It certainly feels like a different sort of June in this Outer Cape town. Everyone has a story of pandemic-related crowding: more people at the beach, more people walking dogs, more cars on the back roads. Unprecedented traffic on Route 6. What happened to our sleepy June respite before the seasonal onslaught?
And then there are the stories of the housing market gone around the bend.
What’s going on? Are we in the middle of Wellfleet’s latest revolution?
A staple of summer romance is the return to the same old summer cottage, the resumption of ancient summer patterns and rituals, immersion in the same old pond or favorite beach. Because Wellfleet’s downtown looks roughly like old photos of it, and because two-thirds of us is immutable (more or less) National Seashore, we like to think that, with notable exceptions (how did the glorification of funky old Cumby’s get by the local zoning people?) we are the same charming, unchanging Wellfleet we’ve always been.
But this cherished concept of a pure and unchanging essence of Wellfleet still here to be accessed by its true lovers is an illusion.
Ten years or so ago in this space I counted the following revolutions of Wellfleet, each one of which left our town radically transformed.
> We become a self-conscious tourist destination. For our first two centuries we were a town like any other town, going about our business. And then, starting in the late 19th century, first with the help of railroads, then cars and roads, we came to know ourselves as a Charming Tourist Destination, and, like post-innocence Adam and Eve, we’ve never been the same since.
> Our town becomes a park. The advent of the National Seashore in 1960, in freezing change in two-thirds of town, was perhaps the biggest change of all, transforming our development and sense of ourselves forever.
> We become a de facto suburb. Until just a few decades back, we were a self-sufficient, full-service town. But for some decades we’ve done our serious food and other shopping in Orleans, if not Hyannis. We have effectively become a dependent suburb masquerading as a small town.
> The Washashore invasion. At some point in the 70s (just a guess)we became a town most of whose citizens had been born elsewhere.
> We get plugged in. The railroad and automobile only slowly eroded Wellfleet’s remoteness. Until the 1990s there was still only sketchy TV reception. Then came cable and internet, making us part of the world in a way unimaginable only a couple of decades ago.
> We become a function of the second home market. Starting in the 1980s, our easy-living, affordable town has become a town in which, a victim of our loveableness, “affordable housing” is an endangered species and a necessary rallying cry.
That’s six revolutions. And that’s not counting the first and most profound one, the 17th century European invasion.
The question of the moment: are we in the middle of a new revolution which, looking back some years from now, we will identify as the sea change wrought by the covid-19 pandemic?
Will our year-round population, stable for decades at around 3000, (and not much more than our mid-19th century high point), take an unprecedented jump to, say, 5000?
What is the radical jump in real estate prices already doing to the quality of life?
Looking for something less subjective than complaints and anecdotes of pre-summer crowding , I spoke to the town’s assessor. As for an increase in our population, she said she had been busy in recent months signing up erstwhile secondhome owners as residents. No telling, though, how many of these are temporary moves to ride out the pandemic and how many people who, though they may have come as refugees from urban covid, have discovered they like it here.
She was worried that if the percentage of houses lived in fulltime gets to 50%, the newly enacted Residential Tax Exemption as a break for locals wouldn’t make financial sense.
I asked the town clerk: would the annual town report show a significant increase in our population? Probably not until the 2021 report comes out next year.
Nothing conclusive about longterm increase in school enrollments, according to the woman who answered the phone. A few pandemic-related enrollments for the past year but nothing at this point about possible longterm increases (to make better use of a building enlarged in the 90s to accommodate the growing population of those days, since when enrollments have steadily fallen).
So other than the shocking real estate market, at this point there’s not much in the way of hard evidence. Meanwhile, it sure does feel like a different sort of June here in this town—and presumably other Cape towns as well.
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