In a front-page story in last week’s Independent, Paul Benson took a look at some of the supposed facts that have surfaced in talk about affordable housing on the Outer Cape — in particular, in relation to this Saturday’s special town meeting vote in Truro on development of the 70-acre Walsh property.
One of those, Benson noted, is the idea that “affordable housing isn’t really affordable.” He laid out the facts: federal rules put a limit on the cost of rent plus utilities in affordable developments. The standard is that tenants pay no more than 30 percent of their income. Meanwhile, with housing costs skyrocketing here, almost half of the current renters in Provincetown are paying at least 50 percent of their income in rent.
Another widespread belief is that affordable housing will be filled with people “from away” rather than locals. But Laura Shufelt of the Mass. Housing Partnership said that’s just not true. “The people who get these affordable units, whether it’s the local preference units or the other 30 percent, are overwhelmingly people from Cape Cod,” she said.
One topic that Benson didn’t address can be seen on a sign out on Route 6: “Walsh will bankrupt Truro.” As Jane Lea pointed out in a letter to the editor last week, the Walsh property question on Saturday’s warrant does not ask for any money — just an endorsement of the idea that plans for new housing should go forward.
The facts about how much it actually costs towns to create affordable housing tell a completely different story than the dissemblers with their highway signs do. Benson laid them out in an article we published on June 3, 2021 titled “Towns Pay Little to Develop Affordable Apartments.”
He studied the financing of four Outer Cape developments: Province Landing and the VFW in Provincetown, the Cloverleaf in Truro, and the Village at Nauset Green in Eastham. The total cost to the towns of those four projects ranges from about $14,000 to $32,000 per unit, depending largely on the cost of the land. “State and federal funds make up the lion’s share of the projects’ costs,” Benson wrote. “Towns themselves generally contribute 10 percent or less of the total cost.” Not exactly a formula for bankruptcy.
An anonymous letter circulating in Truro says the “overbuilding” of affordable housing will be “a catastrophe for Truro taxpayers” and that most of the tenants “will be low-wage service workers … to keep the wealthy P’town elites fully served to their entire satisfaction.” The writer warns that the combination of Cloverleaf and Walsh will bring 300 to 400 new voters to town, and that these “desperate people” could easily “take control of town meeting, and they will have very different interests from present Truro voters.”
Even worse, “Truro taxpayers will have to cover all the costs of educating hundreds of additional children” produced by these tax-and-spend interlopers.
Whoever wrote that letter was clearly trying to scare people. Why am I not scared by the idea of having more children living among us?
