Educate yourself about the Cape’s housing situation. Educate yourself even if you have a house and housing security is not a today concern for you. If you care about the Cape’s environment, the preservation of critical habitats, the fate of remaining unprotected open space and improving water quality, you need to understand what is happening in the Cape’s housing market. How Cape Cod addresses its housing needs will determine a lot about our environmental future.
If the environmental community sits on the sidelines as this debate plays out and solutions are developed, if we do not have a seat at the table, we stand to lose a lot that we have long fought to preserve.
This is not the place to go through the litany of housing issues and their impact on the region’s economy. Suffice it to say that the cost of housing is beyond the reach of an increasing portion of our population and that something needs to be done to ensure that more than just the wealthy can live here. While it is not hard to agree there is a housing issue, there is a lot remaining to figure out about the best way to solve the problem.
What worries me is the very real possibility that there will be a consensus on trying to build our way out of the problem that will result in increased fragmentation of habitats and further degradation of water quality from increased nutrient loading. The region does not need any more septic system reliant, market rate single family housing built on greenspaces. We have seen what that has produced: a distorted and unaffordable housing market, poor water quality, sprawl, traffic, and fragmented habitats. A housing solution that looks at all like how the region has approached development the last 40 years would be insanity.
The Cape needs to simultaneously invest in improving water quality and preserving remaining critical habitats while encouraging the development of different housing types that expand housing choices that are built in previously disturbed areas and reliant on modern wastewater collection and treatment. Safeguards are needed to prevent new housing starts from being siphoned off into the seasonal rental market or becoming just more second home inventory. All of this is easier said than done, but the hard work to think this through is necessary.
We, those who care about the long-term environmental quality of the Cape, have to be part of this conversation from the start. To play a constructive role in the development of solutions that are both good for the people of the Cape and the environment, we need to learn more than we do about housing in order to be part of the solution. Not doing so means we may be facing a misdirected building boom that, no matter how well intentioned, makes things worse rather than better.
