Affordable housing is under attack again and it shouldn’t be a surprise to you or me. In the heat of an upwardly trending and active real estate market, Martha’s Vineyard is seeing it’s already critically tight rental housing stocks dwindling as some of the lowest-end housing is selling off to vacationers, homeowners and investors. During the past 12 months of 2015, we saw 182 homes under $600,000 change hands. These homes represent lots of different types of housing options including both year-round and winter rental homes that many families in our Vineyard community have been dependent upon. The sale of homes in this section of the real estate inventory has a profound and dramatic impact on our community. It may not be immediately visible to you and I, but as the people who had lived in these former rental houses now find themselves displaced, there will be consequences that include struggling to find replacement housing, increased homelessness and departure from the Vineyard.

I see it as domino theory where the lack of housing has actions that affects the Vineyard community in many ways including a lack of a good work force, and that affects us all.

At last count there are between 250 and 300 families on the revolving rental wait list held by the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority. There are more than 400 families on the regional housing authority home buyer clearinghouse, and many of these families are showing up at less than 50 per cent of the area median income. In truth, many may not even be able to afford the cost of the low-end home buying options. David Vigneault, executive director of the regional housing authority, shared with me that he sees things getting worse. “There are lower numbers of year-round housing options at all price levels,” he said, and “the resulting impact is that there are more people on all of our waiting lists.”

Other agencies like Morgan Woods and Island Elderly Housing are also seeing their numbers rising. At Morgan Woods, the current number of families on their waiting list as of April was over 200. Unable to get in touch with the agency, I can only assume that number has grown. For the older population here, there are few good options and as the baby boomer generation matures the number of older folks seeking stable rentals will grow.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

Looking at Nantucket’s recent embrace of a radical zoning maneuver to allow for affordable housing allowed me to consider how alike and yet different we are from our sister island. Some would say that their willingness to bend zoning radically to embrace this large development is a plan that could also work for the Vineyard, but I think that between our larger acreage zoning and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, there is little incentive for any developer. There has to be a profit motive to make it work. In the dusty trail of derailed developments, we still remember the Kupersmith development in Oak Bluffs and of course Cozy Hearth.

What can we do?

Something needs to change. Somehow we need to wake up and collectively take some actions to protect and grow our rental stock. Our attitudes about what we hold important have to change. We can modify zoning, incentivize smart-growth development, encourage tiny or smaller housing, allow accessory apartments, create tent sites, but we need to do all of this now, in a harmonic effort to create more stability and stem the erosion of our community. Close to 15 years ago I mentioned to a few real estate broker friends that we should ask our low-end home sellers to offer homes exclusively to Islanders first for a limited period of time to keep the low-end homes from falling out of our rental inventory. I branded the imaginary program Islanders First as a radical but not impossible step toward stability. The reaction was less than favorable with excuses like “too restrictive to sellers or unfair” but in hindsight it now seems like a wonderful idea lost to the past. This year I half-jokingly suggested to a fellow board members at the Island Housing Trust that we start a real estate investment trust and buy up lower end homes for year-round rentals. In looking at the sales out there, it seems that there is competition from certain buyers who are already doing exactly this but for seasonal rental profits instead of year-round homes.

Tom Seeman is starting a program asking clients to agree to a one per cent surcharge on goods he sells, which he matches and then donates to housing. This is a great idea. I am donating one per cent on my office and personal rental income to affordable housing. We could add a $100 rental housing fee on every lease. We don’t need to wait until the government places a six per cent room tax on rentals to do something. I propose we should all voluntarily donate one per cent of profits today while we can still write it off as a tax deduction to help subsidize the rental market in whatever way we can.

Other ideas are out there. We are all capable of doing a mitzvah, or good deed for our community and the larger the number who do the greater the impact. There is one thing I am certain of — the longer it takes for us to act the less impact our actions will have and the more dramatic those eventual actions will need to be.

Jim Feiner
Chilmark