Letter: Campground tests Westport’s wish to remain rural

Posted 1/30/19

To the editor:

The recent letter to Shorelines from the owner of a 30-acre trailer campground issuing a public plea for the town to buy his land was a bit awkward to read, perhaps because it’s …

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Letter: Campground tests Westport’s wish to remain rural

Posted

To the editor:

The recent letter to Shorelines from the owner of a 30-acre trailer campground issuing a public plea for the town to buy his land was a bit awkward to read, perhaps because it’s hard to issue a shakedown with an apologetic tone.  I have no reason to believe that his intentions aren’t as stated: that he’d love to donate the land to the town, but instead wants the money.  Perhaps he — like many in town — is concerned with preserving Westport’s rural character. 

But Westport’s rural character will be undone precisely by this “tragedy of the commons” (a term in social science used to describe a situation where a shared resource is depleted when individual users — acting on their own self-interest — behave contrarily to the common good by depleting or spoiling that resource). 

In Westport, the shared resource is rural character brought by undeveloped land.  But it seems that while people want a rural town in theory, they still want to sell their land to the highest bidder. At least the camp owner says he’ll give the town a “deal”.  But does Westport need to buy this land with taxpayer money? For tennis courts? Remember this was a town that didn’t even want to pay for 500 feet of sidewalks for pedestrian safety in Central Village!

While Westport is not urban, indeed the force of gentrification is at play here. Normally gentrification (now a dirty word among liberals) is more often used to describe when urban dwellers can’t afford to live in the neighborhood they grew up in because “all the yuppies and hipsters have driven up real estate prices”.  Boo hoo, I say.  The same reality from a slightly different angle: the urban locals simply failed to keep up with the progress happening around them; their standard of living didn’t decline, rather, everyone else’s standard of living rose around them.  It’s not the world’s fault that they now feel disenfranchised; it’s theirs for being complacent and not keeping up with the times. 

This is the tragedy of Westport; the camp owner can’t resist what others will now pay him for his land. So too will the town as a whole no longer be able to effectively afford its collective wealth of “iconic vistas” if landowners continue to cash out to the force of gentrification.   There are well-intentioned conservation groups that try to buy the land from the sellouts — a good example is the beautiful farm field on Main Road between Partners Store and Westport Lobster.  But this approach is expensive, and effectively asks private donors to subsidize the sellouts by creating a market for them to sell into.  And — importantly — this forces the remaining taxpayers to subsidize the forgone tax revenue when the property becomes tax-free conservation land.  Purchasing land for conservation to keep it out of the hands of McMansion subdivision developers treats the symptom, not the problem, and isn’t sustainable.   

We’re all very quick to blame both the developers and the newcomers who buy the houses that they build, but apparently there’s no shame in being a sellout.  Perhaps there should be.  Or, if we can’t count on longtime residents to be good stewards of the town’s rural character, maybe a better way is to regulate against development by a simple change to a zoning law, e.g., all new single-family construction needs a minimum 10-acre lot size.  With such a regulation, a 30-acre parcel looks like a three-house flip to a McMansion developer, not a 30-house opportunity … he’ll drive right by onto Tiverton or Dartmouth and Westport remains rural. 

This would be unfortunate for those like the camp seller who counted on cashing out, but had this law been in place already he wouldn’t have been counting on his payout in the first place.  I’m unsure of the mechanism to introduce this bylaw, zoning restriction, whatever it would need to be.  But it stands to reason that the town where the local history group tells you if and when you can remodel your house, some sort of workaround to state-level exclusionary housing policies can be found, and this could be put to a vote for a town-wide decision and ratification by the town’s collective intent.  For example, expand the Historical Commission’s demolition delay authority from one year to five years. 

If Westport votes for such a measure, then it does indeed want to be a rural town.  If it does not, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Or, let it be revealed that it is actually not the town’s true preference to remain rural.  Right now, it appears that Westport wants to remain rural … but only as long as somebody else is going to pay for it.

John Yorick

Still Rural Westport

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Mike Rego has worked at East Bay Newspapers since 2001, helping the company launch The Westport Shorelines. He soon after became a Sports Editor, spending the next 10-plus years in that role before taking over as editor of The East Providence Post in February of 2012. To contact Mike about The Post or to submit information, suggest story ideas or photo opportunities, etc. in East Providence, email mrego@eastbaymediagroup.com.