Essential workers can’t afford to stay on the island, putting basic services in jeopardy
||| FROM WASHINGTON POST |||
“I couldn’t believe it. Doubled!” the woman said. “I’ve never seen things this bad.”
“This summer was the worst summer ever,” Brown agreed.
What Brown didn’t say out loud was that she knew this story well. That she and her 14-year-old son had moved three times since June. That in two weeks, when school began, she had no idea where they were going to live. Finding an affordable year-round rental on the Vineyard had become next to impossible.
“Well,” Brown began, “if you know anyone who has a year-round…” Her voice trailed off.
The Red Sox fan considered for a moment before shaking her head.
“I don’t,” she said. “But I’ll keep an ear out.”
This is the part of Martha’s Vineyard most people never see. An island known for its opulence and natural beauty, a playground for presidents and celebrities, it is kept afloat by workers for whom America’s housing crisis is not an eventuality. It’s here.
Even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) this week made a political statement by sending two planes full of asylum seekers to the summer haven, the dearth of affordable housing on the Vineyard had pushed its year-round community to a breaking point.
Schools have struggled to staff classrooms. Indigenous people whose families have lived on the island for centuries have been forced to leave their homeland. Firefighters and government workers can’t afford to stay in the communities they serve. People juggling two, three, even four service-industry jobs say they live each month knowing they are one rent hike away from moving into their cars or tents or onto a friend’s couch.
And then there’s Brown, who serves the island’s neediest, including its growing population of seniors.
This hollowing out is nothing new in cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans and Austin, where short-term rentals and investor home buyers have overtaken razor-thin housing markets and destabilized whole neighborhoods. But on an island where commuting means setting sail over temperamental waters, the Vineyard’s housing crisis is also an existential one.
“We’re hemorrhaging people who are our infrastructure, who hold this community up,” said Laura Silber, the coordinator of the Coalition to Create the Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank, which led a successful effort this year to win support for a new fund for affordable housing. “If you don’t have municipal workers, if you don’t have teachers, if you don’t have emergency workers, if you don’t have someone to help families who are struggling and run the food bank, how does a community keep functioning?”
In the winter, the 96-square-mile landmass of Martha’s Vineyard settles into stillness. The tourism industry’s grip on rental properties loosens, and the families who live here year-round rotate into more spacious winter homes for around six months. Only about half the island’s homes remain occupied all year, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
As the Vineyard thaws, what locals refer to as the “island shuffle” kicks into high gear. They pack up and move from those winter homes into summer rentals, where payments are made by the week and housing can mean anything from a shack with no kitchen or flushable toilet to a camper van or a room in someone else’s home. Cars with license plates from places such as New York, New Jersey and D.C. jam the island’s two-lane roads. Bars fill with bodies, crowds clog the beaches, and the Vineyard’s lone airport becomes the third-busiest in New England.
“Because the island shuffle is so ingrained in the culture of the Vineyard, we didn’t recognize it for what it was — housing insecurity — because it was just part of life,” Silber said. “Now there’s nowhere left to shuffle to.”
Brown found a steady winter rental when she moved to the island five years ago. Summers were tougher, she said, but usually she could find someplace to last her and her son, Carron, through the busiest months. Now, they are moving every few weeks — sometimes staying in a house for only a few days.
A similar emergency has hit in resort towns, beach communities and rural destinations around the country, from the Hamptons to Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. The more remote the place, the deeper the crisis.
On Martha’s Vineyard, policymakers have chronically underinvested in affordable housing and allowed investment properties and short-term rentals to proliferate unchecked. The island, experts said, is more than 10 years late to confront its housing crisis, and it is not moving fast enough to narrow the gap.
I read the entire article; thanks for posting. Interesting that i’s a WA Po (Jeff Bezos-owned) article.
What’s been running around in my head for some time, on the islands and everywhere, is this: Who are the people suing counties and striking down regulations to control unlimited growth and grift from the top – who don’t want to give up even a penny of their profits? How do we stop them from getting yet more money and power? When is enough, enough, and how can we put checks and balances on the top dogs, who have enough money to destroy any good we try to put into place? Is it “communism” to wonder out loud if there should be caps on how much wealth any ONE person can amass, when they can evade paying taxes and outsource it into tax havens while building the next “luxury condos” complex?
Has it always been this broken? (I think it has). For awhile, after WW2, there was a middle class. But we got those riches off the backs of those we plundered in a war economy. How we keep staying in these messes of economic disparity is not a simple problem to solve because it can’t come from governmental mandates, but there need to be SOME checks and balances – and how – in a culture of suing one another and being beaten down by insurance monopolies?
Doesn’t all this beg at least asking the hard questions and really sitting with them long enough to try to follow the breadcrumbs?
People are more similar than different. We need to stop letting billionaire-owned talking heads divide us with politicizing everything when these issues are NOT politics – these are LIFE issues with which we are grappling. We have to start here and push back and keep pushing back against the lies that got us here.