East End Woman Forced To Move From Rental: 'Home Is A Sense Of Safety'

RIVERHEAD, NY — A woman who, like so many on Long Island and especially on the East End, is forced to leave her rental in just a few weeks, has shared what it feels like, to have to say good-bye to the place she's called home for years.

What was already a lack of affordable housing on the East End turned into a crisis for many during the pandemic, when scores headed east to their second homes, sending property values skyrocketing. Subsequently, many homeowners put what had been rentals on the market, leaving tenants without affordable options — or none at all.

Erin Narumi Prince, who has to move from the home she and her father shared in Riverhead for years, poured her heart out and shared her feelings with Patch. This is one woman's story, in her own words, about losing a place that means more than four walls and a foundation. It is her ode to home:

"As I age, I truly mourn for what we’re doing to one another as a species. Inequality, inequality. The growing brackets of fiscal, social, political gaps," Prince said. "Divide and further divide."

She added: "I don’t think humans belong in small incandescent, fluorescent, lit boxes. To be without access to the outside breeze, the earth from where we were born. A sense of safety and grounding. To be barefoot, and a hold a sense of privacy. To relax, meditate and unwind, how they choose from an everyday stressful 'current times' grind. To be free to sing, play music and dance.

"How sad to deny a primal connection to a silent, nighttime fire, and the blessed silence of nature's nighttime choir. To restrict by class.

"To never know the free blessing in life of a silent gaze to the heavens, unobstructed from suburbia without light pollution on a cold night. Those secret, intimate moments in nature."

Speaking of life on the East End, Prince said: "I can assure you it is/was everyone’s dream that came out here. Before me, before you. Maybe even before your grandparents. Read the tales of many others in these small communities around you — those who left the grind of corporate life to return to a simpler sense of being."

Wealth, Prince said, isn’t defined as a mansion with a water view.

"Richness is a cottage with a yard for growing flowers and a garden. Richness is peace of mind and heart, birdsong, and touching grass," she said. "Some of us want nothing more than the latter, and it shouldn’t cost a fortune for a simple, quiet life with 'less space.' That something simple shouldn’t come with the price tag; something that costs as much as one of those larger houses."

Prince said she is one of many voices "lost in the echo chamber of 'affordable housing,' where one side complains that people should 'work harder' and hustle 80-plus hours a week, having had so much handed to them, and the other side, who can’t afford to dream or grow where their parents and parents before them did because the area has been swallowed by greed."

Prince said she is sad that to survive, she has to work three jobs. "I shouldn’t have to struggle so much to stay here, when it took me almost 15 years to become established," she said.

She's heartbroken, too, that her father, 72, still has to work so hard just to get by.

"I really wish that the affordable housing crisis would gain more attention, other than just people turning a blind eye to it," Prince said. "My wish is that other people know that it’s not that this generation doesn’t want to work hard — it's that this generation doesn’t want to work 80 hours a week, with three to four jobs, just to try and make ends meet‚ and not even survive. It's maddening, and it's so saddening, that people think an affordable monthly rent equals $2,500."

Other areas of the country just aren't that high-priced, she said. "We shouldn't be paying so much for the privilege to live and work in our own communities."

Prince said she has heard the responses from many who say to leave the East End and go live someplace that's less costly.

But while that answer may seem logical to naysayers, it doesn't speak to the heartbreak of losing the place local residents have called home — the place where their roots are deeply entwined, she said.

Home, Prince added, is about the smells. The sounds. "Nature herself. Plants that grow and bloom every year."

It's the place where her cats are buried.

Where she all asleep to the sounds "raccoons screaming, skunks spraying, bullfrogs bellowing. Owls — the great horned and the screech, even the high-pitched chirps of the hummers."

"Home really is a sense of safety and contentment," Prince said. "It’s about finding, and centering ourselves, around greater things. It’s where we craft, cook, write, draw, sleep with our pets and loved ones. One doesn’t realize how deeply embedded in a place you can be."