The Homestead

Michael Daly The old school thinking of waiting for village and town boards to decide what type of community housing should be put in our communities (and where it should be put) has failed. Period, end of story.  If we want to have enough homes and apartments for our children who want to stay close to us but don’t want to live under our roof (or visa-versa), our parents who

It has cynically been said that “Today’s ‘environmentalist’ is someone who bought a home yesterday. I’m in, now close the gate!”  Many of us know the desire of wanting privacy and beautiful surroundings, and we all know the feeling, especially on our scenic East End, of a house or a building going up on a vacant property that we used to admire. Or tall hedges or “green giants” being planted

I wanted to tell you about a place where I go to meet like minded people: The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork in Bridgehampton, New York. After attending a number of other houses of worship over the years, I feel as though I have found my spiritual home.  The UUCSF is not a church, but a meetinghouse. Members, friends and visitors gather together each week to talk about

Michael Daly I find myself dismayed at the rhetoric that has become commonplace in our American culture. There was a time when most of us would at least try to show a level of respect for one another and couch our messages in respectful language. But that appears to be “out the window” for more and more of us these days. I’m not saying that everyone has gone rouge or off

by Michael Daly In my dream, we all approach life from a mindset of abundance, knowing that there is enough food, water, money and love to go around for each of us. We focus on creating abundance, using the resources available to each and every one of us, so that we all have good food, good paying jobs and safe places to live. In my dream, men don’t see themselves

Michael Daly The tangled web we’ve woven has put us in a pickle around the sustainability of some of our communities on the East End, which I call The Peconic Region.  We have spent decades zoning out others, especially others who are not wealthy, or at least as wealthy as we perceive ourselves as being. We’ve been upzoning under the guise of protecting everything from salamanders to water quality, as

Michael Daly The challenges around affordable, workforce and senior housing housing are both moral and marketing. They’re moral, because we know that we are responsible for providing affordable places to live for our workers, our children and our elders and we’re just flat out not doing that. It’s a marketing challenge because the term Affordable Housing is a lightning rod. For many people, it brings out bias against the “have-nots”:

by Michael Daly Michael Daly “The first step is to acknowledge it happened”, she said loudly, bringing her hand down from above with her index finger extended. “The next is to make it right. The white man is afraid to admit what he did because he’s afraid that would give us power and then we might be as cruel to him and he was to us!” she exclaimed while looming