At the heart of Monday’s Island Realtor-sponsored affordable housing forum was an acknowledgment of the urgent need to provide on the Vineyard a variety of year-round, low and moderate cost housing opportunities. Rental housing is especially needed, forum participants agreed, on an Island where half of all families earn less than $23,000 to $26,000, and need rentals costing $600 a month or less.
Do not be concerned that you missed the housing forum. That paragraph was the lead for a story that ran under the headline, “Rental housing badly needed, forum agrees,” published on the front page of The Times on Nov. 2, 1989.
A quarter-century later, the story remains pretty familiar. Shift a few numbers around, change the byline (Gerald, a wonderful fellow, is long since gone) and there is a story ready to republish that would not raise an eyebrow.
The long ago housing story reported that, according to statistics compiled for the forum, more than 75 percent of Island households could not afford to buy houses available on the Vineyard. That week a three-bedroom Cape in Oak Bluffs was listed for $162,500 in the real estate section.
The story reported that the bankers, public officials, and builders who met “defined the problem’s many dimensions.” The list included:
- Zoning changes are needed in each town, to encourage affordable housing and streamline the torturous permit process.
- State and federal funding is scarce or dried up.
- Rental units, not private houses, are needed.
- Island towns are amenable to affordable housing, but still housing lags way behind the need.
- The regulatory climate makes the creation of affordable housing an expensive and cumbersome process.
- A regional approach is needed.
So how have we done? We can report there has been progress in the past 26 years.
We created the Island Housing Trust (IHT) which has been at the forefront of patient efforts to create housing. The Dukes County Regional Housing Authority works with Island towns, residents, and the Housing Trust to manage affordable rental housing.
And the regional approach is evident in the IHT Kuehn’s Way project, a proposed 22-unit affordable housing complex off State Road in Tisbury, supported with cash from taxpayers in all six towns.
The regulatory climate has improved. More towns allow for accessory apartments and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission has shown a new willingness to be flexible and timely in its review process, as recently evidenced by its decision to leave the Kuehn’s Way project to the Tisbury zoning board of appeals, which will hold a hearing this Thursday night.
We urge the ZBA to act expeditiously. When one considers the precursor to this proposal — the much larger Bridge Commons development — Kuehn’s Way can be traced back to 2002.
What is still lacking is a strategy that sets private builders to work constructing needed workforce rental units. This may be done through a combination of zoning changes where density may be allowed, for example in town centers, and incentives — town land or tax breaks — that would prove attractive to developers looking to make a modest profit and increase the supply of needed market or near-market rate rentals and sales.
In August, it is not unusual for the cost of a one-week rental on Martha’s Vineyard to equate to almost one year’s worth of mortgage payments for a middle class family. The lack of reasonable housing is undermining the foundation that supports the seasonal economy and our year-round community. Expanded supply at many price/income levels is needed. We may not have another 26 years to address the problem.
Unlicensed and unconcerned
Last week, The Times detailed the story of Edson Luduvino DeOliveira Jr., an unlicensed driver responsible for a three-car accident in Edgartown on July 29 (Aug. 4, “Five-time unlicensed driver cited in three-car Edgartown crash”).
Mr. DeOliveira, a Brazilian national, received his fifth citation for unlicensed operation in the past five months, and his sixth in the past three years, according to police records.
On Sunday, Oak Bluffs police arrested Nestor G. Arpi, an Ecuadorian national, after he struck four parked vehicles along Seaview Avenue (Aug. 11, “Police say driver who sideswiped four cars was too drunk to stand”). According to police, Mr. Arpi was so intoxicated he could not stand up, yet he was driving on our Island roadways and was stopped by the Oak Bluffs Steamship terminal just as a ferry was unloading scores of passengers, a menace to everyone in his path.
In both of these cases, police said, the drivers were unlicensed.
Strangely, an individual arrested for unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle faces no jail time. The law only allows for escalating fines up to $2,000 for subsequent offenses.
Officers familiar with the system say that for many unlicensed drivers the fine — if stopped — is the cost of doing business in an underground cash economy. Particularly since Island judges appear unwilling to levy stiff fines, even to repeat offenders.
In contrast, an individual who drives with a suspended license, as opposed to no license, faces stiff fines and possible jail time of up to one year for repeat offenders.
It is time that lawmakers stiffened the penalties for unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and judges begin upping the cost of doing business without a license.
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