PROVINCETOWN — The town’s “housing workshops” — periodic joint meetings of four committees plus town staff that began in 2021 — have become a kind of drafting room for town meeting, a place where policy ideas can be discussed and refined before they are placed on the warrant for voters.
Proposals that have passed through these workshops have fared exceptionally well at town meetings, including the short-term rental bylaw that was written by town counsel and passed overwhelmingly by voters on Oct. 23.
In the wake of that vote and the town’s purchase of nearly an acre on Nelson Avenue, there was a relatively short agenda at the Dec. 4 housing workshop, which took under 90 minutes. Members of the select board, planning board, community housing council, and Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust expressed a broad openness to the zoning measures and “Lease to Locals” incentive program that town staff presented.
The meeting opened with a discussion of the housing needs assessment survey that the UMass Donohue Institute is preparing to undertake next spring. The assessment is slated to cost $53,200 and will attempt to define how many units the town needs “to meet the demands of municipal employees, essential workers, year-round residents, and other target populations.”
Nearly every board that deals with housing has complained recently that it does not know enough about the income levels of various kinds of workers in town, making it hard to allocate resources between “affordable housing,” which serves people making up to 80 percent of area median income (AMI), and “market-rate housing,” which serves people making between 80 and 200 percent of AMI.
(In Barnstable County in 2023, the 80-percent-of-median-income threshold that divides “affordable” from “market-rate” housing was $67,700 for a one-person household and $77,400 for two people.)
The town currently has $1 million in rooms tax money allocated for housing, Town Manager Alex Morse said, and workshop participants agreed that to allocate that money wisely the town should know more about the people it’s trying to serve.
Several participants said the town should use the survey to ask how much rent people were paying in privately owned rentals in town — but not necessarily to develop a target for the town’s market-rate rentals.
“We need to collect data and understand the current market-rate rents — that’s valid, and we should know that,” said planning board chair Dana Masterpolo. “But I think we should start with the people who are currently without housing, the EMTs and police officers and schoolteachers, and ask what they earn.” Setting rents relative to those peoples’ wages “so that they can live, not just survive” should be the goal, she said.
“I agree,” said Morse, “and the goal of the survey is to collect income information and work backwards to find the appropriate rents for people that are housing insecure.”
‘Lease to Locals’
Provincetown’s Deputy Housing Director Mackenzie Perry described “Lease to Locals” — a cash-incentive and tenant-matching program designed to persuade the owners of short-term rental properties to lease their homes to long-term tenants instead.
“People would have to currently be using their property as a short-term rental, and then we would offer the monetary incentive for them to convert it into a year-round lease for folks who work in the area,” Perry said. There would be caps on what the owner could charge in rent, and there could be a bonus payment if the owner agrees to rent for a second year.
“We don’t think this will meet 100 percent of the need, but it could be a bridge to the new construction that’s slated to be online in a couple of years,” said Morse. Even one or two dozen new leases would be significant, he said.
Placemate.com, the company that administers the program, was founded in Truckee, Calif. by Colin Frolich, a former marketing director of Airbnb who moved to Lake Tahoe in 2018 and was surprised he could not find a year-round rental.
The financial incentives are typically funded with short-term rental tax revenue and range from $5,000 for a one-bedroom unit in Eagle County, Colo. to $18,000 for a one-bedroom unit on Nantucket.
Nantucket’s program began last August and is the first to be entirely funded by private donors. Additional rules state that the tenant must either work on the island or be disabled and cannot be employed by or related to the property owner.
“We’ve asked them to submit a proposal,” Morse said, “where based on other communities with a program, they do some predictive analysis on how many units we might get in the first year and what it would cost.
“Then that’s something we can all look at and tinker with” at the next housing workshop in January, Morse said, “and really consider if this is something we want to invest in.”
Zoning Measures
Community Development Director Tim Famulare presented six zoning measures, five of which would liberalize rules for the use of residential parcels.
One would allow small accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, to broach the setback areas at the edges of residential lots under the same rules applied to garden sheds. Another would allow two-family housing by right in the Res-2 district, rather than by special permit from the planning board, and three-family housing by right in the Res-3 district.
A third measure would slightly reduce the number of projects in the Res-3 district that require site plan review. A fourth would relax the lot size requirements that restrict the placement of two or three homes on a lot in the Res-2 and Res-3 zones, while a fifth would allow inhabited recreational vehicles on driveways in the Res-1 zone.
The sixth measure, an amendment to the town’s inclusionary bylaw, would increase the number of units required to be affordable in new residential developments from one-sixth (16.67 percent) to one-fifth (20 percent).
“I feel like I say this every time we come together, but I don’t think we should have single-family zoning in town anymore,” said select board member Austin Miller. “I think we should make this go a little further and have two-family, or two single-family dwellings, in Res-1 in addition to Res-2.”
Denser housing sells for less than single-family homes, Miller said, making it more “naturally affordable.”
Masterpolo asked for a bylaw that would specifically allow large market-rate rental projects, such as the one slated for the site of the old police station on Shank Painter Road, to be built. That project relied on a four-story allowance on Shank Painter that does not exist elsewhere in town, Masterpolo said, and it also had to include affordable units to qualify under the town’s inclusionary bylaw.
“I would say, ‘Stay tuned,’ ” said Famulare. The town is working with the Cape Cod Commission to develop a model year-round rental bylaw that could be ready in time for spring town meeting, he said.
Morse closed the meeting by asking the boards to come up with more ideas and send them to town staff before the January housing workshop.
“If there’s certain ideas or language you want us to take a look at, we’re happy to do some legwork and help them get to a better place,” he said.
