It’s getting louder. The drum beat to increase housing production on Cape Cod is getting deafening. While many of our partners are legitimately concerned with the scarcity in supply that is driving prices out of sight, there are others who see this as a generational opportunity to open up development of more market rate housing. Without real and durable protections to ensure that new housing will be priced to be truly and perpetually affordable, trying to build our way out of the current housing crisis will both perpetuate it and doom the environment of the Cape.
The Cape does not need any more single-family detached homes built in the tradition of what comprises the current housing stock of the Cape. More single-family homes reliant on septic systems will provide the Cape with more of what that type of stock has already given us: poor water quality, fragmented habitat, sprawl, traffic, and a lack of affordability. As a region, we cannot respond to the current housing shortage by implementing the same market-based strategies we have used in the past. They failed then and will fail now.
The market has spoken loudly and definitively about where the money is in housing. There is money to be made, lots of it, in second homes, investor properties and in short term rentals. The money is not in the denser multi-family housing stock needed to provide year-round housing that is generally seen as a necessary component of healthy communities. Turning over important open space and critical habitats to feed this beast is not a strategy; its surrender. Reliance on the economics of the housing market to counter this trend is folly. New strategies are needed to lock in affordability at initial sale price as well as in perpetuity and to focus on redeveloping previously disturbed areas already, or planned to be, served by wastewater treatment infrastructure. The region, both the working people needing housing and the environment that makes the Cape attractive, cannot continue to tolerate a strategy that relies on rewarding builders with extra density in exchange for a few additional affordable units that have never amounted to anything more than a drop in the bucket.
There may be transformative proposals for new strategies to limit new housing starts to the types of units that do more to solve the worker housing problem than to enrich land and housing speculators, but over here we have not heard them. Until and unless something real changes we need to resist the land grab that the deafening drumbeat of the call to build, build, build is creating. Some cures are worse than the disease.
