WELLFLEET — Residents debated whether a master plan for year-round housing at Maurice’s Campground would help bring young people and families with children into town at a community meeting at the elementary school on April 2.
Members of the Maurice’s Campground Planning Committee and Studio G, an architecture firm helping to design the master plan, presented two “revised visions” of their plan to about 100 people in the room and 60 more online. Each vision featured approximately 250 housing units, 80 to 90 seasonal worker beds, and 425 parking spaces.
“I want to get the elephant out in the open,” said Gail Sullivan, a principal architect at Studio G and a part-time resident of Wellfleet, as the meeting began. “There are differences of opinion in this town about what we’re going to do with this campground site. That’s OK. I have a high value for democracy.”
Some cast the development of Maurice’s Campground as a way to help an estimated 495 cost-burdened households in town and a way to reverse troubling demographic trends.
“I just can’t imagine Wellfleet without its school, and I think it’s possible that one of the consequences of having not enough families and children here is that we would lose our school,” said Maurice’s committee member Janis Plaue.
As the Independent reported in January, there are only seven students in this year’s kindergarten at Wellfleet Elementary. The school’s entire kindergarten-through-5th-grade enrollment is 78 students, a 30-percent decrease from only three years ago.
Others argued that the number and density of units proposed for the 21-acre site were inappropriate.
Abutters Karen and Brian Stern, the principal authors of an online petition against the plan, called on residents to reject the article on this year’s town meeting warrant that allocates $125,000 for consultants to help develop the formal request for proposals that will allow the town to select a developer for the site.
“The number of three-story buildings in this plan is excessive and not aligned with the character of Wellfleet,” said Brian Stern. “If the town moves forward, your back yard could be next.”
The Sterns bought their property for $925,000 in 2020 and declared it as their principal residence in 2021, according to records at the registry of deeds.
On April 8, when this edition of the Independent went to press, their petition to “Vote ‘No Mega City’ for Maurice’s Campground” had 50 signatures.
The Push to Delay
The Sterns’ petition lists a series of objections to the master plan including overcrowding, traffic, strain on emergency services, and waste management. The Sterns say they favor the 46 affordable housing units the town is building at Lawrence Hill. “It’s a fraction of the size of this project,” Karen Stern said.
One goal of their petition is to delay action at Maurice’s until data from the lottery for units at Lawrence Hill are available. The Sterns said that data would be a “test case” of “who are the applicants that apply” for affordable housing in Wellfleet — including their town of origin, household size, and other demographics.
The Sterns were not the only residents opposed to the master plan.
“There’s no way that’s a Wellfleet lifestyle,” said social worker Mary Ellen Dwyer of the four 30-to-60-unit buildings proposed for the development.
Planning board chair Gerry Parent agreed. “We have been able as a planning board to keep Wellfleet a rural town. We have purposely not expanded development on Route 6,” he said.
“This is the largest development seen in Wellfleet, ever,” Parent added. Voting down the funding for the RFP would direct the town to “take a step back and do more analyzing and planning,” he said.
Local Preference
At the meeting, many residents supported “local preference” in an eventual housing lottery and had questions about how it works. Projects that receive state and federal funding can reserve a maximum of 70 percent of their affordable units for “local preference” — although people who qualify for the local preference units are also entered in the lottery for the other 30 percent of units.
There was also widespread confusion about who could qualify for local preference units, with some people saying it meant Wellfleet residents only while others said it might include the residents of other Outer Cape towns or families with children in Nauset District schools.
Laura Shufelt, an affordable housing expert at the Mass. Housing Partnership, said that none of those definitions was quite correct. Local residents, she said, are households that live, work, or go to school in town. Households with children in other Nauset district schools, including the middle school in Orleans and the high school in Eastham, wouldn’t qualify as “local residents” on that basis. “Wellfleet has an elementary school and that’s it,” she said.
The housing lottery’s composition is not necessarily the limiting factor on what developers can build, Sullivan told the Independent. “The subsidized stuff is also heavily regulated, so there’s a certain percentage that have to be a combination of two- and three-bedroom” units, she said, “because the priority of that funding is to house families, not individuals.”
Some residents worried there were not enough people in Wellfleet who would apply for the “local preference” units — which Sullivan said would never happen. “Since 1986, I’ve been designing affordable housing in eastern Massachusetts — and there has not been a single unit that hasn’t gotten occupied as soon as it was available,” Sullivan said.
Others argued that the importance of local preference was overstated.
“Think about it,” said John Cumbler. “What about the electrician who lives in Yarmouth, works on the Outer Cape, and wants to live here? When he comes here, he’s a Wellfleetian. The people who move into this housing are Wellfleetians.”
Cumbler also said the town could stand to be more racially diverse.
“I hope they come with a different skin color, to be truthful,” he said.
