IN THE COMING WEEKS, thousands of people from around the world will come to our islands, filling our streets, bars, restaurants, shops, and beaches – and putting enormous stress on our first responders.
But the biggest challenge facing our departments – the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office on Martha’s Vineyard and the Nantucket Police Department – isn’t from crime and crowds: it’s from the cost of housing. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are two of the most expensive places in America to buy or rent a home. Public safety officers can’t live a ferry ride away from the communities we are sworn to protect – and that is making it hard to attract and keep officers who then become a part of the community where we live and work.
It isn’t just the police officers and sheriff’s deputies; because of housing costs Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket can’t find and keep the kind of people who make a community work: nurses, teachers, waitstaff, retail help, nonprofit workers – all of them are finding it increasingly hard to live here, and that makes our economy increasingly hard to maintain. Nantucket Fire Chief Michael Cranson recently said two Island firefighters live off-island, and one who left was commuting from Lowell. Others work a second or third job to afford housing, which means they’re not always available to cover extra shifts or help with an incident.
At the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office, a state agency, starting salary is about $60,000, while the average price of a home on Martha’s Vineyard is $2 million and the average rent of an apartment, if you can find one, is $2,600 per month. We have been increasingly unable to retain or attract staff – including essential 911 communications personnel and highly trained public safety officers – because we cannot offer them a realistic opportunity to live in our community. This situation is untenable.
On Nantucket, the average price of a home is nearing $4 million. Visitors will spend $20,000 or more a week to rent a house – making a year-round rental for a police officer virtually impossible. Nantucket officers who leave for other police agencies on the mainland routinely cite housing as the primary reason for their decision.
It has become unrealistic that an officer who we hire now or that we have hired in the past few years will ever be able to own a home on the island — in many cases they can’t even find a year-round apartment to rent. Officers want to live here, and we need them to live here, but often, they just can’t stay. It has become increasingly challenging to retain newer officers on Nantucket for more than three or four years. Nantucket hired five officers in 2018 and not one is still here. In 2019 we hired seven new officers. Three of them remain.
Police officers should be a part of the community they serve, where they can develop strong ties with schools, civic groups, businesses, and non-profits. These strong relationships are the foundation of effective community policing efforts. For those of us on the islands, residency requirements are necessary to ensure that emergency responders are rapidly available for emergency events. On the islands, our municipal mutual aid partners are a boat or a plane ride away. Depending on weather, that response may take hours. Typically, the critical time where life-saving efforts are needed should come in the first few minutes of an event as it unfolds. An immediate public safety response is paramount.
There is a solution in front of the Legislature right now, a solution proposed by the Healey administration’s housing bond bill that will allow us to preserve and build year-round housing. A small transfer fee on the sale of luxury real estate – overwhelmingly supported by the voters of both islands — will create substantial annual revenues to provide financial assistance for new developments that serve the “missing middle,” funding the purchase of existing inventory to serve year-rounders, creating worker housing, and providing financial assistance to develop accessory dwelling units, like guest houses, garage apartments, or even small units attached to a main house. These measures and more will go a long way to ensuring we can both attract the best and brightest to build careers in public safety and grow our community.
We cannot wait any longer to ensure that the people who protect our communities can afford to live where they work. This is a critical need to support a future with a focus on high quality, professional, community-oriented public safety services.
Robert Ogden is sheriff of Dukes County. Joy Kasper is Nantucket chief of police.
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