Chapter 5 · Why This Matters

Why this matters — the household the levers are for

Why the increase provokes what it does. Two generations ago a house here cost a few years of one income; as recently as 2000 the typical Great Barrington home ran about four times the median household’s yearly earnings. Today it runs about ten — and the town is splitting in two: households that arrive with outside wealth and can buy, and the working households the town runs on — the people who staff its counters and warehouses, care for its elderly, keep its equipment running — who rent, spend more than 40% of their income on that rent, and have no path to owning here at all. A bill that rises a few hundred dollars is a small number, but it lands on a middle already stretched to its limit, and on longtime owners watching the one asset they hold become the thing that could tax them out.

Great Barrington’s squeeze has a structural edge, and it runs in two directions that should not be confused. At the top, second homes and non-resident-owned property — much of the town’s high-value housing — sit outside the year-round burden, wealth that under-contributes and that the Town’s own levers can reach. At the bottom is something different, and not a burden the Town should want to shed: Great Barrington built the housing that shelters the region’s essential workforce, the housing its wealthier neighbors did not. Under state structure that housing is tax-exempt and its families count toward Great Barrington’s school enrollment — so the town that took on the region’s obligation pays for it twice, on a tax base it cannot levy and a school bill that rises with every family it shelters, while the towns that built none are charged for neither. The people in that housing are not the source of the squeeze; the structure that isolates its cost on one town is. Carrying what the top avoids and what the bottom is unfairly charged for is the year-round, middle-income homeowner in between.

The property tax is the most visible part of that pressure, and the one the Town has tools to act on. This menu cannot reach the mortgage or the rent. What it can do is use the tools already on the books — the shift toward property that under-contributes, and above all the apportionment correction that shares the cost Great Barrington took on for the whole region — so the year-round household stops carrying a load that was never fairly its alone. No reform to wait for; the tools exist now.

None of this is a levy on the town’s success. The visitors, the second homes, the cultural life they sustain are part of what makes Great Barrington worth living in — but a town that lets that success price out the workforce and the year-round community beneath it spends down the very thing that draws people to it in the first place. Asking the property that has gained the most to carry closer to its share is not a penalty on it; it is what keeps the place viable, for the seasonal owner and the year-round family alike.

(Price-to-income figures: U.S. Census / ACS median household income and median home value, 2000 and 2024; 2026 sale price from public listing data; renter cost burden from ACS. Sources archived.)