Main Street in Falmouth, Mass.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The Cape Cod town of Falmouth, like many towns these days, has a surplus of closed big-box stores and other detritus, bordered by windy, gritty parking lots, left by Amazon’s assault on the brick-and-mortar world. The town, like most communities in New England, also has a very serious lack of affordable housing to buy or rent, made even more challenging by the fact that it’s also a summer-resort community.
So the town is now letting owners of business-zoned land in and near the downtown add up to 20 rental-housing units per acre, as long as it’s “affordable,’’ which generally means tenants paying no more than 30 percent of their gross income for housing.
Eric Turkington, a former state representative from Falmouth, reports in Commonwealth Magazine that the zoning change “has generated its first project: The owner of an auto repair shop on Main Street has submitted plans to replace it with a restaurant and 10 residential units. Further down the street, the owners of one of the big box stores with acres of asphalt is talking with the town about building a major rental housing development on their property.’’
