June 9, 2021 — Longtime small fishing ports in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts top the endangered list in a new NMFS social sciences study of how gentrification pressure is bearing down on those communities.
Barnegat Light, N.J., Montauk, N.Y., and Chatham, Mass., have history as home ports dating back to the 1700s, but transformed into high-priced resort towns in the 20th century. Inflating real estate values, tax burdens, development pressure, population growth are converging at a time when fishermen are facing regulatory and environmental challenges in their profession, the report shows.
Authors Matthew Cutler, a social scientist with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Rose Jimenez, at the NOAA Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technology, applied a scoring matrix to assess social and economic changes in 29 Northeast ports from Virginia to Maine where commercial fishing is an important social and economic part of the community.
“We selected all the fishing communities in the Northeast region with ‘high’ fishing engagement scores in 2009–2018, which resulted in these 29 communities,” the authors explain in the report, published online in story map format.
“Then, for each year in each community, we added up the scores (ranging from 1 to 4) for the three gentrification pressure indices: retiree migration, urban sprawl, and housing disruption.