Truro has been preoccupied in the past week by a campaign to persuade the select board to get rid of Town Manager Darrin Tangeman (see story on front page). As of Tuesday, 407 people had endorsed an online petition with the title “Truro Needs a New Town Manager — Time to Change Now!”
The petition, initiated by Jonathan Slater, defines the central issue facing the town as whether it will stay “rural.”
“Truro is at a critical crossroads,” he writes. “We either become increasingly suburbanized in 5-10 years or we remain rural.”
I asked Slater what he meant by “suburbanized,” and he named rapid population growth caused by the introduction of “high-density cluster housing” at the Walsh property and the Cloverleaf. He predicted that the “aggressive agenda” of the town manager to promote housing would double Truro’s population in 5 to 10 years.
The infrastructure required to serve this ballooning population, Slater continued, would make taxes go up. And the new residents of these housing units, because they would be renters, would not contribute to shouldering the higher tax burden.
Whatever his faults may be as a manager, Tangeman is hardly the driving force behind the push for affordable housing. Voters have focused on it because the real issue facing Truro is not “suburbanization” but terminal resortification — the transformation of a formerly diverse town with residents of all ages and economic status into an enclave for vacationers and a dwindling contingent of the aged. The only thing slowing that devolution is the lack of working people needed to serve both kinds of people.
Slater argues that the town’s population went up 22 percent from 2010 to 2020, based on the last census. But the artificial pandemic bump of that year has already disappeared. The Cape Cod Commission reported that Truro lost 266 permanent residents in 2022 alone — the highest loss on the Outer Cape — and the astronomical cost of housing is clearly worsening that trend. The median age in Truro is now over 60 (the statewide median is 39.6), and only 4 percent are between the ages of 20 and 39.
The social critique of suburbanization is not about high-density cluster housing. It’s about sprawl, isolation in tract houses, too many cars, and the loss of farms, woods, and open spaces. A town in which more than two-thirds of the land is preserved as national park is not about to turn into suburbia. And if traffic is your bugaboo, consider this: half of Cape Cod’s workers now drive to their jobs from off Cape. That’s according to Hadley Luddy, CEO of the Homeless Prevention Council in a story by Oliver Egger, one of our summer fellows who spent part of last Saturday talking with Provincetown middle-schoolers who participated in a walk to advocate for change because so many of their friends are moving away.
As Shakira Booker described that experience, “I see what’s happening to my friends, I put myself in their shoes, and I feel it with them.”
