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Coronavirus sends city dwellers fleeing to second homes, inflaming tensions in towns across the nation
[Yahoo] Amid increasingly vitriolic Facebook posts on various community pages about how city dwellers with second homes should stay away during the coronavirus pandemic, a nurse added her post to the mix, aiming to explain why she and her husband would be coming to the Cape Cod region in Massachusetts from New York in April."My husband and I are both RN’s... We are ...coming to help with the influx of potentially critical patients into the Cape’s healthcare system," she wrote. "Please keep in mind that not all your neighbors with NY or out of state license plates are there as a burden. Some may be there to help save your life if it’s needed. Let’s be kind in this time of need and help our neighbors not alienate them." Even among the dozens of positive comments, including, "You shouldn’t have to explain yourself," were a couple of snarky responses disparaging their arrival, which have since been deleted. And an influx of similar posts have touched off debates that have sometimes continued for days ‐ "I know many second homeowners who are far from rich," noted a resident of Provincetown, at the most remote tip of Cape Cod and currently under a local state of emergency, in an attempt to diffuse resentment. Another added, "Today a woman asked me if a was a ’townie’? And I was honestly nervous as to how to respond." Meanwhile, said one of many dissenters, "Not only should people not be flooding into town, people who live in [Provincetown] and have a place to leave to should leave to help the situation...why anyone thinks isolating on the tip of an island with limited resources is the thing to do is beyond me." Enter the latest version of "Us and Them," coronavirus edition, with anxiety over the pandemic stoking age-old tensions between locals and second-homeowners in towns across the country and the world. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-03-28 |
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