South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

Housing

The Two Best Vineyard Banks

By John Abrams |

Disclaimer: These words do not reflect the formal position of CCMVHB; they are my own.

One Exists. One doesn’t …yet.

In the 1980s the Vineyard experienced an explosion of population growth and development. Access to beaches and properties once enjoyed by all became limited. Islanders, sensing their way of life slipping away, got organized. After a grassroots campaign and an act by the Massachusetts State legislature, The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank was established in 1986. Funded by a 2% transfer fee paid by buyers of Vineyard real estate, the Land Bank has transformed the island in diverse ways by buying and managing property for conservation and public access. It has expanded and created countless trail systems and provided new ways for the public to get to our beaches. It has initiated farming and affordable housing collaborations. It has helped to preserve wildlife habitats, pond and aquifer water quality, fishing and shellfishing – the essential ecological services we depend on.

The Land Bank has provided significant solutions, but their job is not complete; according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, nearly 16,000 acres of developable land remain up for grabs on the island, and it took the Land Bank more than three decades to protect 3,500.

Meanwhile, the pandemic real estate boom has intensified our affordable housing crisis. Despite 25 years of progress, the situation is worse than ever:
• There is a $780,000 gap between what the average Island family can afford and the median home sale price ($1.15 million in 2020).
• Only 38% of our housing stock is available for year-round occupancy
• Over 600 year-round residents and their families are waiting for year-round rentals, including 210 children.
• Rents are 30% above the statewide median costs while wages are 27% below the statewide median income.
• Over 300 year-round residents are currently on waiting lists to purchase homes within their financial reach.
• More than 1,200 Vineyard residents pay more than half their income for housing costs.

Another way of life is slipping away fast. Only a major long-term funding source can preserve it. It’s time for The Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank, the other most important Vineyard bank. This is not to take anything away from the importance of existing local commercial banks; only to say that the Land Bank and the Housing Bank are the vital cornerstones of a balanced and prosperous future.

Island Housing Trust’s “Eliakim’s Way” neighborhood is West Tisbury.

We’ve tried before. A 2005 Gazette editorial stated: “The housing bank initiative has cleared its first major regional hurdle now that all six towns have thrown their support behind the idea, which aims to create a bank of money for affordable housing using a transfer fee on most real estate transactions. The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank is the model . . . “

With overwhelming support from the Vineyard, the Housing Bank failed in 2005 in the state legislature due to the strong lobbying of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, who disliked the concept of transfer fees. At the time, the median home sale price was approximately $500,000.

That was then. This is now.

With median real estate prices over $1,000,000 and the need greater than ever; there have been multiple calls for a renewed effort to establish a Housing bank.

They are being answered.

The Coalition to Create The MV Housing Bank (CCMVHB) is a citizens’ campaign to establish a regional Housing Bank for Martha’s Vineyard.

The campaign is led by a 12-person Steering Committee co-chaired by Julie Fay and Arielle Faria. (Other members include Kimberly Angell, Makenzie Brookes, Caitlin Burbidge, Stan McMullen, Elaine Miller, Lucy Morrison, Juliet Mulinare, Doug Ruskin, Abbie Zell, and me.)

We are supported by one paid staffer (Laura Silber, our Coalition Coordinator) and a growing “Coalition Council” whose members include selectpersons, town affordable housing committee members, county commissioners, business leaders, realtors, young professionals, housing activists, and those in need of housing – from every town.

Meanwhile, there is a dramatically different political climate in the Commonwealth. At this moment the towns and cities of Nantucket, Provincetown, Boston, Somerville, Brookline, and Concord have all passed Home Rule Petitions to create Housing Banks. All are based on transfer fees. A coalition of these communities has formed which includes the Vineyard. The island coalition is working closely with our state representatives – Dylan Fernandes in the House and Julian Cyr in the Senate.

To meet the goals of the Housing Production Plans created by the six towns in 2018, we will need to create hundreds of units of community housing during the years to come.

It is time for action.

The plan to model the new Housing Bank after the existing MV Land Bank means there is no identifiable group of people (besides the pool of unidentified future buyers of Vineyard real estate) who will be adversely affected, and because this would be an entirely new funding source, it would not tap into or alter existing funding streams like the short-term rental tax or Community Preservation Act funds.

Some ask why not try to use some of the existing Land Bank funds? Not only is it a flawed strategy to pit one good thing against another – conservation vs housing – but there just isn’t enough money; the Land Bank needs its funds. More than 60% of its budget goes to land management and to service existing debt; it needs the rest to continue its work.

Another common question is: will this lead to extensive new development? We will certainly need some. But the Vineyard has 18,000 existing buildings. Some of these can be purchased and re-purposed as affordable housing. Accessory dwellings (ADUs) can be built on developed properties. I hope the Housing Bank will prioritize expenditures on already-developed land and mechanisms like down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.

Winners of the “Jenney Way” housing lottery, crossing the threshold of their new home.

During the first half of 2021, CCMVHB is forming committees in each town, bringing the concept to town boards, and designing the new housing bank. During the year that follows, we expect to create warrant articles in all six towns and bring them to town meetings; if successful in all six towns, we will advance to the state legislature.

Between now and then, there are plenty of questions to answer: how much will the transfer fee be, who will be exempted from paying, who will be served, and for what uses will funding be available? In terms of governance, I hope the Housing Bank will adhere closely to the Land Bank structure – run by an elected commissioner from each town, a representative from the Commonwealth, and professional staff. Each town would have a Housing Bank Town Advisory Board which would have to approve development in its town. This combines regional vision and oversight with ultimate local control and is a tried-and-true method that has worked for the Land Bank for 35 years. There’s no need to re-invent this wheel.

Community consists of a place and those who have a relationship with it. Land conservation is important. People conservation is equally vital.

School teachers and social workers, farmers and fisherman, nurses and nannies, truck drivers and technicians, artists and arborists, plumbers and plasterers, carpenters and curmudgeons, troublemakers and troubleshooters, those of different ages, abilities, incomes, colors, religious beliefs, and gender identities – we need all of these people to maintain a living, breathing community.

Taking bold measures about affordable housing will ensure that the Vineyard community we know and love won’t recede like the eroding shoreline.

Support the CCMVHB effort by
– Visiting ccmvhb.org to learn more, and informing your peers.
– Emailing info@ccmvhb.org to join the Coalition.
– Making a donation to The MV Community Foundation earmarked for CCMVHB to cover campaign expenses
– Following our progress on Instagram and Facebook @ccmvhb.

An island united can get this done once and for all. Our two essential Banks, working side-by-side, can assure the future we all wish for rather than the one that circumstances will otherwise dictate.

Bill Graham and His Mohu Legacy

By John Abrams |

I saw The Post recently. Good Spielberg. Compelling history. As always, Meryl Streep was superb as she captured all the nuances of Katharine Graham’s emergence as a woman to be reckoned with. I was struck by the moment when she said, “My husband used to say the news is the first rough draft of history.”

But The Post wasn’t just history for me. It reminded me of my personal history – and South Mountain’s – with her land, her house, and her son Bill.

Katharine Graham died in 2001. Her son Bill inherited the 218 acre property – called Mohu – that included her fabled house. Built in the 1920’s, the sprawling house occupied a prominent place on the land overlooking James Pond and beyond to the Elizabeth Islands. It was highly visible from nearby Lambert’s Cove Beach. For several years Bill wondered what to do with this evocative (but empty) 10,000 square foot summer house.

One day, sitting on the beautiful bluff in front of the house, he got the answer: undevelop the site and put the house to good purpose. The site, he realized (which had always been his favorite place on the planet) could become even more beautiful without the house. But how could the house best be used?

He called and asked me to come look at it. He explained his idea and asked if we could cut the house into pieces, move them, and create affordable housing from the parts. I told him it wasn’t feasible. The road was narrow and closely bounded by stone walls; the house would have ended up in small pieces. But the house was full of good simple materials – wood and doors and tile – that could be salvaged and effectively re-used. There was no sheetrock, no plaster, nothing to throw away. I suggested that he hire us to dismantle the house piece by piece and save everything. Once apart, he could donate the materials to The Island Affordable Housing Fund, to use them in the construction of new affordable housing and/or sell them to help fund affordable housing.

Bill liked this plan, and hired South Mountain Company to do the job. We set about meticulously unbuilding the house. It was a tough job that required three months of demanding labor. It was highly uneconomic, but tremendously gratifying, for Bill and for us.

The site was restored to a verdant meadow that blended with its surroundings. Two stone fireplaces and their chimneys were left standing, silhouetted against the sky, a reminder of the history that was embodied in the house. An immense stash of materials was bundled, stacked, inventoried, stored in a barn and gradually put to good use.

Because the house was located near the water, we needed approval from the West Tisbury Conservation Commission. When they came to do the site visit, they asked, “What will it be replaced with?”

I answered, “Nothing. Bill is undeveloping the site and restoring it to the way it was before the house was built, nearly a century ago.”

Most in the Vineyard community applauded the project.

A few people didn’t.

One of these was the contrarian left-wing journalist Alex Cockburn. I had followed Cockburn’s work in The Nation for decades. I appreciated his no-holds-barred writing style, but sometimes he seemed to go a bit beyond the pale for shock value. Somehow he heard about Mohu and thought it was appalling that this house had been “demolished”. He led off an article about it with this polemic: “Here’s a question for you. Which scion of which well-known newspaper dynasty assembled a squadron of bulldozers in May of 2005, mounted the lead bulldozer and led this rumbling squadron into a ferocious assault on the house his mother left him on her death in 2001? When it was over, a house which had seen visits from President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan lay in splinters and rubble.”

Alex had no clue what the real story was, but over the next few months the two of us exchanged e-mails. Having his prickly pen pointed directly at me sometimes smarted. But I can say this: whether he agreed with my explanations or not (mostly he didn’t), at the end of that exchange, he at least knew the facts.

This is a story of re-purposing: the restoration of a beautiful place and the re-use of fine materials. This is a story of conservation: appropriate land use and putting waste to good purpose rather than into a landfill.

Some years after the Mohu de-construction, we renovated a beach house on Bill’s property. Working with Bill was never easy but it was usually rewarding. He was brilliant, creative, generous, and compassionate. He had great taste and he loved conversation. I always had a soft spot for him.

Recently Bill Graham committed suicide (you can read his obituary here), like his father before him. One of the sad parts of this tragic ending was the conclusion of Bill’s deep love affair with that large and wonderful property. When he first moved there, it was mostly overgrown new growth woodlands filled with poison ivy, bull briars, rocks, and brush. Restoring it became his lifelong project. He reverently brought it back to life. He cleared it bit by bit, restored stone walls, made a beautiful network of paths, and engaged the Dunkls (that’s a whole other story!) to make organic bridges, walkways, and steps around and over the beautiful brook that ran through.

I’m sorry that he’s no longer a part of this place, and that remarkable land.

But he is. He made his mark.

In Praise of Carpenters

By John Abrams |

In Praise of Carpenters

This soulful piece of writing comes from SMCo Production Manager Newell Isbell Shinn. I'm proud to share it. - JA
A carpenter’s intimacy with a building is particular and visceral. They know, for instance, how every material in a house smells when it is cut, what kind of dust it makes. They know how many pieces of each thing they can lift by themselves, how many with help, and the ratio of pieces moved today to tomorrow’s aches and pains. When they walk away they know a building with their body in a way other occupants probably never will.

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M-Line Homes

By John Abrams |

In 1980 a woman named Madeline Blakeley asked me to look at a piece of land with her. She was a librarian in her early sixties whose husband had recently died. They had no children and had always lived in rented apartments. Her dream was to own a piece of property.

She had $7,000 in cash. A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but her friends advised her against buying it. The lot fell steeply south to a sweet little valley, a perfectly matched solar exposure and view, but it was right beside the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown, which was very loud. Except for that proximity and the fact that the whole lot was a hillside, it was lovely. There was nothing else on Martha’s Vineyard even close to her price range.

I suggested that we could cut and fill and build an earth-bermed, partially underground house. “The southern orientation aims away from the road just enough, and the berming would dull the noise as long as the house doesn’t open to that side. We can design the traffic right out of this scene!” She was excited. Even though she didn’t imagine she could afford to build anything at all, the idea that the land could eventually be sensibly used was appealing. I didn’t tell her that we didn’t – at the time – actually know how to properly build an earth-integrated house.

She bought the property.

Read More about M-Line Homes

Bottom Lines Reaches the Summit

By John Abrams |

The first Bottom Lines Business Summit is over.  It will not be the last.  It was a peak moment after several years of work with two friends and colleagues, Paul Eldrenkamp and Jamie Wolf, to design and build a new program for the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA).

On a beautiful fall day, more than 100 NESEA members gathered at Smith College to celebrate two years of Building Energy Bottom Lines, to hone business skills, and to consider the future of this exciting endeavor.

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Massive Change & Moving On

By John Abrams |

In 2012 Mike retired after 27 years at SMCo.  In 2013 Pinto switched careers after 22 years.  In 2014 Pete D went to half time after 27 years and Bob retired after 21.  And now, in 2015, Derrill has decided, after 24 years, that he will be changing career and life emphases and therefore moving on from SMCo in April.

Five people, a total of 120 years at SMCo.  Wisdom, talent, skill, and institutional memory galore.   Big chunks of the heart and soul of SMCo, out the door.  Gone

But not all gone.  Each remains close by.  Mike  has continued to serve on our board as Benefits Director (required of all companies registered in Massachusetts as Beneficial Corporations) and managing our equity fund and pension with Siobhán.  Pete D continues to be the foreman for our Small Jobs & Maintenance Group.  Derrill will continue to do our photography and chair our Charitable Contributions Committee, and will remain on the board and replace Mike as Benefits Director in a year.

But nonetheless this is Massive Change, and it will continue unabated in the years to come as we navigate our planned transition from Generation One to Generation Two.  That is who we are today, as we enter our 40th year.

Hmm . . . SMCo without Derrill.  That bears examination.  He’s quite a guy.

As Derrill studied architecture in the 70’s, he also studied and taught photography.  A summer in Bogota, Columbia living with a family and learning Spanish foreshadowed a major aspect of his future life.  After graduating from architecture school in 1980, he went to work as a carpenter, and then found his way to the Mosquito Coast in Honduras, where he worked for the UN in a refugee camp overseeing temporary resettlement villages and designing building infrastructure.  Soon after this he met his future wife JoAnn in Boston.

You could say that for the next decade he led a bifurcated life.  Or you could say it was balanced.  Six months of carpentry, six months in Central America doing volunteer work and human rights documentation.  Six months here, six months there.  Over and over.  “It was,” he says, “one of the most visceral periods of my life.”

As his work in Central America began to wind down, in 1990, he began a one year trial at South Mountain, (his brother-in-law Jim was running our shop, and still is) mixing carpentry with a few short trips to Guatemala (by then it was in his blood, and hard to shake!). JoAnn moved to the Vineyard from Boston, they got married (within 500 feet of where they would later build their house in Aquinnah), and Derrill stayed at SMCo, doing carpentry for another four years before moving up to the office and picking up a pencil and a T-square again.

During the next two decades Derrill worked on the design of many of our finest houses and established long-term relationships with many treasured clients.

In 2001 Derrill and JoAnn adopted Jacob, who was diagnosed with autism three years later.  A whole new chapter began.  “In 2010, after working with many programs that were ineffective for us,” Derrill says, “we began to work with the Autism Treatment Center of America (ATCA) to establish a play-based therapy program for Jacob, and a re-orientation for us as parents.  This was a life-saver.”

Many of you who are reading this helped make possible an ATCA 2011 residential intensive for JoAnn, Derrill, and Jacob.  Jacob said his first words there.

Along the way, Derrill has consistently been an active force in the island community, both in his town, Aquinnah, and island-wide.  He chaired the Aquinnah Housing Committee and Community Preservation Committee.  He was a captain in the volunteer fire department.  He has been an important part of the  Vanderhoop Homestead restoration and the Gay Head Lighthouse move.

He came down from the wilds of Aquinnah to be a founding board member of both the Island Affordable Housing Fund and the Island Housing Trust, and a prime mover and board member for the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority and Greenough House. For all his important affordable housing efforts, Derrill was recognized this year by the Commonwealth when he shared the Kuehn Award for Community Preservation.

And now the twin threads of Jacob and affordable housing have drawn him back home, where he can spend more time with Jacob’s homeschool program and pursue the perfect compliment – affordable housing work from a home office.

When he departs, Derrill will take with him oh so much that we will miss.  But he will leave behind far more.  His relentless commitment to humanity, kindness, compassion, justice, and design has made an indelible imprint on the South Mountain DNA.  His heart will always be with us, and his continuing photography, charitable contributions, and board service will be a constant reminder for us to never forget the “Derrill part” in our work and our thinking.

Personally, I love the strong memories that linger from the many yeasty design collaborations Derrill and I sailed through together, from affordable housing neighborhoods to some of our favorite all time houses, like the Mazar house below.

Hmm . . .  SMCo without Derrill.  Tough one to imagine.

And the others too.   Each has been hard to say farewell to, and each remains a part of who we are.