2023 Life Logs, Day 95: Attainable Housing in Falmouth
Date: Wednesday, April 5, 2023
Weather: Overcast with Periods of Sprinkles; High 49, Low 43 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
My day got off on the wrong foot. I forgot I had a follow-up appointment with my pain management doctor about my recent spinal epidural, so I was relaxing a little before going to remove more varnish from Eider. When my phone reminded me that I had 15 minutes to get to my appointment, I had to scramble to get to North Falmouth on time. If I had remembered I had that appointment and planned right, I could have stopped at the boat on my way home. But because I had to leave so quickly, I didn’t have everything I needed to do the boat work. And by the time I got home and remembered other things I needed to do, it was too late to go to the boat and get back home in time to get ready for my Public Policy meeting this afternoon. So the boat work was put off until tomorrow morning.
The good thing about today was that the Public Policy meeting about affordable or attainable housing that I was chairing was a success. I had reached out to friends who are not in the Public Policy group to come this afternoon because so many of our members couldn’t come. The friends came through and our invited speaker, Michael Kasparian of the Falmouth Chamber of Commerce, gave a great presentation. I’ve written previously about how difficult it is find a rental in this town and I learned why this afternoon. The rule of thumb is that 30 percent of housing in a community should be rentals. Falmouth has 6 percent. And according to Michael, increasing the number of rentals is the first goal that needs to be reached. Right now we have a shortage of workers in all areas from service workers to scientists to surgeons because no one other than retirees can afford to move here. And at the current rate, by 2030, 65 percent of the people in Falmouth will be over 70. It is a huge problem to tackle that is going to take the cooperation and creative ideas of everyone in the community. In order to get cooperation, everyone needs to be informed. Hopefully our little meeting today was a tiny baby step in informing a few community members of the problem.
