Affordable Housing Institute : US

In yesterday’s post, we followed a Boston Globe story about the demographic shakers — Cape Cod’s home owner population, which has voted itself restrictions on growth and in so doing insured that on the one hand, the incumbents will become richer, and on the other, that they will find it ever harder to lure in the service workers on whom their retirement depends.

 

When the Cape found home prices rising, what did its voters do? 

 

Why, adopt further growth restrictions that could only act to push them even higher!

 

Just wrap this around your employment base and twist hard

 

To avoid density, towns required new houses be built on large lots, such as the two-acre requirement in Barnstable. Large lots were also thought to better protect groundwater supplies from seepage from septic systems, used by the vast majority of Cape residents.

 

Two-acre lots! 

 

Put just one house on this whole green area

 

In other contexts, smart-growth advocates would call that sprawl.  Here it was being proposed in the name of ‘avoiding density’.

 

Towns began preserving more open space, buying it with help from a land bank that’s funded by a surcharge on local real estate tax bills.

 

As a general proposition, I’ve endorsed community land trusts; it’s a way for the community as a whole to chip in for property of public benefit.  Once the land trust money is assembled, it’s a different question whether to preserve the land purchased as open space, or dedicate it to high-density affordable housing.

 

While such restrictions kept areas of the Cape free from development, they limited new housing construction and meant the houses that were built were larger and more expensive. Since 1997, the Cape’s median single family home price has tripled to about $350,000.

 

Converting those figures into annual inflation, we have roughly 11.5% annual appreciation every year for a decade. 

 

As prices rose, local salaries did not keep pace.

 

This is a period when the CPI rose 2.7% annually (210.2 in 11/07, 161.5 in 11/97), meaning that home prices increased 9.0% annually in real terms — four times as fast as the CPI!

 

My wages aren’t keeping up

 

More than a third of Cape jobs are in the relatively low-paying retail or food service and accommodations industries that support tourism.

 

Don’t cost much to dig clams, ay-uh

 

Observe the self-reinforcing cycle: an aging population shifting the workforce toward personal-service jobs, meaning average wages were probably declining in real terms because the workforce was shifting lower.

 

An effort in the late 1990s to promote the Cape as high tech haven dubbed “the Silicon Sandbar” fizzled –

 

I mentioned the utter congestion of the Cape’s minimal transportation infrastructure.  No rail.  Minimal public transportation.  One principal (two-lane!) highway.  Ouch. 

 

Sunday afternoon, Route 6 — only four miles to the bridge

 

– and Northcross of the Chamber noted the Cape has more employees working in arts and crafts than tech jobs.  

 

Sidebar: arts and crafts are low-industry jobs that people can do from their homes.  These jobs have emerged in spite of the Cape’s anti-growth and anti-jobs policies, not because of them.

 

As higher paying industries have struggled to gain a foothold, even middle income workers are finding the Cape unaffordable.

 

In an interview at the Barnstable senior center, where the second major expansion in less than a decade is underway, Michelove recalls speaking to an EMT who was forced by high housing prices to move off Cape to Plymouth.

 

What’s 35 miles when it’s an emergency?

 

I’ve posted many times about workforce housing.  Cape Cod’s an extreme example of its importance.  With the Cape’s long attenuated shape, and the difficulty of getting up and down its sole highway, EMT’s who are two towns away might be too far to save a life.

 

“That’s scary when the people who take care of you physically are … miles away and over a big bridge that sometimes closes when the weather is bad,” Michelove said.

 

In other words, the people who protect the Cape’s elderly live off the Cape. 

 

Leslie Richardson, economic development officer of the Cape Commission, said none of the Cape’s problems is catching planners by surprise.

 

Loocee!  You are surpriiised, Loocee?

 

They’re surprised.  That makes me feel all better.

 

She also questioned whether the Cape was aging as rapidly as Francese warned in his recent presentations before Cape business and educational leaders. She noted demographic experts have challenged the reliability of the Census population estimates, which Francese uses.

“This isn’t a sudden, urgent crisis,” Richardson said. “We’re still not anywhere near Nantucket.”

 

No bridges to Nantucket

 

Nantucket is an island – a beautiful, and by now extremely exclusive, island, with extremely high prices and a massive unaffordability problem.

 

Mighty wet wheeling from the mainland

 

Work is underway to diversify the local economy and make the Cape more affordable to younger workers and families, Richardson said. For instance, economic development groups are pushing the renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth as a base for expanding renewable energy businesses and research.

 

 

That’s all well and good, but completely irrelevant to affordability.  Adding jobs in energy and oceanographic research will do nothing to alleviate high housing prices – in fact, it’s more likely to push them up because it will be adding to demand.  If the Cape wants affordability, it will need either to remove a great many development barriers, or create specifically affordable or workforce housing, or – probably –both.

 

There’s also a move to change zoning laws to allow more dense development so towns can create village centers that allow more lower-cost housing units.

 

Yes.  It will take inclusionary zoning, or simple higher-density use, to add supply. 

 

Expanding sewer systems to handle the increased density is a priority.

 

Curious phrasing, that. 

 

I wonder what it means

 

There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, and “priority” is meaningful only if it converts into increased funding for sewer and water infrastructure.

 

Which towns will go first?

 

Change comes slowly on the Cape, which is governed by 15 independent town bodies.

 

If I’m a normal suburbanite, I always want ‘those people’ to live in my neighbor’s town, and drag down his property values, not mine.

 

It may also be difficult to sell more dense development on a population that’s been focused in recent years on stopping development.

 

You think that telling them that their shibboleths have all been wrong may be a hard sell?

 

Condemned to repeat the mistakes?

 

But zoning changes will be needed. Just 17% of Cape land is unprotected or undeveloped, according to the commission, and no one is talking about putting new houses on remaining open space.

 

Two years ago, in What price greenfield?, I not-very-daringly speculated that Britain’s love affair with greenfield might be driving up its land prices:

 

Like many European countries, the British pride themselves on preserving greenfield, and shudder to think of American ’sprawl,’ but at what price in higher housing costs?  A big one.

 

In Britain, though, the government’s National Savings and Investments department said that while wages have increased nationwide by an average of 79% in the last 10 years, house prices have gone up by 180%.

 

Thus a buyer paying 30% of income in 1994 would today be paying half again as much in 2004.  For their higher prices, do the Europeans get more space?  As anyone who’s ever visited a semi-detached knows, they do not.  Here’s another remarkable statistic, from a recent EU-USA study (download here, .pdf):

 

The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet.  In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.

 

Clearly the same thing is happening on the Cape — and the British experience suggests the lack of affordability, and corresponding job contraction, are likely to continue.

 

There’s also plenty of room for more seniors: a third of Cape homes are second homes, according to the commission.

 

For the last three or more decades, England’s periphery — Wales and Cornwall — has been steadily depopulating, as young people follow the jobs into London and the major cities.  Like many people, I love vacationing in Wales and Cornwall, but the towns are empty from mid-fall through mid-spring, and when they are empty, the aging housing stock is all shuttered up and silent.

 

Houses in Fowey, Cornwall, in October: windows open, doors shut

 

Helen Perron, 73, moved from Chelmsford on the New Hampshire border to her second home on the Cape in 1994 and has enjoyed an active retirement with her husband Ed. But she said while everyone enjoys being with people their age, no one wants to see the Cape swing too far out of balance.

 

Another coincidence: my sister-in-law, who like Nancy grew up in Chelmsford, moved to the Cape at about the same time.

 

“You don’t want to be with just gray-haired people,” she said. 

 

Then perhaps you should renounce your demographic Shakerism, and start creating jobs (with workforce housing) and younger people (with family housing, as in Who put the bed in bedroom?)

 

Don’t forget to bring your parents, and their wallets

 

 

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