I fully agree with “Jack Bauer’s” recent comment on many of his points, specifically that Camden is a beautiful town and has been a beautiful town for a very long time. [Read comment at the end of the article Camden proposes easing density rules to encourage workforce, affordable housing]

Once upon a time it was a town where everyone—workers, rich folks (very few), and those in between—lived comfortably together. The workers and the in-betweens got up in the morning and went to their jobs at the mills, at the shipyard, at their offices and boat launches and other places of business, including six or seven bustling grocery stores, the hardware store, the dry goods emporium, the banks, the newspaper stand, and at least three pharmacies that existed not too terribly long ago.

Moreover, many of those people walked to work. This is not a photoshopped memory of the good old days; this is the way it was, in a bustling, vibrant, creative and energetic community. 

That is rapidly becoming not the case: Rich folks live here part-time, workers live in distant places and drive long hours and long miles to and from work every day, and those of us in between (among which I count myself) feel very fortunate to have bought a place in Camden years ago when housing was still affordable.

I would venture a guess that most of us in-betweens are on the downward side of 55 and living or expecting to live the rest of our days on a fixed income, hence eager to preserve what we have.

But when Mr. Bauer says that people who “pay a pretty penny to buy” and “a fortune to renovate” expect Camden to remain beautiful long into the future, he is missing the boat, so to speak.

What makes Camden beautiful is not just the mountains, the waterfront, the islands in the distance; it’s also the people. The fact is. this is still, despite all the odds, a vibrant community.

We no longer have most of the downtown enterprises I mentioned above (thank the saints of grocery stores for French & Brawn) but we do have a much, much greater hospitality sector than we had back in the day, from restaurants to carry-out shops to food carts, as well as inns, hotels and other lodging places.

And that hospitality contributes an enormous, even I would venture, an incalculable, amount to our economy, not just in salaries and sales and real estate taxes but in that hidden economy that happens when a restaurant worker shops in town on their way to work, pays a baby sitter for minding their child, buys gas at one of the two remaining gas stations, gets their kid a season ticket for the Snow Bowl, or takes them to a show at the opera house—the countless ways that income gets redistributed throughout a community.

Mr. Bauer discounts all of this. He seems to think there’s no problem if that worker has to commute 30 or 40 carbon-dependent miles, coming and going, to a job in a community in which he has no stake; no problem if a restaurant can only stay open four nights a week because no staff can be found in a town that is increasingly inhabited by folks who don’t need to work; no problem if that restaurant or that inn or that bookshop shuts its doors completely for lack of help, not to mention high rents. 

Let Mr. Bauer admire his Camden when it is free of all those petty income-producing establishments, the restaurants, the hotels, the shops that provide community services, when the winter months will show a deserted downtown such as the one I pictured in a photo taken on Main Street last Wednesday at 11 o’clock in the morning. That’s Camden’s future.

Oh, but I forget, Mr. Bauer won’t be here to enjoy the solitude. He and his kind will be off to another beautiful town in a more benign winter climate. They will have paid their taxes in Camden, the only obligation they have to the town, and headed south, leaving the deserted but still beautiful, lifeless village to those of us who remain behind, paying the high taxes his real estate ventures have engendered.

I salute Camden’s town manager and select board for confronting the housing crisis we are facing. Their immediate solution may be imperfect, but at least they are working toward a sustainable goal. Let’s keep doing that.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins lives in Camden