How much land is "protected"? A reckoning
Protecting open space has been a driving goal of a subset of Cape Codders since at least the 1960s, not coincidentally the same moment when large-scale development mushroomed.
People have referred to this as a geographic arm’s race, acres “saved” vying with acres built. There’s merit to this view, though my argument in a previous Voice (Buying open, pushing big-lot zoning) is that zoning policies, not this “race,” explain why we are in an existential affordable housing crisis.
That said, how about an assessment: Far as “open space,” where are we today?
Short answer: The land preservation movement has maintained pace with development, towns and conservation trusts playing major roles but state and federal partners providing crucial support, often involving larger tracts.
For a long time, conventional wisdom divided the Cape equally in thirds; one-third protected, one-third developed, one-third with development potential.
Those days are over.
Now 40 percent or more of the Cape is “protected” one way or another. The one-third already developed isn’t shrinking, that’s for sure. And so a good guess is that no more than 20 percent of Cape land is still developable, and many of those parcels are at the buildable fringe, problematic in ways related to size, zoning, access, or marginal upland.
This in turn drives what we’ve come to call re-development, reinventing and expanding properties with buildings already up. If you want to get big and new, this often becomes the only way and it’s been invoked often, with dramatic impact that can overshadow the quieter successes of conservation.
With big thanks to Jessica Rempel, Natural Resources Analyst at the Cape Cod Commission, here are some hard open space numbers, my parenthetic comments added.
I liken this to taking a hike across our terrain, bushwacking through a thicket of numerical growth. Once you’ve reached the end, I’ll follow up with some additional trail markers:
Municipal (town) 35,921
Federal 24,412
State* 22,334
Private non-profit 14,461
TOTAL 97,269
*In the map above, all DCR (Dept. of Conservation & Recreation) colors, plus Dept. of Agriculture and Comm. of MA, are included in state holdings.
Acres protected Total %
Barnstable 10,714 40,078 27
(Town holdings account for almost all protected land, around 9800 acres)
Bourne 13,530 26,294 51
(State holdings, almost 9000 acres, explain why much smaller Bourne has more protected than Barnstable)
Brewster 5729 16,331 35
(The state holds more than 2900 acres, aka Nickerson State Park. The town has recently added the Sea Camps acres to the rambling Punkhorn, 2700 acres)
Chatham 1927 10,907 18
(Town holdings are the bulk, 1106 acres)
Dennis 3469 13,360 26
(More than 2800 acres in town holdings; private non-profit, a conservation trust adds 630)
Eastham 3244 9187 35
(The National Seashore’s impact begins to show, federal holdings at about 2175 acres)
Falmouth 8131 29,150 28
(No fed, but private non-profit with more than 1900 acres; the town has 3850)
Harwich 2722 14,401 19
(Again little fed impact, municipal holdings at about 1760 acres)
Mashpee 5395 16,385 33
(Town holds about 2500 acres, municipal and non-profits each at about 1200. Wampanoag holdings not included)
Orleans 2939 9323 32
(Municipal at 1730 acres)
Provincetown 5274 6683 79
(The National Seashore rules, roughly 4830 acres creating the largest percentage holdings)
Sandwich 10,714 28,110 38
(The state’s Shawme-Crowell Park accounts for much of 6600 acres)
Truro 9585 14,082 68
(Again, the Seashore dominates; 9009 acres held by the feds)
Wellfleet 7334 13,442 55
(Ditto, 6000 acres for the feds, with private non-profit at around 960 acres)
Yarmouth 4893 15,947 31
(Town is the key player with more than 3800 acres)
TOTAL 97,269 263,680 37
Total acreage for each town is created by calculating around the perimeters. This means that all water bodies, ponds, lakes, marshes in protected and unprotected areas, are included in the total.
Using this overview, 37 percent of Cape Cod is “protected” one way or another. If you were to factor just upland, that percentage would be much higher.
Meanwhile, the term “protected” can mean different things.
Sometimes it means forever, as in owned by the Seashore or towns via conservation commissions.
Sometimes it’s considered temporary; if a water district owns land to protect public wells, but if those wells stopped pumping the land could revert to development.
Sometimes the term is “limited,” because use could change by town meeting vote, for example, though often this includes cemeteries that will remain.
Then there is a “none” category, meaning no specific legal impediment to building, but almost all (3027 of the 3228 acres in this group) is held by private non-profits.
Now we’re in the weeds, a place I like to go but don’t want to inflict on others. If you feel like taking a statistical machete and whacking at even denser underbrush, there’s a great public interactive site Jessica Rempel flagged called MassMapper. Here’s the link:
https://maps.massgis.digital.mass.gov/MassMapper/MassMapper.html
You can focus the statewide map onto the Cape and then choose subsets by clicking on the prompts, for example conservation, open space by owner (what you see above), all kinds of interesting nuances.
Have fun, but don’t get lost – and remember, leaving numerical bread crumbs doesn’t work!
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