Mashpee Commons grows, Cape Cod sprawls

Buff Chace and Douglas Storrs have won permission to construct two residential neighborhoods that they have long wanted to build adjoining their Mashpee Commons town center on Cape Cod. Over the next seven years, the developers will build 382 units of housing, all within walking distance of the center they have been creating since the mid-1980s.
The two residential areas, known as the Jobs Fishing Road and Whitings Road neighborhoods, will give Mashpee Commons a wide range of housing, including detached houses on 5,000 to 8,000 sq. ft. lots; fee-simple townhouses of 1,200 to 2,000 sq. ft.; rental and for-sale apartments of 800 to 1,500 sq. ft; and 650 sq. ft. one-bedroom patio units. The first houses will be ready for occupancy in 2008. In addition there will be 31 live-work spaces.
“The greatest impact will be that the town center will change from being predominately a commercial center to being a true town center, similar to a traditional New England-Cape Cod town, as the neighborhoods are directly and seamlessly connected to the town center,” Storrs told New Urban News.
Twenty-five percent of the dwellings will be affordable for households whose incomes are 80 percent of the area’s median, said Russell Preston, staff architect and urban designer for Mashpee Commons LP, developer of the project, near the western end of the Cape. The exteriors of affordable units are intended to be visually indistinguishable from more expensive dwellings, except for being smaller. They will be spread throughout the two neighborhoods.
The patio homes will be one-story cottages that wrap around individual courtyards and may also have shared outdoor spaces. “There are quite a few single people who want some outdoor space,” Preston said, describing the market for the patio units. Most housing to be built at Mashpee Commons is expected to be occupied by year-round residents, although there will be some second-home buyers as well. “What we are seeing on the Cape is that people who buy a second home are planning on it becoming an early retirement home,” Storrs noted.
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. laid out the neighborhoods in a charrette in 2002, but since then the plans have evolved considerably. Chace and Storrs have been seeking permission to build the neighborhoods since 2001, and ultimately negotiated approval from the Town of Mashpee this February under Chapter 40B, a Massachusetts statute that allows developers to construct projects not in keeping with the existing zoning, as long as the projects offer affordable housing.
The streets and roads in the two neighborhoods will have slight deflections, common in old New England towns, where the curb line doesn’t necessarily follow the façade. “The outdoor room is much more organic” in New England than in some other parts of the country, Preston observed. Whitings Road follows the route of a cart path from long ago.
Separately, the Cape Cod Commission, an independent arm of county government that oversees regional planning and land use, approved the 31 live/work units and two office/commercial units, which in total contain 40,900 sq. ft. of commercial space. Live/work units are “a particularly good model in a region like Cape Cod where the underlying cost of land combined with traditional suburban zoning can price smaller businesses out of the market,” the Commission said in its December 2006 decision approving the units. “These spaces will generally appeal to individual professionals, artists, and small boutique owners, which provides greater commercial real estate diversity.”

Cape Cod’s development dilemma
Chace and Storrs pursued an unusual “friendly 40B” procedure, working closely with town officials and residents to design a development that would be welcomed by nearly everyone. More commonly, 40B projects are pushed down the throats of the towns, which see the proposed “affordable” projects as too crowded or in other ways inferior.
Despite the example of Mashpee Commons, which has become a flourishing, walkable center offering 340,000 sq. ft. of commercial space, a number of residential units on top of retail businesses, a post office, a public library, and other community facilities, the Cape has had a hard time obtaining a suitable shape for much of its development. The Town of Mashpee still operates under “archaic” zoning regulations, according to Storrs. A major zoning change in Mashpee “would require a two-thirds town vote in a town meeting, which is very difficult to do,” Preston said. That’s why the developers chose the time-consuming 40B procedure.
The magazine Cape Business (see capebusiness.net) recently produced an incisive series of articles examining widespread unhappiness with how the Cape is developing. From 1990 to 2005, the 396-square-mile Cape added 17,500 housing units, and the population grew to 228,700 from 186,605. Many of the new houses were built on three-acre lots, a pattern that rapidly consumes the available land and aggravates congestion on overloaded roads.
In an interview with Cape Business, Storrs said the state, the Commission’s regional policy, and most towns’ comprehensive plans “are calling for mixed-use, mixed-income, higher-density development to occur in designated regional and village centers.” Nonetheless, said Storrs, “Currently zoning in virtually every town on the Cape does not allow this form of growth to occur.” The Commission does not control residential developments other than those encompassing at least 30 acres (a size that’s rare on the Cape). The Commission focuses mostly on commercial developments of 10,000 sq. ft. or more — a policy that has led many owners to avoid the Commission’s jurisdiction by constructing dispersed buildings of less than 10,000 sq. ft.
Margo Fenn, executive director of the Commission, acknowledged that the Cape “went for a suburban planning model instead of a downtown development model. … We should have focused growth in our dense villages.” The Commission now favors concentrating more development in existing centers, but many people believe the Commission’s regulatory practices are doing too little to achieve that purpose. Storrs argued that the Commission should encourage compact development by making its regulation in dense growth centers “significantly less onerous.”
A countywide study group has proposed a series of changes in how the Commission operates. It is unclear what the effects of those recommendations will be. Meanwhile, Mashpee Commons remains a rare example of the largely automobile-dependent Cape’s progress toward mixed-use, walkable development.