TRURO, MASSACHUSETTS – I’ve been enjoying a working vacation on Cape Cod, and the big local issue here is how the shortage of housing is undermining the recovery from the pandemic. Not the housing shortage for tourists—the housing shortage for workers.

Restaurants are having trouble reopening because they can’t get workers at any wage, because there is no place for workers to live. There are proposals to build worker housing, or summer dormitories, or even to dock an old cruise ship to house summer workers.

You’d think that local merchants in a tourist economy would have a fair amount of political clout, but guess who has even more political power—the NIMBYs. Even many well-off liberals who have summer homes in these hills and shores don’t want the working class nearby, especially if worker housing might further tap the precarious local water supply. The number of new affordable-housing units approved so far by local towns is in the two digits.

And this housing crunch affects not only summer restaurant workers; it affects tradespeople who are being priced out of their homes. The local workforce of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, housepainters and so on is just not replicating itself, because the wash-ashores, as people from off-Cape are called in these parts, have bid up the price of housing sky-high.

So summer people: If you don’t want to support affordable housing, you’d better learn a trade and fix your own damned toilet, and forgo those oceanfront restaurant clambakes in favor of home cooking.

To use a fancy word, the housing crisis here on the Outer Cape is a synecdoche for the housing crisis nationally—a part that depicts a larger whole. Housing costs have totally gotten away from us, and the market’s responses are irrational and insane:

Build housing in deserts that don’t have enough water; have workers commute two and three hours from where the affordable housing is to where the jobs are; build on landfills like North Miami and stint on inspections. Or just live in your car.

Biden’s infrastructure plans have some funds for housing, details to be determined, but they are a drop in the bucket; and they are likely to subsidize housing for the officially certified poor—which is desperately needed but doesn’t address the larger challenge of affordable housing for the working middle class. (And I haven’t even mentioned housing reparations.)

When we get one or more versions of the big physical infrastructure bill through Congress (and we will), and we complement that with trillions more for caring human infrastructure (and we will), the next giant challenge is housing.