More than a half century of exclusionary zoning has fundamentally altered community character in ways that are hard to understand.  One planning project on Cape Cod is working hard to balance the conflicts between what history says places were really like, what’s been built since the ‘70s, and the housing needs of people today.

We’ve talked a lot about housing policy and what needs to happen in the Commonwealth’s bigger towns and cities. But more than 30% of Massachusetts’ towns and cities have less than 10,000 residents (making up more than 10% of the overall population) and they have almost as many issues with housing availability and affordability for young families as bigger towns and cities.  But these rural communities have their own unique problems. Aging populations have led to significantly falling school enrollments and numbers of working-age people. They want to maintain agricultural land and open space that is often the backbone of their economies. They have concerns about the viability of their tax bases to pay for basic services.

In 2022, the Town of Wellfleet, aware of these and related concerns about housing for the workers critical to businesses, decided to buy Maurice’s Campground, a 21.5 acre site right on Route 6.  Maurice’s currently provides 200 RV sites as well as tent sites, cabins and cottages and was specifically designated by the town’s Housing Plan as the place to create homes for young working families and seasonal workers who are priced out of town.

And while there was general agreement that this already developed land, for which the town will have water and sewer capacity under current plans, was where growth should happen, many other conflicts remained.  How many units?  Who should live there?  What should it look like?  How tall is too tall?

To help them, the town hired Studio G Architects.  The team led by Gail Sullivan worked closely with a broad range of community members to understand hopes and concerns and how to move forward.  They dug into research and reports, interviewed officials and held open community meetings which, in the end, led to a detailed plan to provide approximately 250 year-round homes, plus 80-90 seasonal worker beds, commercial space and parking, as well as a range of sustainable and smart development goals like Passive House construction, on-site renewable energy and minimizing light pollution.

They looked at a range of different layouts, using different Cape-specific historical precedents and building types.  They navigated community concerns about density, housing types and the trade-offs between building height and lot coverage.  In the end Studio G settled on plans rooted in traditional Cape villages, with large setbacks and taller buildings as far from neighbors as possible.

This was good work based on community-defined needs and concerns but, not surprisingly, not everyone is happy.  Immediate neighbors are concerned about there being too many units, height and traffic, which admittedly is bad on Route 6 in the summer; others are more concerned about local preference.  The usual issues you’d expect.

And, of course, community character came up.  People expressed deeply held love of the Cape’s rural character, which is written into law through the Cape Cod Commission.  But what is community character in a place like Cape Cod which was historically made up of two types of housing – widely separated farmhouses and compact villages?

The villages, which is what most people seem to be referring to, were made up of houses surrounding an open space and anchored by a community building like a church or a town hall.  These are home to both residential and commercial uses, a variety of building sizes and heights, almost always including a few taller, larger buildings like churches and town halls where the community gathered.  They were connected to the surrounding farms by roads, not at the end of a cul-de-sac.  They were for everyone.

But this is not where most Cape Codders live, an area which has grown from 96,817 people in 1970 to 228,996 in 2020.  These additional 132,000 people don’t live in farmhouses or villages.  They live in single-family homes or townhouses built on large lots in subdivisions as required by the zoning laws put in place during the ‘70s.

It seems to me that the conflict here is not between the historic, village-centered development patterns and new, compact developments like the one proposed for Maurice’s Campground.  It’s between what I’ve come to think of as the rural sprawl of single-family homes on big, subdivided lots versus the traditional, dense, mixed-use village centers like the one in Wellfleet that I’ve always loved.

The Cape’s true historic development pattern, like what we love about New England, is not what was built over the last 70 years; it’s what came before. I think the Town and Studio G got this one right.  Let’s see how it develops.