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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
March 31 - April 6, 2005 Edition
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CPA, yes March 31, 2005 This page favors the adoption of the Community Preservation Act by voters in Tisbury, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, and West Tisbury, just as we favored its adoption by Chilmark and Aquinnah in 2001. The record shows that funding under the CPA, including especially the state's matching contribution, can make significant contributions to town efforts to preserve open space, protect historic property, and fund affordable housing efforts. The reason voters in four Island towns will face the CPA question in this town meeting season is that advocates of affordable housing believe - correctly, we think - that housing for modest income folks is a crucial community concern, and funding through the CPA may make possible important advances in the provision of that housing. The CPA is a flexible and responsive tool that guarantees to town voters that they will annually decide how to deploy CPA money among the three eligible categories for CPA spending. This flexibility ought to attract support from voters in the three down-Island towns, some of whom may argue with considerable justification that their communities have already done a great deal to increase the stock of affordable housing. With the CPA in place, Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Tisbury may continue to expand housing or allocate CPA funds differently as time goes on to serve conservation or preservation needs, according to the voters' interests. But, it is affordable housing that is the focus of this town meeting season, because despite a remarkable, four-year-old political consensus among Islanders in support of affordable housing, and despite a wide variety of efforts to develop and subsidize the provision of affordable housing in recent years, we are falling behind. Preliminary findings by a consultant who is updating the 2001 housing survey done for the Island Affordable Housing Fund show that population, jobs, wages, and family incomes have grown handsomely enough since 2001, but housing prices have leapt more than 45 percent and as much as 80 percent. Consultant John Ryan writes, “The market forces driving up prices on Martha's Vineyard have only accelerated the affordability gap that existed in 2001. If it were not for the work going on to create a supply of affordable community housing, neither long-term renters or young Island households would have much reason to hope for a future on Martha's Vineyard. But much has been done, and that is cause for both hope and celebration. The cost of continuing to create this supply of housing reserved for ordinary working residents only goes up as the cost of housing rises. Maintaining the commitment to securing the funds needed to continue this effort is crucial to the character of the Island's residents and workforce.” There is no quick or inexpensive way out of this fix. Just as the Land Bank cannot protect all the wonderful Vineyard places that ought to be preserved, publicly subsidized housing efforts will never meet the continuing and growing need for affordable shelter. But taxpayers must support some of the many strategies that must be brought to bear on the problem. Leveraging modest town real estate taxpayer contributions with state matching funds will help provide a badly needed source of reliable funding for housing initiatives of all sorts, tailored to the individual goals of the six Island towns. The CPA deserves approval by voters in the three down-Island towns and West Tisbury. |
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