New report a comprehensive profile of the Island

A new statistical report on Martha’s Vineyard, made up of everything — from town demographics and land use to traffic counts, and shellfish prices; the total number of emergency hospital visits and solar installations to municipal budgets and watersheds — was released by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission this month.

In collaboration with dozens of state departments, Island organizations, and local town officials, and spearheaded by Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s research and communications manager, Alex Elvin, the regional planning and permitting agency has compiled and organized thousands of data sets into a 150-page report, painting perhaps one of the most comprehensive statistical snapshots of Dukes County released yet.

The 2023 document is an update to the 2019 profile, which was the first of its kind, Elvin explained to The Times this week. It exceeded the scope of previous biennial reports released by the commission, offering a more comprehensive view of the status of the Island in dozens of different sectors.

Likely most notable in the recently released report are data shedding light on the impacts the pandemic has had on the Island. Having affected nearly every aspect of Island life, COVID-19 was indeed the most disruptive at its peak, the report shows. 2020 saw unemployment intensify, — reaching 25.4 percent in April of that year — and the county’s gross domestic product briefly, but rapidly, decline. Real estate values skyrocketed, while many local businesses and year-round Islanders’ wages suffered, pushing the existing housing crisis to even more critical levels. 

The economic portion of the MVC’s report is broken down by industry, and outlines how different industries were affected by the pandemic, with visual markers indicating sudden dips in otherwise consistent table graphs during the peak of COVID-19.

Less affected were services related to landscaping, construction, agriculture, educational services, and public administration. Hit hardest in terms of employment, the report confirmed, were hospitality and food services, retail trade, transportation, and membership organizations. 

According to the MVC, most industries have since rebounded; but some continue to feel the economic impacts of the pandemic. For example, while Martha’s Vineyard Airport passenger enplanements quadrupled from 2020 to 2022, and ferry travel is gradually returning to pre-pandemic numbers, Vineyard Transit Authority ridership has overall decreased, making it the largest decline of any transportation mode on the Island during the pandemic.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the county also saw a significant increase in domestic migrations (those who relocated to the Vineyard), peaking in 2021, before dipping below pre-pandemic levels a year later.

All Vineyard towns saw both a bump in population density from 2018 to 2022 — an Islandwide increase of roughly 35 year-round residents per square mile — in addition to exponential growth in local-option rooms tax collections, the total for which has quadrupled, from under $2 million in 2018 to $8.6 million in 2022.

Also by that time, the average home price on Martha’s Vineyard nearly doubled — going from $1.25 million in 2018 to more than $2 million as of last year.

Some of the other revelations from the commission’s profile include demographic-related stats: the county’s median age being roughly 8 percent higher than the state’s, slightly higher longevity in females, and a large jump in ethnic diversity Island-wide. The report also projects a slight decrease in the county’s population over the next few decades. 

The commission plans to continue updating the report, with plans to next year employ new methodology recommended by the UMass Donahue Institute, in order to add long-sought-after data on the Island’s seasonal population; a tricky task, given there are so many factors that need to be considered. 

Commission staff hope that the comprehensive profile, which delves deep into Island agriculture, health services, education, open space, and housing, in addition to detailed maps on land development, beach and swimming access, flood zones, trail networks, and water resources, will prove useful to not only project planners and nonprofits, but also curious residents who are interested in learning more about what Elvin called “Dukes County in numbers.” 

“This gives a pretty good picture of the Island,” he said.

The profile notes that some information involved estimations, and like with any large-scale report of its kind, there remain margins of error due to reporting discrepancies and sample sizes.