A crisis on the Cape — soaring housing prices have wreaked havoc on several towns there and the fallout is being felt in schools being forced to close and the cost of living has resulted in some families being priced out of living there altogether.
Officials are now racing to make changes. The Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates officially declared a housing crisis last week, citing the price of a single-family home rising more than 60 percent since 2019.
The lack of affordable housing makes recruitment for businesses and public safety difficult and has led to low enrollment in some schools, causing them to close. With most of Cape Cod fully developed, building affordable housing on the land that remains or providing low-interest loans for first-time homebuyers are also options.
“We have hundreds of thousands of dwellings on the cape that are sitting empty,” said Daniel Gessen of the Barnstable County Assembly. “Rewarding towns that are going out there and trying to produce multi-family housing or housing for working families or housing for municipal workers, maybe creating some financial incentive there. Maybe we can follow a successful model to incentivize home ownership and ability to live out the American Dream on the Cape.”
The assembly is forming a working group to propose housing policies as the next course of action.
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