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Voters and officials in bucolic Truro are subjecting a small affordable housing development to intense scrutiny – and unusually strong language.
There may be no region of the Bay State in more dire need of affordable housing than Cape Cod.
For years there has been a shortage of affordable rentals to support the legions of low-paid service workers who make the Cape’s tourism economy tick.
The Cape is a magnet for both tourists from around the country looking to rent a house for a week or two in the summer, as well as for more affluent second–home buyers and retirees who bid up prices of even ordinary ranches.
So, the exhaustive review by Truro officials of a measly 39-unit housing project, and the downright vicious rhetoric of some of the project’s opponents, is truly inexplicable.
40 Units on 4 Acres
Ted Malone, a well-regarded affordable housing developer and president of Community Housing Resource Inc., first proposed the Cloverleaf project back in 2018 on Route 6 near the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Truro officials acquired the land, previously slated for a highway interchange – hence the name – through a state part program aimed at selling surplus land to for new, lower-cost housing.
But what should have been a slam dunk has degenerated through an endless slog through town bureaucracy.
The town’s select board gave a green light to the project in early 2019, but that appears to have simply been the starting gun for every self-important town official and board to pile on.
Eighteen months later, the zoning, planning and health boards are still hashing over Malone’s plans for the Cloverleaf although one of the main sticking points, the proposed septic system, finally appears headed for resolution.
But in the meantime, the developer has missed the deadline to apply for crucial state funding for the project, meaning it will now be 2022 before construction can start, at the earliest.
And whatever concessions Malone makes, it is unlikely to appease his critics. Despite a fine record of building badly needed affordable apartments in Provincetown, and yes, in Truro on a previous project, the developer has found himself the victim of some remarkably vicious attacks.
While a proposal to build 40 apartments on a 4-acre site wouldn’t be seen as anything out of the ordinary in Boston – where very tall towers have been erected on smaller footprints – it apparently conjures up images of Nazi Germany for one former Truro building inspector.
In a letter to the town’s ZBA, Stephen Williams, the town’s building inspector in the mid-1980s, called out the “concentration-camp like densities of this ‘duplex disaster.”
A Tragedy for Workers
At least Williams no longer represents the town.
The same can’t be said for Truro Planning Board member Peter Herridge, who has been critical of the project’s planned septic system and who referred to the developer, in an interview with The Provincetown Independent, as a “little scumbag.”
“This little scumbag will try to sleaze in any way that makes him money and this system will require constant and expensive maintenance, which, of course, will be done in the crummiest and cheapest way possible,” Herridge told the Independent.
Of course, I’m sure the Malone, the would-be developer here, has heard that and worse. You have pretty thick skin to build affordable housing in NIMBY Massachusetts.
But the delay in this frankly modest and desperately needed apartment project is a tragedy for the legions of working-class cleaners, cooks, waiters and laborers who are surfing on friends’ couches or living in other truly substandard conditions.
A case in point is none other than the Truro Motor Inn, which has become the year-round home to dozens of families and which the town has targeted for closure because of septic system issues.
The rent doesn’t come cheap there – $800 to $1,400 a month – but residents have told local reporters it’s all they can find.
Scott Van Voorhis
We’ll give the last word here to state Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro, who recently came out swinging in support of the project, calling upon Truro to “reverse decades of racial injustice here on Cape Cod” and move the Cloverleaf forward.
“The arguments for halting the project are troubling,” Cyr wrote in an op-ed in The Provincetown Independent. “If they had any basis, I’d consider the merits. But they don’t, so I’ll call them what they are: procedural tactics designed to perpetuate racial and class inequities under a thinly veiled guise of moderation and caution. It’s a tired playbook that’s worked too well for too long.”
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
