cannot afford to own their own home.” Being homeless in the Hamptons means spending a lot of time on a bus. Various houses of worship have joined together to ensure there is somewhere for the homeless to spend the night over the winter. Churches up and down the north and south fork of Long Island take on the burden one night at a time and roughly 50 homeless people are bussed between them every day. Eddie Vallone, 22, is one of those on the bus every night. “People look at the Hamptons as some sort of rich town and there’s no problems going on. But there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs. “It’s hard to really grasp –'OK, the summer is coming to an end. What am I going to do for the winter?'” Vallone says at Maureen’s Haven, a charity that coordinates the homeless shelter programme. “I want to work but there’s no work to be done.” Vallone, who works cleaning pools and doing odd jobs on luxury estates, says that, if he saves well and doesn’t impulse-buy, he can make his summer earnings stretch out until November. “But, work doesn’t start again until May or the beginning of June.”