Among the women paying $1,000 for a massage and the men lounging in $100m homes in the billionaires’ playground of the Hamptons is a largely unseen, mostly Latino, workforce toiling all summer in order to survive the winter

Every summer, the Hamptons becomes a billionaires’ playground. In the collection of historic towns and villages on the Atlantic Ocean where beachfront mansions change hands for more than a $100m (£64m), the streets are lined with designer boutiques and the roads are clogged bumper-to-bumper with Ferraris, Range Rovers and Maseratis.

Life is not so much fun, however, for the army of local people and recent immigrants who work to keep the swelling numbers of the super-rich happy. And as Labor Day approaches – the unofficial end of the American summer – life is likely to get worse.



“This is not paradise for me,” said Natacha Castillo, 19, who came from the Dominican Republic to Southampton, which is regarded as the most luxurious area of the Hamptons, in search of a better life three years ago. She didn’t find it.



Castillo works in a luxury beauty salon washing the hair of the world’s richest and most famous women for $9-an-hour. Her clients, who Castillo says don’t bat an eyelid at paying $60 for a blow dry or $1,000 for a massage, often ignore her “and sometimes they treat us like we are servants”. But they do tip well. Castillo, who is studying cosmetology at college, can make $650 a week with tips, but “without tips I can do nothing”.

Castillo is part of the largely unseen, mostly Latino, workforce toiling all summer clearing plates in the restaurants, scrubbing the mansions and maintaining their privet hedges. “I don’t like this town,” Castillo said as she walked home in the twilight after a long day at the salon. “You spend all your summer working to have something to live on in the winter.”

Her family – a stay-at-home mother, carpenter step-father and younger brother and sister – struggle to get by just a few miles from some of the most expensive real estate in the world. “Those of us who live here, we are not rich, we have to work to make money, even more in the summer. If we want to be OK in the winter we have to work a lot in the summer, so we can hardly enjoy the summer.”



Castillo doesn’t have any friends who live “south of the highway” – the Manhattan-to-Montauk highway that divides the richest of the world’s rich from the people who serve them. Her friends are without exception other Latinos, mostly from Mexico and Colombia.



Her best friend, Eliana Sabogal, 18, works “stupid hours” at McDonald’s, when she’s not studying. She said three generations of her family, who live in a small bungalow a few hundred yards north of the highway, are only able to survive by relying on the kindness of the church in winter.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eliana Sabogal, 18, (from left), her grandmother Luz Sanabria, 63, and her friend Natacha Castillo, 19, sit on the porch of Sabogal’s family home in Southampton, New York. Photograph: Bastien Inzaurralde/The Guardian

While working at McDonald’s gives her little time to sleep over the summer, it’s preferable to her previous job: cleaning billionaires’ homes. “I went to one of those houses to work, to clean it,” she said as her 63-year-old grandmother listens and prays with rosary beads. “I almost didn’t finish cleaning it because it was so big. I was alone in so much luxury.

“It was like walking into a palace for me because I had never been in a house like this.”

It’s a safe bet that the house Sabogal cleaned cost several million dollars. The median selling price for homes on Southampton’s most desirable streets exceeds $18m and some have sold for in excess of $100m.



“If you’re going to be on the ocean, I just don’t see how you can touch it for less than …” Hamptons real estate Nancy Hardy trails off as she tries to think how much the cheapest beachfront house might cost. No one has ever asked her the price of the cheapest, she explained as she took the Guardian on a tour of the properties she has on the market. “People normally only want to talk about the most expensive.”



“A teardown house [would] maybe cost $35m (£22.5m), and up from there,” Hardy says after some consideration. “And, I’m always the conservative one so I may be understating that number.”



Hardy, 56, who has been selling houses for 20 years, pauses to point out the window as she drives past acre after acre of luscious hedgerows grown 20ft high to shield the wealthy from prying eyes. “We’re going past one that was sold for almost $100m. It traded twice in the past year,” she said. “It had belonged to the man [shoe designer Vince Camuto] that owned [ladies fashion brand] Nine West.”



A couple doors down on Gin Lane, which has been dubbed “the Fifth Avenue of the Hamptons”, is Vera Wang’s mansion, and the estates of late retail billionaire Alfred Taubman, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy.



The houses are almost without exception second homes that allow their owners to escape the heat of Manhattan on summer weekends, and can be just one home in a portfolio of seven, eight or nine houses in luxury enclaves across the world.



“I mean people have $60m houses that they use for 16 weekends out of the year, literally,” said Ann-Marie Horan, Hardy’s colleague at Halstead Property. “As soon as Labor Day hits they’re gone, and they’re in Bermuda, Palm Beach or Aspen.”

For those hoping to join billionaire and Republican political activist David Koch, private equity king Leon Black or designer Calvin Klein on Meadow Lane, but who don’t quite have the tens of millions required to buy, there is always the possibility of renting – but even a modest oceanfront home can cost more than $1m just for the summer.



“Some are $1m for the month of August,” explained Hardy.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest This three-story luxury home in Southampton can be rented for $395,000 from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Photograph: Bastien Inzaurralde/The Guardian

The rich don’t come alone, Horan said, they bring a team of assistants, nannies (“at least one per child”), cooks and drivers. “I just had some Saudis for the weekend spending $10,000 a night, and they came with four security [personnel], three nannies and I provided them with housekeeping,” she said. “This is the way people roll. They have a lot of staff.”

The help also travel in style, joining their employers on private jets or helicopters into East Hampton airport, where the parking lot is packed with Porches and Rolls-Royces with blacked out windows. More than 4,200 helicopter landings were registered at East Hampton airport, which is 35 minutes from the Manhattan heliport, last summer.

The growing desire for bands of travelling household staff has solved a problem for realtors: how to rent a house that doesn’t have a pool.

“It’s a big problem if you don’t have room for a pool. [In the past] if we had a 10 renters come to a house, nine-and-a-half had to have a pool,” Hardy said. “Now … they’re being rented as staff houses [because] they [the rich renters] don’t want to pay for the maintenance of the pool. So they’re putting their chef, they’re putting their driver, they’re putting their housekeeping in a separate house. It would be a very nice house, everyone’s got their own bedroom and bath.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nancy Hardy, sales director of Halstead Property real estate agency in Southampton. Photograph: Bastien Inzaurralde/The Guardian

Larry Cantwell, the town supervisor and life-long resident of East Hampton, which lies 13 miles up the Long Island coast from Southampton, explains that while 50% of homes in the town are the summer homes of rich people, the rest are occupied by those who live and work there year-round. “That’s the working class part of our community, including some who are poor and in need as well,” he said.

Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother, said he often thinks he presides over a town comprising two very different worlds living just minutes apart. “In terms of income and wealth, yes, completely different worlds,” he said. “But you know you also have a situation where some of the people who are very wealthy, famous, probably well-known, certainly in this country or even throughout the world, have people that are working for them that live five miles away in a much less expensive home.”

But he fears the gap between the wealthy and the “locals” is only gaping larger, especially for the area’s youth growing up in working class families with very limited local job prospects and a severe lack of public transport. “It’s very difficult for young people,” Cantwell said. “I mean, look, the land and housing values here are so high that you have a situation where many people struggle. In our town we have husbands and wives combining their incomes to try and raise a family, some of the them are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Road D Beach. Renting a home by the ocean during the summer can cost more than $1m, according to real estate agent Nancy Hardy. Photograph: Bastien Inzaurralde/The Guardian

So many local people struggle to get by – with 7% of the population below the poverty line – that food banks have been set up to accept donations and make sure children and their parents don’t go hungry in the the winter when the mansions close and jobs for locals dry up. “We have food pantries here in East Hampton and many of the people from different parts of the community and different walks of life contributing a great deal to help feed people,” Cantwell said.



There is such concern about the prospects for the Hamptons’ youth that a special taskforce of various local government agencies have come together to try to draw attention to the difficulties of growing up in a low-to-middle income household surrounded by such luxury.



The group’s first report detailed high incidences of drink and drug abuse (with drug abuse prevention counselling now being made available from as early as kindergarten in some Hamptons schools), teen pregnancy, mental health problems and some schools providing more than half of students with free lunches, an indicator of families living below the poverty line.

Nancy Lynott, Southampton Town’s youth bureau director, said the report was part of an attempt to paint a true picture of what life’s like in the Hamptons for the young people who live there.

“Sunshine, holidays and parties, that’s the perception – that life out here is a big party,” she said.

“What’s pictured in the media for life out here is the folks who live on estates, the celebrities … a lot of celebrities, they’re the ones that are making the news, not the folks that are doing the everyday work,” she said. “It’s wealth that blows my mind. Just the number of houses, the amount of disposable income, the options that some of these folks have, that most of us including myself could never dream of having in our lives. And then you have the other side, which is the folks who need help heating their homes, feeding their children, those kinds of things.”

