Springs Costs a Quarter of the Village Next Door. Town Hall Just Made Sure It Stays That Way.

Drive ten minutes from East Hampton Village toward Three Mile Harbor and the median home price drops by roughly four million dollars. Same town, same school taxes, same beach permits. A buyer who assumes that gap is just the cost of ocean frontage is missing the more interesting story: East Hampton Town is actively deciding, right now, which of its hamlets gets to keep growing as year-round housing stock and which don't. Springs just won that vote.

The Same Town, Four Different Markets

As of June 30, 2026, Zillow's neighborhood-level home value index put East Hampton Village at $5,056,824. Springs sat at $1,265,042. That's not a typo and it's not a fluke of one expensive sale skewing the average. Two other bayside-adjacent pockets of the same town, East Hampton North and Northwest Harbor, came in at $1,813,145 and $1,926,233 respectively, both notably higher than Springs despite sharing a similar distance from the ocean.

If proximity to the Atlantic explained the whole gap, Springs and East Hampton North would track closer together. They don't. Something specific to Springs is holding its price down, and it isn't an accident of geography.

Where the $5.6 Million Median Actually Comes From

The Village number isn't Zillow's alone. William Raveis' 2025 year-end sales report, cited by East Hampton Town Councilman Tom Flight at a January town board meeting, pegged the Village's median even higher, at $5.625 million, the highest of any market on the South Fork. The Village tied Bridgehampton for the most transfers over $20 million that year, with seven each. Across the entire Hamptons market, the median home price broke $2 million for the first time in its history.

Judi Desiderio, managing partner at Raveis and the report's author, didn't hedge about where that leaves buyers waiting for a correction. "I don't think prices are going to go down at all," she told the Star. "We live in heaven. We're surrounded on three sides by water. They're not creating any more land out here." Sarah Minardi, a broker with Saunders and Associates, made the same point from a different angle: for people who already own here, whether as a primary residence or a second home, "there's no affordability crisis." The crisis, if there is one, belongs to somebody else.

Somebody Else Is the Town's Own Workforce

That somebody else showed up in the same Star reporting, in a set of numbers that rarely get quoted alongside luxury sale prices. The average salary for a full-time East Hampton Town employee is $92,517, according to Town Administrator Becky Hansen. In the Village government specifically, it's closer to $85,000, per Village Administrator Marcos Baladron. Measured against a $5.6 million median, that's not a stretch budget. It's a different planet.

Flight framed the tension plainly: home values are "a boon" for people who already own property here, but the town still has to "figure out a way to provide opportunities for new people to come live out here and work." A 2005 town comprehensive plan had already flagged how tight that math was going to get. Only 10.9 percent of the town's land remained vacant that year, down from 45 percent in 1984, while preserved open space had climbed to 34.7 percent, up from 18 percent. There's simply no undeveloped acreage left to zone into a new subdivision of starter homes. Whatever affordable housing East Hampton adds from here has to come from the homes and lots that already exist.

The Policy Decision Nobody Outside Town Hall Is Watching

This is where Springs stops being merely the cheaper option and becomes the deliberate one. In June 2026, the town launched its Accessory Dwelling Unit Construction Assistance Pilot Program, putting $1 million from the Community Housing Fund toward interest-free, deferred-payment loans of up to $100,000 for homeowners who build a rent-restricted apartment on their property. Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez described the logic behind it plainly: "This is a practical way to create more year-round housing using the homes and properties we already have."

The eligibility rules matter for anyone comparing hamlets. A property needs at least 15,000 square feet of lot area and can't sit inside the Harbor Protection Overlay or Affordable Housing Overlay zoning districts. The homeowner has to live there as a primary residence. Attached units can run up to 1,200 square feet, detached units up to 600. None of that is exotic to Springs, where larger inland lots and a year-round residential base are the norm rather than the exception.

By September 2026, the program's popularity was forcing a bigger decision. Twenty-three families applied for the interest-free loans in a single round, among them Hersey and Quincy Egginton of Wainscott, who are converting an existing studio and garage into a rental apartment they hope to fill with someone working in healthcare. Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte, who has led the ADU push, is now moving to raise the per-hamlet caps that limit how many of these units can exist in each part of town. The proposal would lift the ceiling for East Hampton hamlet and Springs to 76 and 56 units respectively, while lowering the caps for Montauk, Amagansett, and Wainscott to 32, 23, and 13. East Hampton hamlet and Springs are the two areas closest to hitting their current limits, with usage already at 32 and 25 against caps that current applicants would otherwise max out. A public hearing is scheduled for October 1, 2026, and Calder-Piedmonte has said he'd like to run the loan lottery before then.

Read that plainly: the town isn't just tolerating Springs as an affordable pocket. It's expanding the zoning room for Springs to keep adding modest, income-restricted rental stock, while pulling that same room back in three other hamlets. That's not a market accident. That's a town board making a choice about where year-round housing gets to grow.

What This Means If You're Actually Comparing Springs to the Village

For a buyer weighing these two markets, three things follow from all of this.

1. The price gap is structural, not cyclical. It isn't waiting on a rate cut or a slow season to close. It's built into which hamlets the town is directing its limited affordable-housing tools toward.
2. Springs is likely to keep adding small, functional housing stock, ADUs behind existing homes, rather than the kind of speculative new construction that pushes medians upward. That tends to preserve the hamlet's character rather than transform it.
3. The Village's ceiling on new supply is effectively fixed by geography and zoning that predates any of this. Springs still has working room to grow within its existing footprint. That's worth something to a buyer thinking ten years out, not just about this closing.

None of this means Springs is a discount version of anything. It means Springs is doing the specific job in East Hampton's housing ecosystem that the Village structurally cannot, and the town just put real money and a zoning fight behind keeping it that way. It's also worth remembering that the hamlet's original appeal, going back to when Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner bought a small farmhouse on Accabonac Creek in 1945, was exactly this: land north of the highway was cheaper, quieter, and still is.

A Few Questions Buyers Ask Us Directly

Does the ADU cap change affect resale value in Springs? It's too early to say with certainty, since the hearing hasn't happened yet, but a higher cap generally means more approved rental units, which supports rather than threatens property values in a market built around year-round occupancy.

Is Springs still considered part of the same school district and services as the Village? Yes. Springs shares East Hampton's town services and its residents pay into the same tax base, even though the Village itself operates its own municipal government with separate salary structures.

Will more ADUs change the feel of Springs' historic district? The historic district around the Pollock-Krasner House operates under its own design guidelines focused on preserving front facades, open yards, and sightlines to Accabonac Harbor, so change there tends to be incremental rather than sweeping.

If you're trying to figure out what a specific budget actually buys between Springs and the villages closer to the ocean, that's the kind of comparison The Burns Team walks through property by property, not just zip code by zip code. Get Your Home Valuation and we'll show you exactly where your number lands on this map.