Gentrifying Maine

The New York Times takes a look and vanishing "working waterfront" spaces in Maine. The state has a very long coastline, but apparently only a small proportion of it is suitable for the docks and so forth that fishermen need and more and more of that is getting bought up for real estate development. That trend's been going on for a while, but the Times reports that it's now pushing all the way into the remote parts of the state east of Bar Habor.

My family has a summer home on the coast in Brooklin, Maine so I guess we're part of the problem. This kind of thing ends up being somewhat more paradoxical than your urban gentrification scenarios since the working fishing operations and so forth are, at least in my opinion, an integral part of coastal Maine's considerable charm. On the other hand, that reality may create a reasonable policy rationale for taking action to protect the industry.

Comments

I wonder if Matt has been doing some editing on Wikipedia. I found this under famous residents. Notice the last sentence:

One of Brooklin's best known residents was E.B. "Andy" White author of "Charlotte's Web," "The Trumpet of the Swan" and "Stuart Little" and co-authored "The Elements of Style" with William Strunk. White was a long-time writer for The New Yorker. He and his wife, Katherine S. White, a founding editor of The New Yorker, are both buried in a Brooklin cemetery. James Russell Wiggins, onetime publisher of the Washington Post and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, lived for many years in Brooklin. Other notable residents of the past include Emily Greene Balch, co-winner of the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize, and the geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell. Mathematician Oswald Veblen was in Brooklin when he died. Novelist and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias owns a summer home in Brooklin.

Posted by This Machine Kills Fascists | March 25, 2007 11:22 PM

My father's parents had a summer house up on the coast in Maine. His mischling father would spend most of the days getting loaded presumably to forget about the fact that he had married a probable lesbian who would only give a single child while his mother treated him like some kind of boy servant. Decades later (after his father had drank himself to death) his mother was still treating him like some kind of boy servant.

Posted by Linus | March 25, 2007 11:25 PM

Uh, thanks for sharing, Linus. I guess.

Posted by SqueakyRat | March 25, 2007 11:31 PM

Yeah, he definitely did add that. lol. Look through the history of the page for the change by Myglesias.

Posted by haha | March 25, 2007 11:42 PM

There was some comment on NPR that fishing is having trouble in the north atlantic, since the fish stocks are depleted, and the quotas are relatively stiff.

If that is true, then fishermen may not be able to pay for berthing since their income is lower than it had been.

Posted by anon | March 26, 2007 12:09 AM

Maybe if all the people with summer homes used those homes as working fisheries?

Posted by dj moonbat | March 26, 2007 12:21 AM

Linus,

What happened next?

Posted by Zagnut | March 26, 2007 12:35 AM

I'm a big Yglesias fan, but as a rural New Englander (raised as one, at least), there is something offputting in MY's nonchalance at being 'part of the problem.'

The situation in Maine, Vermont, the Berkshires, Cape Cod -- and other, non- New England rustic resort spots, too, I'm sure, it's just that I don't have as much knowledge of them -- is that they function as colonial economies in a very real sense. They serve as peripheries to the metropolitan center, here defined as the Boston-NY-Philly-DC megalopolis. In these vacation locales, what you see is extreme poverty and social disfunction among year-round residents ("natives"), replete with alcoholism, welfare-dependence, high suicide rates, even stuff like incest (a social worker once told me that North Adams, Mass., adjacent to my alma mater, Williams College, was rife with this particularly ghastly problem). When the summer people come in, who in my analogy play the role of European planters, we find at best an offhand breezy sort of concern, a la Yglesias, at being part of the gentrification of such places, at worst the kind of dim-witted hedonism and decadence for which aristocracies have been despised by all true republicans (small 'r') since the time of Cicero.

So while I am pleased that MY and the NY Times have begun to notice the problem, a little more introspection and less easy exculpation might be in order.

I can tell you from experience that the natives, underneath the friendly, roadside tourist shop facades, are seething with resentment.

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 26, 2007 9:17 AM

My family has a summer home in our winter home.

Posted by Aaron Berger | March 26, 2007 9:32 AM

Ben Cronin:

Largely agree with your diagnosis - do you have a concrete suggestion for a solution? At least the 'natives' control the political systems in these states (certainly Maine) and so while the economic forces are strong, they can choose democratically how to respond to them. So e.g. in Vermont, they tax second-homers at a discriminatory rate, and ideally such money can be put into education and economic development for the natives. Do you have any other ideas?

Posted by otto | March 26, 2007 10:09 AM

Yeah, he definitely did add that. lol. Look through the history of the page for the change by Myglesias.

Also amusingly, it appears that Matthew was the first person to write up the main entry for his dad's bio... but he got his birthday wrong (it was fixed two days later).

Heh heh.

Posted by JP | March 26, 2007 10:12 AM

People who post Wikipedia entries clearly have too much time on their hands!

Unlike people who post comments on blogs, selbstverständlich.

Posted by otto | March 26, 2007 10:17 AM

Ben-
What's the better answer? Halt gentrification so the locals can stick with their incestuous, suicidal, drug-addicted ways? As you describe it, gentrification is the best thing since sliced bread.

Sk

Posted by Sk | March 26, 2007 10:20 AM

Otto:

I think Vermont has the right idea (inter alia) in terms of taxing second homes at higher rates.

But the problem is a larger one, and has two different sides, as I see it. On the one hand, you have the problem of places like Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Southern Maine, that are just beyond the metropolitan periphery but into which you're beginning to see exurban expansion that is a kind of weird combo of summer housing and the growth of suburbs. For instance, it's increasingly common for people to commute from the mid- and upper-Cape, places like Bourne and Hyannis, or from southern New Hampshire and Maine (think Durham and York, e.g.) to jobs in the Boston metro area. A lot of the solution to this is to get real and comprehensive incentives in place to reduce suburban expansion and strangle the commuter culture in its crib (hat tip -- G. Norquist). So, things like gas taxes, taxes on housing growth that exceeds population growth (i.e., pretty much all new housing), but also positive moves by local, 'native' governments: getting defunct rail-lines up and running, revitalization of historic small town "downtowns," protection of greenland and conservation corridors. In short, we need to encourage people to stay local.
But that is only one part of the problem. The larger, and I think far worse and more existential problem for the authenticity of rural places in 21st C. America, is the desire of the urban/suburban upper and upper-middle class to enact a fantasy of rural life for one month of the year. Yes, I understand, it is necessary to leave Manhattan every so often; residents of rural Maine feel the same about Machiasport. You like our trees and waters, we like your sidewalks and skyscrapers. And this is all well and good. But the rich in this country want it both ways; they want all the advantages of urban culture and vibrancy with the opportunity to play Paul Bunyan for two weeks every summer. The question that must be asked is: at what price is this fantasy enacted, and who pays that price? Certainly not the play-actors. More like local communities and ecosystems. Inasmuch as this is a problem, it is a spiritual problem, and I'm not sure what public solutions exist.
In any case, we are getting to the point where intense localization is going to be the only viable form of economic development, so people will have to choose, as they used to, between town and country and their respective virtues.

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 26, 2007 10:28 AM

Sk -- these weren't such huge problems when there was an organic and independent network of culture and society in the country, rather than just a landscape of second homes and bombed out former mill towns.

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 26, 2007 10:29 AM

We're renting a house in Castine, which isn't far, during the first 3 weeks of July. Are you going to be around then?

Posted by CJColucci | March 26, 2007 10:55 AM

But Ben, the second-homers didn't close the mills and the fisheries. Without tourism, you wouldn't be back in the golden days, your economy would be like that of upstate New York or rural Ohio. They have few tourists, no money, and the same social problems.

I'm not trying to pretend that second-home colonization is a wonderful blessing but the cause and effect of the problems is complex. People can't afford to stay in scenic rural areas with or without gentrification.

Posted by Brittain33 | March 26, 2007 11:57 AM

Brittain33,

Fair point. A lot of resentment gets thrown at summer people for things they didn't, strictly speaking, do. You're right that tourism is a better alternative than the "nothing" option open to places like Utica, N.Y. or rural Michigan.

So yes, the origins and ramifications of the problem are indeed complex. But at the same time, and in good Marxist fashion, I would point out that while criticism of the summer colonists for their personal role in the destruction of once-vibrant small towns and rural living is absurd, we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that the material interests of second-homers are indeed advanced by the fraying of the societal fabric since about 1950 in places like Maine and the Berkshires. It is, after all, much easier to buy up property on the outskirts of a dying mill town, like Pittsfield, Mass., when property prices are low, than it is to do so when there is some kind of reason for locals to want to stay in the local housing market (Pittsfield kind of sucks, but the surrounding towns are bucolic).

I think in the minds of many 'natives' that summer people are viewed as local manifestations of the larger phenomenon of globalisation, as representatives of that which is destroying and uprooting not only American rural regions, but, in more extreme and severe form, the countryside in places like Nigeria, Turkey, and India.

I don't know the solution, but I do know there is a huge amount of ressentiment out there amongst aging and ever-poorer country people, as well as their children and grandchildren who've been forced to the metropolis for economic reasons.

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 26, 2007 12:18 PM

"Linus,

What happened next?"

Well, lets see. Then the libs managed to get literally the worst president in American history re-elected because they foolishly and arrogantly believed their own lib internationalist rhetoric about the so-called war on terror. In trying to split the difference and find some middle ground on Iraq and the broader war on terror they succeeded in neither defending civil liberties at home and ending the Iraq War or winning back the White House. After that they managed to gain a narrow majority in Congress, reinforcing their naive belief that some kind of "return to normal" was not only possible but that the American people wanted it. As with 2004, their failure to embrace a vision of positive change in the Arab World and Central Asia would help to undermine their chances of winning back the presidency effectively handing it to Rudy "kewl mayor type" Giuliani. But not only would they again prove themselves inept at playing the game they would also fail to stand up for civil liberties, let alone do anything about the extraordinary number of Americans in prison or the staggering rate of poverity for a modern, industrialized country.

But I for one am appreciative for the advent of the blogosphere. I've learned that liberals are often dumber (especially about politics) than I ever thought, and often big assholes. I've learned that conservatives are just as often smarter (especially about politics) than I ever thought, and often nicer, and funnier than their liberal counterparts - even as they continue to support appalling people and policies.

Posted by Linus | March 26, 2007 1:23 PM

Uh, Matt, have you noticed that the Grand Banks fishery has completely collapsed, and isn't expected to recover for oh, about 50-100 YEARS? The way I read this, there's no viable fishing industry on the East Coast to protect anymore.

Posted by beckya57 | March 26, 2007 2:30 PM

beckya57-
The Grand Banks is a cod fishery - some of the inshore shellfish are still doing well, both in Maine and Atlantic Canada. (I think).

Posted by Jose Peterson | March 26, 2007 2:40 PM

Sometimes when Matt drops these little wealth-oriented asides, I'm reminded of that Bugs Bunny episode where Elmer Fuud keeps saying "My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht."

Posted by dw | March 26, 2007 5:23 PM