REASONABLY PRICED HOUSING on the Cape and Islands is eroding faster than the sandy shores, and local businesses face a harder math problem by the year: Without reliable housing for the seasonal or working-class people who staff the bakeries, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals, do the organizations scramble, shrink, or shutter entirely?

The problem also extends to the dwindling number of newsrooms serving the region.

For the Provincetown Independent, a local weekly newspaper, and its nonprofit partner, the Local Journalism Project, finding young journalists who could afford to rent in the town was already a struggle. Even landing someone to run the newsroom was proving difficult. “We have been looking long and hard for a managing editor, and it became impossible,” said Local Journalism Project executive director Janet Lesniak. “We had incredibly talented candidates who got here and said, ‘There’s no place for me to rent. I can’t afford to buy anything.’ And we were stuck.”

Lesniak and state Sen. Julian Cyr, who represents the Cape and Islands and also serves as the Senate’s housing chair, joined CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast to talk about the employee housing crunch.

There is a long history of employee housing in sprawling so-called “company towns” or ad-hoc housing purchased by restaurant owners and other small businesses who need to survive the seasonable tourist boom with immigrant employees who come in on short-term work visas. Across the region, businesses from small mom-and-pop shops to regional hospitals have had to invest in building or buying housing for a workforce that can’t compete in the local rental market.

“Our real failure on this is further escalating the cost of doing business here,” Cyr said of the state’s role in the housing crunch. “It also raises all sorts of challenging, complicated questions about having your housing tied to your employment. This is not sort of an ideal situation.”

It looked like the best shot for the Independent was for the nonprofit to become a landlord.

Impulsive Zillow scanning identified a condo that was “unbelievably well-suited for our needs and unbelievably pricey in the center of Provincetown,” Lesniak said. After a breakneck month of fundraising, the nonprofit was able to secure the half-million dollars needed to buy the condo where three reporters could live, paying 30 percent of the market rent while the nonprofit subsidized the rest. An Eastham resident then reached out to gift a house to the nonprofit that might be suitable for a managing editor.

It was a stroke of incredible luck and local networking. It was also, Lesniak and Cyr say, an absolutely terrible model for addressing the region’s crisis.

“Notwithstanding the good fortune of the Local Journalism Project and the largess of one or two very fortunate donors, that’s no way to look at this problem,” Cyr said. “For every Local Journalism Project house that’s able to be bought, we’ve lost 10 or 20.”

More than 54 percent of renters in the region are cost burdened, he said, meaning that they’re paying more than 30 percent – and often much more – of their income on housing. Cyr and the Senate have been pushing successfully for more flexible housing tools through the recently finalized seasonal communities regulations, and pushing in vain for a local real estate transfer fee modeled on the ski towns in the West.

“We are so late to the game on this,” Cyr said, “and I’m really increasingly worried.”

On the episode, they discuss the history of employee housing (2:00), the math of raising employee pay versus purchasing employee housing (14:00), and what tools the state could put on the table (29:00).