Riverbrook resident enjoying her holiday shopping spree gift. Thanks to all who donated. More photos below.

The Case for a 'Seasonal Community' Designation

by Patrick White

One of the provisions of Massachusetts' recently passed Affordable Homes Act is the creation of a 'seasonal community' designation for municipalities in Berkshire County as well as the Cape and Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard Islands.

Berkshire municipalities with 40% or more seasonal residential homeownership automatically qualify for this designation. Towns so designated must accept this designation via a vote at a Town Meeting. Other municipalities, with lower percentages but in the designated counties, can vote to apply for the designation to the Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities, who then can use his discretion to approve or deny them.

There are a number of benefits and two requirements for a municipality that accepts this designation. The benefits include:

• The ability to preference municipal employees in affordable housing opportunities.
• The expectation of grant funding available only to seasonal communities.
• An increase in the residential exemption tax classification option from a maximum of 35% to 50% (no Berkshire municipalities have adopted this option).

Additionally, there are two new bylaw requirements to municipalities who accept this designation:

• A bylaw allowing undersized lots to be developed for year-round housing.
• A bylaw allowing tiny homes to be allowed for year-round housing.

I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to make the case why all Berkshire County towns should quickly put in place a strategy to be so designated.

First, let's discuss with the requirements: bylaws around housing production for full-time residents.

Local Opposition

In Stockbridge at a recent Planning Board meeting, the Chair spoke with some derision concerning the tiny homes requirement. I frankly find opposition to tiny homes downright bizarre.

First, tiny homes are far more green than conventional ones. Many are net zero, meaning they use no net energy to heat or cool. In a county worried about losing forest and farmland to solar arrays, focusing on demand reduction helps to protect our natural resources and landscapes from the need to produce energy. Second, I point out that if you want to live in a tiny home, you should be able to. How about we keep the government out of your personal land use decisions around how small a home you can choose to live in? Third, many of us who have lived in cities started off in small apartments with lofts about the size of tiny homes. With the absolute crisis we face in housing for young people, why would you take a unit that might cost less than $50,000 off the board, a price point for housing that's within the reach of the many single young folks in the 18-30 age range?

I suggest any Planning Board member who is still not convinced, write bylaws for tiny homes and undersized lots that preserve the onerous restrictions of frontage, front and side setbacks, mass, and footprint that have been used for decades to limit housing production. Limit their applicability to a handful of zones. Maybe you can add some gates while you are at it. Personally, I believe this would serve neither the town's needs nor interests. We should encourage smaller homes and housing production on undersized lots, both of which by statute would be limited to full-time residents. The point I am making is that concerns over the statute's bylaw requirements are a red herring. We have lots of options.

Seasonal Communities: Incredible Benefits

I am going to focus on two clear benefits that give municipal leaders new tools to ensure their communities remain vibrant.

The first is the provision to allow municipal employee preference in subsidized housing decisions. That means teachers, administrators, aides, and others who work at local schools. It means, police, fire, and emergency medical professionals. It means highway, water, and sewer workers. It means town hall administrative staff. Having homes these folks can afford helps keep these folks in your communities. It is especially ironic to me, living in the town that Norman Rockwell called home, a man whose celebration of small-time life and these types of careers is iconic, that some here wouldn't recognize the value of preserving the essence of small-town life.

The second though, as an economist, is equally compelling: the money. The state has already indicated that there will be grants available for subsidized housing available to designated seasonal communities. That may not be all. When it comes to bridge and highway funds, one can make a compelling argument that seasonal communities deserve a bigger slice of the pie, since the volume of traffic we get with visitors far exceeds what would be normal based on our census populations. Stockbridge, for example, gets around a million visitors per year, driven by attractions such as Tanglewood, Norman Rockwell Museum, and Naumkeag. That dwarfs the impact on our infrastructure from the less than 2,000 census-population residents that count towards the component of state bridge and highway funds we receive (the other component being road miles).

All you have to do is watch the news to see that the current thinking in Washington is to severely reduce federal government spending. The days of massive trillion-dollar investments in infrastructure from legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act, flowing from Washington to Boston to places like the Berkshires, is done, at least for now. It's going to be harder to compete for funding. How about we give ourselves every advantage we can as we compete for these resources?

Next Steps

For the eight towns who received the initial designation, all we have to do is accept the designation at our May annual town meetings. For communities that have yet to be designated, I strongly recommend that select boards from towns such as Sheffield, Egremont, Great Barrington, West Stockbridge, and Lenox, quickly develop a plan to apply for the designation and get it passed at town meeting. We will be far more effective in securing state funding as a region than we will be as individual towns. Get the resolutions requesting designation on your May town meetings, and work through Tom Matuszko of Berkshire Regional Planning and Jonathan Butler of 1Berkshire, our designated representatives for Seasonal Communities, to best position your towns for an uncertain and unsettled future.

Housing and Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is one measure of economic output. Massachusetts generates approximately $615 billion in economic activity annually. The Berkshires represents just 1.18% of the state's GDP. The Cape and Islands generates 2.86% of the state total. These are the two regions whose municipalities can be designated as seasonal communities.

The state tracks the aggregate assessed value of all real estate per municipality. It is called Equalized Values (EQV). Massachusetts has almost $1.6 trillion in real estate values. The Berkshires represents just 1.34% of the state's real estate value. In contrast, the Cape and Islands together represent over 10% of the real estate values for the entire state.

If you think real estate prices are out of whack in the Berkshires, these statistics show how it is actually far worse for the Cape and Islands. Kudos to Jonathan Butler and Tom Matuszko for getting the Berkshires designated with the Cape and Islands in the Seasonal Communities component of Affordable Homes Act. It groups us with this much larger economic block for which this legislation was primarily targeted.

Finally, just read the Cape Cod Times or any of the smaller Cape newspapers or blogs to get a sense of how tourism and its corresponding impacts on the housing market have wreaked havoc on municipalities' ability to function. It's gotten nearly impossible for some of these communities to hire police, fire, EMTs, and other municipal employees because of the stresses surrounding housing affordability. Berkshire communities still have time to learn the ample lessons from the Cape and Islands and put in place strategies to mitigate these stresses. How about we do that?