes toward the tribe’s programs, infrastructure, and tribal-employee salaries, not to mention the ongoing litigation to keep the billboards operating. None of the revenue goes toward housing.
Opponents argue that the signs, the tops of which showcase the tribe’s seal, are eyesores that detract from the Hamptons aesthetic, and earlier this spring, a court injunction filed by neighboring property owners temporarily halted construction of a 20-pump gas station and travel plaza the tribe had planned.
“History has not been very good to them,” says James M. Burke, the Southampton town attorney. “And we have an opportunity here to right a little bit of some of this wrongdoing.” And yet when the tribe suggested building a casino on their land, Southampton residents responded with horror and lawsuits. Plans for the casino have been indefinitely paused.
Until the Hamptons community allows them to raise more of their own income, the tribe will rely on the generosity of Hamptons Community Outreach. “In all my years on this land, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” says Genia. “You can’t erase us. We’ve been here. We’re still here. And we’re not going anywhere.”
Amanda M. Fairbanks is a Sag Harbor–based journalist and the author of The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind. She is currently at work on her second nonfiction book, Tick Boom, a biography of Lyme disease
