What cities and vacation towns have in common

It's more than walkability, it's unaffordability

I’m wrapping up summer this week on Eastern Long Island. It’s a beautiful region and I’ve been reflecting on my feelings about seasonal communities and their relationship to big cities.

The walkability of many resort towns, the old main streets, the pre-zoning housing that allowed for an array of housing sizes and types invite comparison to the things we love about cities, even if the scale is so different.

Ryan Puzcyki who writes the City of Yes Substack notes the beauty of Edgartown in Martha’s Vineyard as one example:

“Notice how the buildings hug the street, inviting in customers and passersby, without overwhelming it. The street is narrow, encouraging cars to slow down while allowing people to walk or bike in relative safety… you’ll find a mix of historic homes, offices, civic buildings, restaurants, boutiques, and churches, all connected by lovely brick sidewalks. It’s the kind of place that fosters amity and community…Urbanism is not about building skyscrapers everywhere, or cramming people into micro-apartments, or forcing people to live within a 15-minute prison. Rather, it’s about creating places in which people can gather, connect, and build full and flourishing lives—places where people actually want to be.”

For people who actually love skyscrapers and microapartments, it can be comforting to realize there’s something in common between city neighborhoods and little main streets: places that are authentic to their environment and centered around people and not cars.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that some people are leaving their primary homes in cities behind to relocate full time to areas that were once just seasonal communities. Two years after the pandemic started, Cape Cod was the fastest growing county in Massachusetts.

But these small towns also have another thing in common with big cities: a lack of affordability. In many of these communities, essential workers can’t afford to live near the city halls, schools, firehouses, police stations, and hospitals where they need to show up every day. These communities also are subject to the kind of price gouging that occurs when there are fewer amenities in healthy competition.

And yet the solutions for small towns may end up being completely different than what works for cities. In places like Austin and Dallas, a major increase in housing supply has helped drive down housing prices. By contrast, a YIMBY effort to add more housing in small towns may end up just creating more opportunities for wealthy second homeowners or investors. Land is often so expensive there’s no way to create naturally affordable housing without some kind of government intervention.