As Martha's Vineyard's food pantry entered the last minutes of the day, a woman in a Boston Red Socks rushed through the door.
The woman was greeted by the pantry director. After 18 years of living on the island, the woman's rent had suddenly shot up, and Brown had to log the details into her system.
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I didn't think it was true. The woman said that she had been doubled. I have never seen things like this before.
Brown said this summer was the worst he had ever seen.
Brown didn't mention that she knew the story. She and her son had moved three times in the last six months. She didn't know where they were going to live when school started. Finding a year-round rental on the Vineyard was no longer possible.
If you know anyone who has a year-round job. Her voice went quiet.
Rents in South Florida are higher this summer than they were last year, according to data.
The fan shook her head after considering for a second.
She said she did not. I will keep an ear out.
Most people don't know that this is the part of Martha's Vineyard. An island known for its opulence and natural beauty, a playground for presidents and celebrities, is kept afloat by workers for whom America's housing crisis is not an occurrence. This is it.
The lack of affordable housing on the Vineyard had pushed it to a breaking point before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent two planes full of asylum seekers to the summer haven.
Schools have a hard time staffing classrooms. People who have lived on the island for a long time have been forced to leave. Government workers and firefighters can't afford to stay in their hometowns. People juggling two, three, even four service industry jobs say they live each month knowing they are one rent hike away from moving into their cars or tents.
Brown is the island's neediest, including its growing population of senior citizens.
In cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans and Austin, where short-term rentals and investor home buyers have overtaken the housing market, this hollowing out is nothing new. The housing crisis on the Vineyard is not just a commute issue.
Laura Silber is the leader of the Coalition to create the Martha's Vineyard Housing Bank, which won support for a new fund for affordable housing. If you don't have municipal workers, if you don't have teachers, if you don't have emergency workers, how does a community survive?
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Martha's Vineyard is a 96- square-mile land mass in the winter. The tourism industry's hold on rental properties loosens as families who live here year-round move into more spacious winter homes. The Martha's Vineyard Commission says that only half of the island's homes are occupied all year.
The "island shuffle" kicks into high gear during the thaw. Housing can mean anything from a shack with no kitchen or flushable toilet to a camper van or a room in someone else's home when you move into a summer rental. The island's two-lane roads are jam-packed with cars from New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The Vineyard's lone airport is the third-busiest in New England.
"Because the island shuffle is so ingrained in the culture of the Vineyard, we didn't recognize it for what it was - housing insecurity - because it was just part of life." There isn't anything left to shuffle to.
Five years ago, Brown moved to the island. She said that during the busiest months she could find a place to stay for her and her son. Sometimes they stay in a house for only a few days when they are moving.
In resort towns, beach communities and rural destinations around the country, there has been an emergency. The deeper the problem is, the more remote the place is.
Investment properties and short-term rentals have been allowed to flourish on Martha's Vineyard because policymakers have chronically underinvested in affordable housing. It is more than 10 years late to confront its housing crisis and it is not moving fast enough to close the gap.
According to the Martha's Vineyard Commission, the amount of housing on the island has grown over the last seven years. The vacation rental market devoured any progress. The number of units that were occupied year-round dropped by more than 8 percent.
Things got worse in 2020 because of the covid-19 Pandemic. The island has a salty air and tree lined neighborhoods. Some people who already own property moved to winter housing. According to the State House News Service, the median cost of a house was over one million dollars in April. Home prices increased in the last year.
Silber is from the housing bank coalition. She said that the Vineyard needs to get back the housing that has been lost to the investment and short-term rental market.
Doctors can't afford to stay here. Martha's Vineyard Hospital, the largest employer on the island and home to its only emergency room, has been without a full staff for months. During the busy summer months, when the population swells from 20,000 to 100,000, the CEO offered 19 jobs to doctors, nurses and other workers.
The people were turned down.
One of my nurses living in a one-bedroom apartment was evicted when rents doubled to $6,000 a month. "He said that."
None of the changes advocated by advocates have been enacted island-wide. A housing bank, a place to store money collected from large real estate deals that would fund affordable housing, was approved by the Vineyard's six towns earlier this year. The state needs to give local governments the power to impose real-estate transfer fees.
The legislature didn't pass a measure last session. State lawmakers are going to push one through.
It's surrounded by water. Jim Feiner is a real estate broker and chairman of the housing committee in the town of Chilmark who advocated for the adoption of the housing bank. If we want our community to survive, we need to be proactive.
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Many businesses on the Vineyard have had to deal with the housing crisis directly.
"We had to come up with something new," he said.
In order to provide subsidized housing for workers, the hospital has leased about two dozen dormitory-style bedrooms. There is much more that needs to be done. It will take more than two years for anyone to be able to live in the property that the hospital is buying in Edgartown.
I didn't come here to build real estate. I came here to care for the patients. "He said that." For a wide range of businesses on the island, the choice is between house workers or not.
One of the year-round workers at the Ritz, a dive in downtown Oak Bluffs, is a native of the island who lives in a loft owned by his boss.
Roberts, who has been working since he graduated from high school, juggles a side hustle and a music career with two full-time jobs, one of which is at the bar at the Ritz. He works so he can stay on the island to help his mom. He wants to avoid the fate that many of his peers have experienced. The people who stayed have had a hard time moving out of their parents homes.
During the high season, when rent can go for more than that per week, the cost of the loft is almost extinct.
He acknowledged that the setup creates a power deficit.
Roberts lost his apartment if he left the job. The vice president of the Martha's Vineyard Community Services board says that he doesn't have the freedom to move around. I don't think employer-based housing is a good solution.
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Brown was told that she would have a place to live when she was hired as a chef at the hotel. She realized the accommodations wouldn't work for her and her child.
The kids were smoking and drinking and were staying up until 2 a.m. I had to start searching.
Brown and Carron have been living in different places for more than a year. Carron asked how many times they've moved since arriving on the Vineyard.
He said recently that the moving starts to get annoying after a while. You get use to it.
Brown contemplated boarding the ferry to the mainland in her lowest moments. She lost her kitchen job during the Pandemic. They felt miserable.
She said it was a nightmare when they returned to the island after three years.
Brown was asked to return to run the island's food bank because of her experience in kitchens and as a social worker. She said yes because she saw it as divine intervention.
Many of the people served by the pantry are senior citizens, low-income workers, immigrants and families with children. Martha's Vineyard Community Services says that more than a third of the Vineyard's full-time residents are 65 years of age or older.
She sees her work as a call. She shows up on her days off, puts in produce orders from home, and answers work calls after dark. A woman who has been with Brown for a long time calls each night to pray.
People living in tents in the state forest have been fed by Brown on her weekly food delivery. Brown said that one senior client spends her summer months living in a chicken coop so she can rent out the main house for the rest of the year.
Brown sees the island as a place where her son can run around with friends or bike on his own. She doesn't have to worry about the violence that happens to Black boys in America as much. Here, her son is free to be who he is, a soft spoken ninth-grader who helps seniors with their groceries and volunteers at the food bank after school, who loves video games and rolls his eyes when his mom tells him to stop watching YouTube videos with so much swearing.
I ask him if he wants to stay when we're moving again. Brown made a statement.
It was time to move again by August 2nd. The Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association's board of directors allowed Brown to sublet a cottage for a maximum of a month and a half. The board denied her request for an extension.
Despite posting pleas on social media, putting her name on affordable-housing wait lists, and exhausting her network of friends, colleagues and even clients, Brown's only housing option was to accept a weeklong plant-sitting gig at a friend's house She was going to take Carron on a road trip after that. It was more than a break. They could have nowhere to live if they stayed.
Brown's return date came to her mind as she planned their journey, a stop to visit family in Maryland and a trip to Universal Studios.
She said that she needed to pray that something would be ready by that time.
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Pit islanders are against islanders in the shortage of housing.
In the spring, DiGiacomo discovered her landlord was putting his Vineyard Haven house and detached in-law unit up for sale. It was bought by a company that plans to turn it into workforce housing.
"My first thought was, 'I'm going to lose my housing,' " said DiGiacomo, a kindergarten teacher who has taught on the Vineyard for two decades. I realized that I would lose my people, my tribe, and my sense of place.
She raised her child in Vineyard Haven and went on to work as a house cleaner, artisan and waitress. She imagined herself being as old as she was when she fed the cats and planned on retiring and welcoming her daughter home for the holidays.
DiGiacomo applied for teacher licenses in other states. She sent a query into the ether, asking where to go at 60. If she can hold on for five more years, her pension would increase by 75 percent.
She said that she wasn't thinking much until she did the math.
After DiGiacomo was featured in a June Martha's Vineyard Times story on the island's attrition of teachers, a concerned reader offered her a one-year lease on a 300- square foot basement apartment.
DiGiacomo said that the only reason he has housing is because of charity.
During the last weeks of the summer, DiGiacomo gave up some of her possessions. She gave away her dining room table and sold her Tiffany-style lamp. She kept repeating the "It's just stuff" slogan between breaths.
This is where I would like to be. DiGiacomo's lease expires next summer. I hope that God will allow me to stay.
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Brown was in Florida when she got the phone call. The six week extension was approved by the camp meeting association.
Brown was happy. She and Carron were able to return to the Oak Bluffs cottage at the end of the season. It meant a place to live for a long time.
She repeated a promise he had made before, as she and Carron loaded the car with her clothes and suitcases. One Brown is unsure if she can keep it.
She told the baby not to worry. Soon, we will find a year-round.
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