Adequate housing is not optional

0

Many Vineyarders are perplexed and frustrated when national policies regarding critical issues defy progress, let alone solution. The term “intractable” — a verbal cue that however much we want to solve something, we won’t be able to — is often applied to ascribe certain stalemate to issues like gun control, rational immigration policies, affordable health care, environmental safeguards, and women’s reproductive health rights. It’s a chin-stroking, patronizing way of justifying the political failure to do the right thing about benchmarks of a just and healthy society in the face of single-issue politics and the passion and unimaginable sums of money which fuel them.

On Martha’s Vineyard, many of our seemingly perennial issues draw passion but are generally less fundamental — the roundabout, Five Corners traffic and the future of the Stop and Shop, parking and seasonal traffic, airport management and county administration, ferry schedules and Uber, not to mention hybrid-hybrid SUPs. We’re OK talking about these quality-of-life issues endlessly, because while they matter in some ways, it’s not by enough to force tough decisions.

Adequate housing for all Islanders, though, is not an optional, quality-of-life issue. A healthy and fair community wants all its members to enjoy decent housing as a moral obligation, so we have a choice: We either decide to reduce services and amenities and jobs and shrink our economy (our collective quality of life) so that demand for housing abates enough that everyone fits within the rural/village/wealthy visitor style we’ve become accustomed to, or we do the hard work of compromising to encourage and support where necessary the housing stock we know we need to match our desire for schools, health care, a thriving cultural and civic life, and — most of all — the diversity of financial resources available to the sum of our neighbors.

In the past our overall approach has relied on low-density (and at bottom discriminatory) zoning, with resulting high land and development costs, supporting virtually no moderate-income ownership or rental-housing supply. We struggle to support secondary housing units as though they are a threat to our way of life. We preserve a nostalgic idea of “the real Vineyard” based on design and atmospherics, but forgetting the humans, leaving out newcomers and professional and service providers, and our own children.

Fortunately, Martha’s Vineyard’s housing dialogue may be poised to move out of its intractable limbo into the daylight of constructive consideration and serious progress. A new All-Island Planning Board (AIPB) described in a story by reporter Barry Stringfellow published Sept. 30, “All Island planning board zeroes in on housing crisis,” is bringing town officials and planning professionals together, with housing squarely on their minds. They may not share a single sense of the problem or of the acceptable bounds of the range of solutions which will be required, but they have begun by asking good questions.

Chilmark member Joan Malkin gets it right when she says, “We need a clear picture of what our priorities are,” but the segue to classifying Islanders (workforce? Retirees? Returning Island kids?) presumes that our priorities lie with one and not another. And a further separation by ownership versus rental-housing stock is both too narrow and too distracting right now. The range of comments and ideas expressed at the initial meeting, though, and the dedication of so many participants to starting with objectives, not one-dimensional solutions, is very promising.

Let’s begin by taking stock of where we seem to be in the aftermath of a very encouraging start by AIPB. First, there is a growing, broad acceptance of the idea that our current housing stock is woefully inadequate to meet the needs of our community ambition. A letter to the Editor from Islander Kira Sullivan [Oct. 8, “Revisit transfer fee increase”] discussing the transfer-tax approach to assisting in financing some housing, makes clear how at least some of us are thoughtfully open to new ways to approach an unacceptable stalemate.

Despite the residual attraction of land preservation at almost any cost many of us brought to our earlier lives on the Vineyard, zero development is no longer a responsible default position, and there are no miracles waiting to happen. Sliding our significant needs invisibly into a marginal site or a youth lot or two isn’t going to really do enough. And our experience has shown us that finance-first approaches — the programs which can attract private and public money — can’t drive what needs to be a political rather than a technocratic community decision.

Understanding the political heart of our housing crisis is central if we’re to give a mandate to planners and various experts to craft the solutions and make the changes we need. Hail Mary planning won’t lead necessary change, and decisions controlled from narrow one-issue perches won’t lead necessary change. And if we don’t make thoughtful changes to allow the supply and cost of housing on the Island to grow, we should begin to reckon with the kind of place we’ll inevitably become: a second-home and retirement community for off-Islanders, supported by imported services and labor, not so much a community as a resort business, every bit as Disney as Disney World itself — where the staff who keep the lights on and the trains running are referred to as cast members. The AIPB and the towns it represents are the best chance we have to force the choices we face into the open, and direct changes in land-use policy, zoning, and community development investment to consider all Islanders, and we need our selectmen to lead in the heavy lifting.