Can Young People Afford To Live Here? - Editorial
The annual property values booklet was included in last week’s paper. Few could have missed it; it’s a big one and it’s very popular. We’ve published that section for many years and it has always been popular—so popular, in fact, that one year we made the mistake of only inserting the booklet in our subscribers’ newspapers (the thinking was that our subscribers are our most loyal customers and therefore should be rewarded). The backlash was less than pleasant, and we never did that again.
It is curious, though: what is it about the value of properties that people find so interesting?
Of course, there is curiosity, the “nosey neighbor effect” of wondering which house on your street is worth the most. Sure, there are many factors that go into valuations, some completely invisible to the casual observer—but that rarely matters, as what is interesting is to see how other homes in town stack up to yours.
That is, of course, assuming that you own a home, or property, or something. But for renters, young adults and other non-homeowners, property valuations can feel much more dismal and discouraging.
For the fun of it, we compared the recent valuations of randomly selected residential properties in each of Bourne’s villages to those of 2019, the time before COVID. In each instance, we found a property valuation increase of over 50 percent. Some properties saw increases as high as 69 percent over just a few years. This could have been luck—maybe we just happened to look at properties that are, in some tangible way, worth that much more since 2019—but that feels unlikely. The more plausible explanation—and this is no shocker—is that the housing market is out of control here on the Cape.
This year’s property valuations piqued the interest of the younger people in our newsroom, many of whom are relatively new to the Cape. It is worth noting that both Barnstable County and the Town of Bourne have a similar composition of young people—about 17 percent of residents are between ages 25 and 44. We wonder what the crossover is between this age group and the lower brackets of annual household income. For a young person just starting out, the increasing costs of housing may make establishing a home, career, family and life here on Cape Cod seem entirely out of the question.
The numbers, even from years past, make it clear: the annual household income needed to comfortably afford a home at the town’s median sale price, according to the Cape Cod Commission’s data from 2022, was $187,000. The average income, in comparison, was, in 2022 was $90,640—which makes sense with the median sale price of a home, assuming two household members are both bringing in the average income or higher. But, again, that is not the most likely scenario, especially if we are talking about young adults in the early or even middle stages of their career. The commission’s housing profile on Bourne says that average wages in the town’s largest employment industries “fall well below what is needed to affordably purchase a home at median sales prices,” with “affordably purchase” meaning that a household spends 30 percent or less on housing costs.
Like we said, there are a number of unseen factors that go into determining a property’s value, but that caveat surely matters little to the nearly 25 percent of households in Bourne bringing home less than $50,000 annually—which, by the way, is more than $6,000 less than what was determined as the annual household income needed to afford the median price of rent in Bourne.
So while leafing through the pages and gawking at the exorbitant values can be fun, it has a much more sobering effect when considered alongside the area’s demographics and the ever-widening wealth gap. If young people cannot afford to establish a life or start a family here, they will be left with no choice but to leave for a more affordable town, county, or state. And then what will become of the Cape’s future? We hope something changes before we find out.