If thoughtful Islanders are asked to identify critical community problems and challenges, the shortage of affordable housing for all of our year-round community will likely rank at the top of the list. It’s hard to imagine a supportable argument that shelter for the families and individuals who live and work here is somehow optional.
Barry Stringfellow’s recent report (Feb. 19, “Martha’s Vineyard housing shortage reaches critical mass”) is the first installment in a multipart series about this complex and frustrating challenge, and the hard choices and decisions we’ll need to make if we want to be a healthy and inclusive community.
The facts and statistics of our affordable-housing failure are stark: “virtually nonexistent” year-round market-rate leases, according to Dukes County Regional Housing Authority (DCRHA) Executive Director David Vigneault; 235 individuals and families on a waiting list for year-round housing and rental assistance (against an inventory of 79 units and little turnover); estimates from the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s (MVC) 2013 housing-needs assessment that more than 2,200 Island households, about 30 percent of Islanders, may meet income qualifications for assistance; waiting lists of 12 to 14 years for federal Section 8 funds; and effects in all quarters of the Island, extending to teachers and young professionals as well as seasonal and underemployed workers and their families. With Martha’s Vineyard house prices exceeding what an Island family with the median household income can afford by more than $200,000 (second only to Nantucket among Massachusetts counties), conventional home ownership seems an unlikely remedy.
Attention to our severe affordable-housing shortage is longstanding, going back at least to the 2001 assessment done under MVC auspices. Since that report was published, many Islanders have labored long and hard to provide buffers against market forces and community-lifestyle preferences. The DCRHA, the Island Housing Trust, the now-inactive Martha’s Vineyard Housing Fund, the six Island towns, and the MVC have all contributed to a range of program efforts, and the tangible results — such as DCRHA’s managed rental units and Morgan Woods — are bright spots in a grim picture.
Yet we remain seemingly as far behind as always: terribly urgent and moving individual stories, impossibly long waiting lists, well-intended and passionate public and private agencies and organizations strapped for funds and for land, and the notable absence of consensus on how to climb out of the hole we’re in.
At its heart, our affordable-housing problem isn’t about greed or indifference; it’s the natural result of multiple market forces inexorably playing out, in our case pummeling hundreds or more of our neighbors who are unable to compete for high-priced housing. Inescapably, Martha’s Vineyard’s shortage of affordable housing is the result of a distorted and flawed market that fails our community.
The laws of supply and demand apply here, of course, but our supply of homes for sale or rent is limited (and apartments are almost nonexistent), and the pace of demand is set by vacation and second-home buyers. And nonresident homeowners, understandably taking advantage of the very high seasonal rents they can command, don’t put their properties into the year-round rental pool at all. In the face of severe supply constraints, nonresident demand easily pushes market prices beyond the means of many of our neighbors.
In the mists of the past — through the 1990s, before the new gilded age began to land on Vineyard shores — local and off-Island demand for resources like housing coexisted well enough. Stories of yurts, tepees, and school buses providing summer accommodations for locals just seemed to add to our safe bohemian charm.
While demand and prices rose with accelerating impact on our affordable-housing supply over the recent decade or two, we zealously continued to limit the Island’s supply of housing through low-density zoning, and, however unintentionally, through aggressive conservation efforts. We fretted about too many housing starts, and experimented with moratoriums. We worried over defining mansions. We preserved the style and undeniable attraction of rural vistas and small villages (and thus added to our draw for suburban and urban refugees), but failed to connect the dots to see the unintended effect our aesthetic preferences would have on the affordable-housing supply we need.
To be clear, the problem doesn’t stem from the values we favor about views and lifestyle; it stems from failing to expand on those values to reflect their ultimate social cost — our inability to simultaneously maintain housing alternatives for folks who live and work here. We can’t punt on the harder work: zoning and development policies to encourage the affordable-housing supply we need.
Scale and values matter, of course, and communities around the world arrive at their own calculus. New approaches here — selective high-density zoning, developer incentives for building market-rate and subsidized units, a reversal in thinking about secondary dwellings on home lots (including relaxed zoning and homeowner incentives), assured ongoing town support, so-called millionaire taxes on high-end real estate transactions, and other ideas this creative and desirable community can devise — need to be part of a larger public discussion.
Adequate housing is a fundamental marker of a healthy and whole community, and if we don’t deliver — if we let the market take its course and try to mitigate its exclusionary effects at the margins — we need to know that we’ve failed our community by choice.
