Article: Maria is sitting on a black plastic chair in a community centre on a cold Tuesday afternoon waiting for someone to call her number. She is number 34.
  When it’s her turn, Maria goes to pick up a brown paper bag filled with essentials including pasta, eggs and cornflakes, and can choose between butternut squash or carrots as this week’s vegetables.
  Maria is the 34th “client” so far today at East Hampton Food Pantry, just streets away from some of the most expensive houses in the world.
  Each day at this time of year, more than 400 families collect their weekly food parcel from the food pantry. This food helps them survive the cold, dark Long Island winter.
  The Hamptons are historic oceanfront towns and villages 100 miles from Manhattan. In the summertime, they are a billionaires’ playground. But, in early September, when the rich and famous shut up their mansions and go back to Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the glamour ends and the gritty reality of life begins for the mostly immigrant community who live here all year.
  “The people who come here are rich and famous but we who live here are not,” says Maria, who works 14-hour days in the summer cleaning mansions but often has no work at all in the winter.
  Maria laughs when asked if she has enough money. “There is no work in the winter, only in the summertime,” says Maria, who is from Latin America, like many of the workers in the Hamptons. “Here, lots of people live in a single room because they can’t pay the rent.”
  She says some families with up to five children have to live in basements and still pay more than $1,000 a month in rent. “People come here looking for work but, in the winter, there is nothing.”
  Lots of her friends can’t pay for heating or medication and many would go hungry if the East Hampton Food Pantry didn’t exist, she says. It is just one of several food pantries in the town.
  Vicki Littman is chairperson of the East Hampton Food Pantry, which provided more than 31,000 food parcels in 2015. She says there are more and more people coming to the food pantry.
  Littman says that, when she talks to the people who come for the summer about the food pantries, they are always shocked because they know only the glamorous side of the Hamptons where there are big parties and the beaches and mansions.
  “But, what people don’t realize is that there is that service industry. It’s the landscapers, the nannies, the waitresses – they all rely on what they earn in the summer to survive the winter.”
  Littman says the town has lost too many people who do important jobs – such as teachers, police officers and even doctors and dentists – because they can’t afford to live in the community.
  Housing is the biggest cost in the Hamptons. Larry Cantwell, who has lived in East Hampton all his life, says homes regularly change hands for more than $25m. “Finding your first home is a challenge in an area like this,” Cantwell says. “If you can find a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for $500,000, you’re very lucky.”
  Cantwell says more than half the town’s homes are empty for most of the year – this causes the population to go from 80,000 in August to 10,000 in the winter months.
  “There’s certainly a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer,” says Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother. “But, the rest of us live here year round.
  “There are famous and very wealthy people but also hard-working and poor people who struggle to get by. You’ve got to remember that this community used to be a farming and fishing community of people who lived off the land and the water – a real working-class community.”
  Eddie Vallone, 22, says, “People see the Hamptons as some sort of rich town but there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs. It’s hard to grasp – ‘OK, the summer is ending. What am I going to do for the winter?’” Vallone says. “I want to work but there’s no work to do.”
  Vallone, who works cleaning pools and doing odd jobs on luxury estates, says that, if he saves well, his summer earnings can last until November. “But, work doesn’t start again until May or the beginning of June.”