even the town’s most modest flats. “Finding your first home is a challenge in an area like this,” Cantwell says. “Not just people who you would characterize as poor – working- and middle-class families are also having a hard time. If you can find a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for $500,000, you’re very lucky.” Cantwell says more than half the town’s homes are empty for most of the year, which causes the population to dwindle to as little as 10,000 in the winter months compared with 80,000 in August. “It’s kind of the tale of two cities. There’s certainly a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer,” says Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother. “But, the rest of us live here year round. “There are famous and very wealthy people but then you have hard-working and poor people struggling to get by. You’ve got to remember that this community was founded as a farming and fishing community of people who lived off the land and the water – a real working-class community.” Cantwell says saving up enough money to buy your first house while working as a farmer or fisherman is near-impossible in East Hampton today “and it’s not just the poor – police officers, teachers, young professionals and others all struggle to find a place to live here and many of them