Let’s start by stating the obvious: We all agree that the Cape needs and benefits from a year-round population with access to stable and affordable housing. Not only does the well-being of our economy rely on the availability of local workers, but a year-round population will also be more invested in preserving the resources of Cape Cod. A second home-dominated visitor population is not as invested in preserving the Cape as those who consider here home. While we will always have both permanent and seasonal residents, the balance is shifting away from a sustainable year-round population and that needs to be corrected.
From that starting point of agreement, the proposed solutions diverge. The loudest voices have coalesced around some iteration of a “build our way out of it” agenda. Focused on building market-rate housing with some subsidized affordable housing, this approach succeeds only by building enough homes on the Cape to make it no longer the place most of us value. Akin to destroying the place to save it, the policies I hear most about are those that promote enough new market-rate building to satiate the market forces that have distorted the current housing market. No one wants to publicly state, and therefore be attached to, the number of new units that breaks the market but it’s in the tens of thousands. Let that sink in as you sit in traffic trying to take your kids to swim some place where the water quality has not been degraded by existing development.
What I have heard that I find interesting pivots off the intriguing comment made by Paul Neidzweicki of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce last week at the Cape Cod Commission’s excellent One Cape Summit. Paul characterized the Cape’s housing issue as not a problem of too few houses but as an occupancy problem. In other words, we have enough single-family houses; what we need is to have more of them occupied on a year-round basis by working families for whom Cape Cod is home. That notion made sense to me and, combined with his statement that the Cape has enough detached single-family homes, I am able to see a path forward.
The answer to our housing problem, and therefor to our environmental protection challenges, lies in integrated strategy that promotes and enables:
- the purchase of deed restrictions on existing houses that ensures long term affordability for working families;
- land use policies that encourage denser development of multi-family and rental housing in already disturbed and underdeveloped properties that have access to wastewater infrastructure;
- zoning changes that break the development patterns that have resulted in poor water quality, traffic and high housing prices;
- a major new open space acquisition effort that preserves the majority of the remaining critical habitat left unprotected; and
- utilization of those portions of JBCC that may no longer be needed to meet critical national defense needs or that protect the sensitive lands of the Upper Cape Water Supply Reserve.
Simply put, more of the same housing and development approaches, no matter how well intentioned, will bring more of our existing problems. Now is the time to break the mold before insatiable market forces consume all the remaining open space and turn the remaining modest sized homes that can suit working families into unattainable palaces that sit empty for much of the year.
