The Provincetown Independent’s reporters couldn’t find housing. So the Local Journalism Project bought a condo for them to rent.

Paying the rent on a reporter’s salary isn’t easy anywhere these days. But on the Outer Cape, it’s almost impossible.

Massachusetts has some of the highest housing costs in the country. The problem is exacerbated on Cape Cod’s Outer Cape, a region that includes Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. In a community where the same one-bedroom apartment can be rented out for $2,500 per month year-round or $5,000 a week in the summer, the incentives for short-term rentals are overwhelming, leaving few to no options for young reporters whose salaries start at $45,000 a year.

This reality makes it challenging for the Provincetown Independent to attract the early-career reporters it wants to employ and train. The local weekly newspaper founded in 2019 is a for-profit, public-benefit corporation supported by a parallel nonprofit, the Local Journalism Project. Core to that nonprofit’s mission: educating, training, and financially supporting aspiring reporters. But how do you educate and train young reporters if they can’t find a place to live?

Essentially, you can’t, which is what the Local Journalism Project’s board has been learning the hard way. “We had raised money for young journalists; we had money sitting in the bank [for] young journalists,” board president Willow Shire told me. While they receive an abundance of “stellar applicants,” Shire said, without a place to live, “all of these candidates were turning [the Independent] down.” For the few who did choose to come to the Cape, the seasonal rental market meant they generally had to move multiple times a year. “We didn’t anticipate [housing] being as big a problem as it turned out to be,” Provincetown Independent co-founder and editor Ed Miller said.

Last year, the LJP board decided it needed to take a big swing. The nonprofit launched a capital campaign to raise $500,000 with the goal of purchasing a condominium to house three early-career Provincetown Independent reporters.

It exceeded its goal in two months, and purchased the three-bed, three-bath property in October for just under $1.5 million, making a cash down payment of $448,500 and taking out a $1,046,500 mortgage. Three reporters moved in within weeks; they pay 30% of their salaries as rent, well below market rate.

More than a century after the heyday of company towns, employer-owned and assisted housing is part of the policy landscape in other communities where people struggle to work where they live. On the Outer Cape, from restaurants to healthcare, “housing is a conversation for every business out here,” said Local Journalism Project executive director Janet Lesniak. The Local Journalism Project had previously taken a page from the Cape Cod Baseball League’s book to set up homestays for its seasonal fellows. Other newspapers in the broader region are also getting proactive about providing housing for their reporters; the Vineyard Gazette, on Martha’s Vineyard, advertises its new fellowship as including housing in “a furnished, well-appointed two-bedroom guest house.” But taking out a mortgage to buy a standalone condo is a strikingly bold investment in making local journalism accessible to young reporters.

“We did not expect to be in the housing business; we didn’t particularly want to be in the housing business,” Shire said. “But it is in the critical path of the mission. So here we are…We determined the need, we raised the funds, we found the properties, and we are teaching young journalists what a circuit breaker is.”

What makes a successful capital campaign?

The capital campaign brought in donations from close to 100 local individuals and family foundations; gifts ranged from $10 to $150,000. On top of reaching its goal — thanks in part to large donations from board members — the campaign attracted “a significant number of new donors,” Lesniak said. Some donors were longtime subscribers or seasonal readers, and others were inspired by the mission of educating and investing in young journalists. And, Miller said, “there’s a certain kind of donor who really prefers to give money for something concrete, brick and mortar.”

To Miller, the campaign’s success was, in part, a testament to the Indie and LJP’s years of work communicating the importance of local journalism, and explaining their own unusual structure. After six years operating the newspaper as a hybrid for-profit in relationship with a separate nonprofit, the community had gotten used to both paying for the newspaper via subscriptions or newsstand purchases and supporting its public service function with donations to the nonprofit. “In the early years, it was sometimes hard to explain to people” why the newspaper was asking for both sources of support, he recalled. “But we don’t get those questions anymore. I think people really get it.”

“We were stunned” by the success of the capital campaign, Miller said. But he also attributed its success to a shared understanding of the challenge of year-round housing for young people on the Cape, which “has been kind of the number-one topic of concern and civic debate for a while now — the whole community is really aware of what a problem it is and how important it is to have younger people able to live here and work here.”

“So the project made sense to people,” he said. (It occurred to me that this campaign, by tapping into such a relatable local issue, maybe even humanized the Indie’s journalists.)

One (home) leads to another

Not only did the Local Journalism Project reach its fundraising goal and purchase the condo; a community member (and friend of Shire’s) has since agreed to donate an additional three-bedroom home in Eastham to the nonprofit.

While this home needs to be gutted and renovated after not being maintained for the last 20 to 25 years, Shire is taking advantage of local community networks and philanthropic spirit to complete the renovations for “an amazingly small amount of money,” which she said has already been raised (she expects the total price tag to come in under $100,000, including a new roof).

Specifically, Shire’s partner, Jaime DaLomba, is serving as the pro bono project manager; she said he’s been working on the renovations seven days per week. A welder born in Provincetown, DaLomba has leveraged the depth and breadth of his connections with other local craftspeople to convince others to donate time and basics like paint. The renovations only began in January, but Shire said progress is on track to have the home move-in ready by June 1.

“You need to be embedded in your community at all levels — we’re embedded with the local tradespeople, the lobstermen, the local painters, the local Ace Hardware store owner,” Shire said. “Your donors are critical — we have two really big donors, and we couldn’t do it without them. But we also couldn’t do it without Jaime, who quit school in 10th grade and is a welder. So you need everybody.”

“Very lucky timing”

Jack Styler‘s path to the Provincetown Independent was, in some ways, unlikely. He’s from Milwaukee, and did not study journalism. But after graduating, he moved to Kazakhstan, where he did some blogging. Clips from that blog helped him get an internship at The American Prospect in Washington, D.C., and an editor there helped connect him with the Provincetown Independent. He joined as a staff reporter in June of 2024.

On the Cape, Styler’s first living arrangement consisted of sharing the second floor of a house with two other reporters; the first floor was a short-term rental, but the Local Journalism Project leased the second floor, three-bedroom apartment “on a longer-term basis.” He left the Indie for a yearlong Fulbright in Latvia, but returned as a reporter last summer. Between August and October, he bounced from a room in a house in Wellfleet, where he lived with a retired couple, to a guest house available for about a month in the same town. Then the Local Journalism Project closed on the condo.

“I moved in right away, because I was going to be without housing,” Styler said — he needed to move out of the guest house the same week the Local Journalism Project closed. “So it was very lucky timing.” He moved in with no furniture, and slept on an air mattress. It’s his first time living in a house with his own bathroom.

I commented that bouncing around that frequently sounded exhausting. “I think that out here, it just is the reality for so many people that it wasn’t an unexpected thing that I would have to jump between a few housing situations before getting permanent housing,” he said. “That’s pretty typical out here…Housing is probably the number one issue for people of all types, all walks of life on the Outer Cape. Young reporters at the Indie have definitely experienced that as well.”

Two other reporters, his roommates, moved in a couple weeks later — one a new staffer, the other someone he’d overlapped with in the summer of 2024. They were able to furnish the house quickly with donations.

Living in the condo has put the reporters, board members, and other Indie staff on intimate terms. For instance, when the lock on the bathroom door didn’t work, Styler told me Shire helped teach him to reattach the strike plate so it could lock.

“That was the moment I realized, ‘oh, right, we actually own this house,’” Styler said. “We’re able to make normal renovations, easy renovations, ourselves. And that felt kind of empowering, because…Instead of a faceless corporate entity, like so many landlords I’ve rented from, these are people who are doing this because they want to support the work that we do, and are also being helpful in a million different ways.”

Indeed, board members are on call for everything from installing a mailbox to troubleshooting a plugged drain, Shire told me. (She confirmed she showed Styler how to use a wood chisel and screw gun to fix that bathroom door; he emailed her when he successfully used the screw gun to fix the rickety top of a table missing its screws.) Styler, his roommates, and Indie staff worked together to install blinds for the first time.

The home, Styler said, is in the heart of Provincetown. That’s ideal for the local reporters.

“I think it’s super important for us to live where we live, which is right smack in the middle of Provincetown,” he said. The town “can get pretty quiet during the winter, but if there’s anything going on, our house is both not super loud, but pretty much in the middle of things, which is really, really helpful for a local reporter.”

The condo purchase, Styler added, helps him “envision a longer-term tenure at the Indie.” If you’re moving at least twice a year, he reflected, every time you move is a natural “hinge point” where you might question whether the lifestyle is sustainable and consider not just moving elsewhere on the Cape, but pursuing a different opportunity.

“I think that the idea that the Local Journalism Project actually owns this house, and that as long as I continue to do good work as a journalist and they’re happy with what I’m doing, that I should have stable housing here, is a real relief,” he said, “and kind of takes away those hinge points where you’re naturally looking for other opportunities to work other places or move other places.”