Provincetown, The Quintessential American Economy

A decade ago, I opened a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and found out quickly how perilous our local economy can be. One afternoon in July, a few of my line cooks—all Jamaican culinary students who had traveled to the United States on student work-study visas—rolled into work late for the third time that week. The other cooks were annoyed. So was I. I’d been spending my days stumbling through what seemed like impossible situations, and here was one more crisis.

But the students had a good excuse: They had landed in Provincetown with two promises from a nearby restaurant: a summer job and a place to live. The job had materialized (as had a second one, filling in at my restaurant). The housing hadn’t. These teenagers had been living out of the back of a borrowed car parked illegally in a faraway beach parking lot. Away from home for the first time, working seven 16-hour days a week, these cooks had nowhere to live in an ultraprogressive town that desperately needed their labor. Hearing this, I realized: If I want to keep my restaurant open, the local housing crisis is my problem too.

[From the March 1865 issue: Cape Cod]

Provincetown, a remote little village on a thin spit of sand at the very tip of Cape Cod, has about 3,700 year-round residents but a summer population estimated at up to 16 times that. Once one of the busiest fishing ports in the United States, it now has an economy that relies on the influx of tourists and wealthy second-home owners, many of whom identify as LGBTQ and revel in the town’s inclusivity and peculiarity. The drag performer Dina Martina likes to call Provincetown a “delightful little ashtray of a town.” I agree, but with one footnote: Some of the burning issues in town are profound—an extreme version of what’s happening in the U.S. economy as whole. If you work for modest pay in the service industry, Provincetown isn’t an escape from the real world; it’s a harbinger of a dystopian, ever more unequal future.

My job was to sell lobster rolls. But to do that well, I also had to become a landlord; over the next several years, my business spent more than a million dollars buying, renting, and operating housing for our workers. I helped employees work through the tangle of affordable-housing applications and joined community boards discussing housing issues.

Still, the shortage keeps getting worse. In the second quarter of 2024, the median single-family home sold for $2.4 million, according to one report; the median condo sold for more than $900,000. Two-thirds of renters are cost-burdened. The local economy has become dependent on temporary foreign workers whom the U.S. immigration system allows in grudgingly or not at all. We’re buffeted by political and economic forces far beyond the control of anyone in town.

I’m not alone in likening the country as a whole to this one queer mecca. After a summertime family trip to Provincetown a couple of years ago, the Washington Post columnist Max Boot observed that deep-blue communities like it “might be more representative of 2022 America than the Rust Belt diners where reporters love to take the pulse of Trumplandia.” In response, the writer Declan Leary declared in The American Conservative, “By any measurable standard, Provincetown is far, far off from American norms: it is about one sixth gay, over 90 percent white, overwhelmingly Democratic, and obscenely, sinfully rich.”

Some local residents are indeed quite wealthy. The night before President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were in town for an event that raised $2 million for Democrats. On this part of Cape Cod—as in San Francisco, New York City, and other liberal strongholds—properties that used to accommodate working-class residents are going upmarket, and some people who can afford to buy homes use their influence to keep more from being built.

Take away Provincetown’s tourist class and rainbow flags, though, and the issues facing the community look more like the ones crippling towns in MAGA country—aging infrastructure, the loss of industry, a mental-health crisis and addiction epidemic, stagnant wages and a rising cost of living, the challenges of aging with limited resources, tribalism, the corrosive effects of social media.

Meanwhile, the lack of a coherent national immigration policy creates problems for businesses and seasonal workers alike. The Jamaican culinary students were working on J-1 visas, a category created back in 1961 as an instrument of American soft-power diplomacy. Foreign students wouldn’t fall prey to anti-American propaganda, the theory went, if they could travel to the United States during their summer vacations and experience freedom firsthand. Today, businesses use the J-1 visa as a loophole to fill temporary jobs that few Americans want. Because it is a travel visa, not a work one, official oversight of foreign students and their employers is usually less stringent than it would be if a traditional work permit were involved. But that can change unpredictably: Last summer, a handful of J-1 workers were sent home after someone reported them for illegally driving pedicabs. They, like the cooks sleeping in a car, certainly got a taste of America, exactly as it is.

As gloomy as all this may sound, most people in our community have a can-do attitude. We try to address our challenges in energetic, progressive ways. When the first major COVID outbreak after mass vaccinations happened to arise in Provincetown, private citizens and public officials alike stepped up to contain it. Researchers from MIT and Harvard traveled to Provincetown to learn how to contain future outbreaks. This success was largely chalked up to the LGBTQ community’s experience with AIDS—gay people know how to snap into action during a health crisis. On housing, a number of businesses besides mine have responded to the crunch by providing apartments for some workers. But not every employer is in a position to do this. Labor advocates worry, and rightly so, that such arrangements make workers too dependent on their bosses; after one prominent local restaurateur died a few years ago, some of his employees lost their home and their job.   

[Read: America has a private-beach problem]

At a dinner party recently, a group of friends and I found ourselves reconstructing a historical timeline of the town’s unofficial saviors—plucky private-sector individuals who set their sights on fixing some aspect of our tiny seaside village and trying to lead the public to action. In some moments, the savior is the new owner of a big hotel or restaurant in town. Sometimes it’s a wealthy celebrity who just purchased a second home here. And other times it’s a philanthropist or developer.  

But voluntary effort at the local scale can only accomplish so much when the inequalities in society at large are so extensive and consequential. That’s all the more reason communities should radically intervene before their housing shortage becomes as acute as ours. Inevitably, each new would-be savior in Provincetown succeeds for a while—and then bumps up against the town’s intractable problems. The honeymoon ends. Moods sour. Energy and optimism wane.

Still, without fail, someone else always steps up. There’s something uniquely American in this relentless cycle: As the cracks in our foundation deepen, so too does our faith that redemption will grow from them, defiantly, like weeds.