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rental housing

    THE CRISIS

    Year-Round Rental Housing Melts Away as Real Estate Booms

    New ideas for preserving existing rental units emerge on Nantucket

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Early in the morning of June 11, seven Provincetown residents received the email that every renter here fears: “It’s been wonderful being your landlord, but I’m getting older and I need to retire. The real estate photographer will be there at 3 p.m. today.”

    The seven residents of the six units at 28-32 Standish St. were fortunate to have annual leases through Sept. 30, which gave them almost four months to look for new homes. The last two times this happened to him, said Dan McKeon, he was told to leave within 30 days.

    Dan McKeon, left, and Allan Lukauskas on the deck of the apartment at 28-32 Standish St. they must leave by Sept. 30. (Photo Paul Benson)

    “When I lived on Center Street, the notice came Memorial Day weekend of 2014, and then on Nelson Avenue, the notice came Memorial Day weekend of 2016,” said McKeon. Tourist traffic isn’t just good for restaurants and bars — a summertime listing helps sell a house as well.

    Landlords retire all the time, and it’s their right to do so. The sale of individual properties is significant because of what’s happening in the aggregate.

    When rental housing sells on the Outer Cape, it rarely stays a year-round rental. The potential income from short-term rentals is so high — more than double the return from renting year-round, according to a 2018 UMass Dartmouth study — that it has elevated the price of real estate far beyond what most local residents can pay.

    Census data show that the privately owned landlord-tenant rental market is melting away.

    500 Rental Units Lost

    In 2000, the U.S. Census recorded 3,890 residential units in Provincetown, almost exactly evenly divided between “occupied housing units” and “for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use.” The “occupied housing” column showed 988 owner-occupied units, and 849 renter-occupied units.

    By the 2010 census, Provincetown’s total residential inventory had increased by 463 units. Yet the number of occupied units had fallen — and the loss was entirely in the renters’ column: there were only 565 renter-occupied units that year.

    The 2019 American Community Survey estimated that there were still fewer occupied units than in 2010. Of 1,570 occupied units, only 334 were renter-occupied.

    Just over 100 new affordable units were constructed between 2000 and 2017, according to the UMass Dartmouth report — most of them at Province Landing and Stable Path. Even so, the total rental inventory shrank by 515 units over 19 years. The entire rental housing stock is only 40 percent of what it was in 2000 — and the numbers are going down.

    On Standish Street

    The residents at 28-32 Standish St. are a microcosm of the town. House painter Annemarie Piccerelli moved to Provincetown in 1982. Allan Lukauskas moved here in 2002, and recently retired for medical reasons. Chris Racine is a manager and DJ at the Crown & Anchor. Dan McKeon is an event photographer for the Provincetown Business Guild and Provincetown Magazine. Other residents work at Victor’s restaurant, Napi’s restaurant, and the Boatslip Resort.

    Piccerelli said she has moved four times in the last three years. McKeon moved to Standish Street in 2016, and Lukauskas began renting in 2010.

    All three said they like and respect their landlord, and they like their apartments. They approached Michelle Jarusiewicz, the town’s housing specialist, to find out if there was anything they could do to preserve the units as year-round rentals.

    “She said there’s nothing the town can do,” said Piccerelli. “There’s no money in the housing trust. I said, ‘Where is all the money from the short-term rental tax?’ That money should go to the year-round housing trust. Forget about tourism — they have enough.”

    Piccerelli is referring to the $2 million Provincetown received in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021 from the expansion of the rooms tax to short-term rentals. According to Provincetown’s existing allocation formula, 35 percent of that money went to the tourism fund. None of it went to a housing fund.

    “I said to Michelle, ‘This is the type of property the town needs to save,’ ” said Piccerelli. “It’s going to be six more empty condos.”

    Piccerelli wants the town to approach the landlord, Marilyn Mervar Rodes, and ask if the house could be sold at a reasonable price and the rental units preserved. She believes that Rodes has an attachment to Provincetown. “She’s been here since the ’70s,” Piccerelli said.

    What Can Be Done?

    The town does not have $3 million set aside to buy six units of housing. That’s the asking price for 28-32 Standish St. But there are alternatives to buying the property outright.

    Nantucket is exploring two approaches, according to Housing Director Tucker Holland. One is a trust that would buy the land underneath a residential property, add a deed restriction guaranteeing year-round occupancy, and then sell just the building at a lower price. This would make residential units substantially cheaper and would give the town a permanent seat at the table for future transactions, according to Holland.

    Nantucket is also considering paying a large developer to deed-restrict 78 new units to year-round-occupancy only, said Holland. The developer of the Surfside Crossing project has already offered to make 25 percent of the 156 units affordable rental housing, and another 25 percent deed-restricted year-round-only market-rate condos. Without potential revenue from short-term rentals, those condos are expected to sell at rates much closer to the working income of island residents.

    Holland is also considering making an offer to the developer to secure year-round-only deed restrictions on the other 78 market-rate condos in the project. It is not common to use public money this way, said Holland, but for resort towns where the appetite for short-term rentals seems endless, new strategies have to be carved out.

    “A year-round-only deed restriction with no income restriction associated with it — this is kind of new ground,” said Holland. “We’re really talking about creating a bifurcated market, with a pool of year-round-only properties.”

    Laura Shufelt is a Cape Cod native and resident who is director of community assistance at the Boston-based Mass. Housing Partnership, and an expert on appropriate uses of public funds and fair housing. The Independent asked her about the use of public money for year-round-only deed restrictions.

    “For buying down to affordable-ownership opportunities, we know how to do that,” said Shufelt.  “There’s a formula. For affordable rentals, it depends on the funding source, but you’ll see towns negotiate with a developer to secure more affordable units in a mixed-use development. You figure out what rental schedule you’re buying down to, and then the developer still owns it. You’ve paid for the deed restriction, but you haven’t bought the units.

    “For existing units with existing tenants,” Shufelt went on, “it’s more difficult, but I think it’s viable.” This kind of arrangement is “on everyone’s list of things they’d like to do,” she added.

    “It’s certainly less money than building a new unit,” Shufelt said. “The investment is less, and you’re getting a great value, but also, you’re getting what you need to sustain the community.”

    How much might it cost to deed-restrict a property to year-round-only use? Both Holland and Shufelt were unsure but said it could be roughly calculated against the income lost due to the restriction. Leaving the rents at market rate would be a cheaper restriction than buying them all the way down to an officially “affordable” level, Shufelt said.

    What this option comes down to, Shufelt said, is “a negotiation.” And that would depend on what owners think is fair.

    “There are some people that, in a tight community like Provincetown, want to maintain the culture,” said Shufelt. “They want to maintain the town for what it’s been. And it can’t happen if someone doesn’t step forward.”

    INSECURITY

    Behind the Housing Crisis, Anxiety

    Homeless Prevention Council case managers find ‘no solutions’

    By

    EASTHAM — Allie Dubois and her family had been renting their house in Eastham for almost four years when their landlord decided to take advantage of the booming real estate market and sell. Since getting this news in May, she’s searched for a new place to live every day, to no avail.

    After all her searching, Dubois said, “I have not found one acceptable place for my family to live.” She said there’s not one house selling for less than $500,000, and the lowest rent she’s been able to find is $2,000 per month. “That could be a mortgage,” she said. “It’s a constant, crippling undercurrent of anxiety. I can never not think about it.”

    Dubois, who lives with her husband and 14-year-old son, has lived on the Cape for over a decade. She has what she calls a “Cape Cod career,” working as a waitress, seamstress, landscaper, and, prior to the pandemic, after-school art teacher. It’s always been hard to find housing here, she said. It took the family eight months to find their Eastham rental four years ago. Today, said Dubois, the task seems impossible.

    Hadley Luddy, CEO of the Homeless Prevention Council (HPC), a Cape organization that provides case management and rental assistance to people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, said her office is hearing more and more stories like Dubois’s.

    In the first three months of 2021 alone, HPC served the same number of people as it did in the last six months of 2020. And 2020 was already a year of unprecedented need, with HPC cases up 25 percent from 2019, Luddy told the Independent in June.

    Luddy has had to tell a growing number of clients that there are simply no available rentals. “It’s really difficult for a case management team to have no solutions,” she said.

    If year-round housing continues to disappear at its present rate, Luddy said the situation “will get worse, to the point where we don’t have a workforce at all to draw from.”

    The community is aware of the housing crisis, and asking for change, but if you’re among the displaced, solutions come too slowly. (Photo Cam Blair)

    The owner of Dubois’s rental house has found a buyer, with the closing date set for Sept. 20. Dubois has hired a lawyer in an effort to delay their ultimate departure by a few months. By then, Dubois hopes to have found a new spot, but based on how the search has gone so far, that might be easier said than done.

    Tina Camino, who has lived in Provincetown since 2003, had been renting from a friend for nearly a year when she was forced to leave on June 16 because the house was sold. Camino was without housing for nearly two months, staying with friends for short periods and spending time with her ill father in Pennsylvania. She moved into an apartment on Shank Painter Road last week.

    Camino last had stable housing in 2018. She was in the same apartment, which she rented from a friend and his husband, for four years. Camino left the apartment because of a pervasive mold problem. The mold made her sick, she said, but she hesitated to raise the issue with the owner because she feared she would be kicked out. After she did raise the issue to the owner and he downplayed it, she decided she needed to stay somewhere else until the mold problem was fixed. The owner told her not to come back.

    “You’re living in a place where you’re scared to tell the landlord what’s going on because of the housing crisis,” she said. “I was always afraid that something was going to happen.”

    The situation has gotten noticeably worse since Camino moved to Provincetown nearly two decades ago, she said. Back then, it was much easier to find housing for the winter and summer. The change is frustrating to Camino, and, she said, the people who will suffer most are the workers.

    “It’s almost like no one cares,” Camino said. Summer people “want to be here and be served,” she said, but she wonders what will happen when there’s no one to serve them “because the workers have nowhere to stay.”

    Dubois agreed with Camino: “What are the haves going to do when there’s no more have-nots?”

    HOUSING CRUNCH

    A Neighbor-to-Neighbor Rental Market Falls Short

    Six months in Facebook’s outermost housing rental group

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Someone in the Facebook group “Provincetown: Housing for Rent” called finding housing here “an impossible dream.” The page is a trove of tales of housing plans that have fallen through. And when one man wrote “luxury on the water is what I’m looking for,” the response was, “Oh, honey.”

    It’s unclear whether the social media platform is solving people’s housing issues or helping to foment political action. But it does offer a window on a problem whose solutions are not in immediate view.

    The possibilities posted are tantalizing but often impractical — someone advertised a house swap: you get to stay in their Boulder, Colo. home for a few months in exchange for letting them stay in your Provincetown abode. Selfies are captioned with biographical information. One person is the proud owner of “a small deaf chihuahua”; another is a floral photographer; and, despite the boa he’s wearing in his picture, a third notes he is straight. Most are requests for housing. “Likes” often correspond to good looks.

    A handful of real estate brokers are in the group, along with people who were born and raised in Provincetown, year-round transplants, college students hungry for a job that will fund a big gay summer, and the occasional family hoping to move out here full-time. There are nearly 6,000 members (full disclosure: this writer is one of them and did find a room through the group).

    The group was founded in 2013 by Adam and Ben Berry, Provincetown residents who run the Peregrine Theatre Ensemble. It is limited to those seeking seasonal and year-round rentals, not weekly or monthly vacation stays. To join, all one must do is click a button and more or less correctly answer what year the Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown. (Hint: the answer is not 1492, though that is apparently a popular one.)

    Most groups of this kind — for Northampton, Providence, or Burlington, Vt. — function as standard informal marketplaces. But the Provincetown group has flair. The selfies, exclamation points, and sassy quips that make it different from most housing market groups could be chalked up to Provincetown’s small size and village vibe. Or they might arise from something trickier: the lack of housing on offer here.

    The group’s tone is more pleading than personal. In other housing groups, people post available units; in the Provincetown group, that doesn’t happen much. People present their cases and ask if there are units available. Then, usually gently, commenters respond: not really.

    Good Neighbors

    “Provincetown: Housing for Rent” reveals how neighbors helping neighbors can come up short. Joining the group can feel like sitting down at a restaurant with a very friendly wait staff but no kitchen.

    In her book Good Neighbors, Harvard professor Nancy Rosenblum writes about the image of America as a nation of people performing acts of neighborly kindness for one another. She writes that, while well-intentioned, this view can sour: “When government and politics disappear from view as they do, we are left with the not-so-innocuous fantasy of ungoverned reciprocity as the best and fully adequate society.”

    Rosenblum lives part-time in Truro. Since local government is, by nature, responsible and responsive to “property owners and not people looking for housing,” she says, she sees the Facebook group as “a good response to an impossible situation.”

    In mid-May, an unusual post cropped up in the Facebook group: a call to “organize a group of workers for housing rights in our beautiful little town.”

    The post was by Juniper James, a 34-year-old trans woman who, since 2016, has spent her summers working in Provincetown.

    “The local government is obviously more interested in tax revenue than they are in providing security for the local workforce,” James wrote in the post, “but if we work together we can effect change!”

    James spent the summer of 2019 living in Provincetown — in her car. This despite the fact that she was working two jobs, at Loveland and Pop + Dutch. “I was making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, and I still couldn’t swing it,” she said.

    She feels “weird” about relying on Facebook for community organizing. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she said. “Facebook creates a public forum, but the company now owns what everyone has said in that public forum. It’s disconcerting, but it’s also hard not to rely on it for communication.”

    ‘The Saddest Thing’

    Jennifer Cabral spends a lot of time on Facebook. Too much time, she admits. She says she’s not alone, though, especially in the winter. That’s when people here flock to Facebook for connection, she said.

    Cabral is the moderator for “Provincetown: Housing for Rent.” That means she has the ability to silence comments and add and remove users, and her posts are flagged with a special tag.

    Cabral, the daughter of the late Reggie and Meara Cabral, spent her summers as a young adult working odd jobs in town. She describes the housing crisis in Provincetown as “a bucket with holes in it.”

    “You try to patch the holes you can patch,” she said. “But it’s always going to be leaking. So, you have to always be filling it. You will never solve the housing problem. You can only tackle it and keep tackling it.”

    The Facebook group could be a patch. Cabral is glad the group exists — it has helped many people find housing — but she says it’s sad that the group exists in the lopsided way that it does, with people always asking for space and others rarely able to provide it.

    “Being in the group is like staring at this huge, gaping need,” she said.

    She paused for a while.

    “It’s so sad,” she said. “It really is. It’s the saddest thing.”

    Editor’s note: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Jennifer Cabral was born in Provincetown. She was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

     

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