Nantucket: A tale of two islands

Boston Globe

2 days ago

Despite all the investments and initiatives, Nantucket faces a deep-rooted challenge: Vacation rentals have taken over its housing market. With no zoning rules in place to regulate these rentals, it's harder and harder for long-term residents and local workers to find places to live. Imagine if Las Vegas operated without any laws for casinos, or if Boston's zoning codes ignored universities — Nantucket's lack of oversight on vacation rentals is just as stark.
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Tourism is essential to Nantucket's economy, but the island doesn't rely on resorts or hotels. Instead, most summer visitors stay in privately owned homes, turning Nantucket's small supply of housing into both an economic engine and a source of housing stress. Because no zoning regulations prevent corporations from snapping up properties for short-term rentals like Airbnb, the pool of available homes for seasonal or year-round workers keeps shrinking, pushing the cost — and competition for housing — even higher.
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Another accelerant straining the island's housing stock is an uptick in ultra-wealthy tourism. Nantucket is now facing the same problems as elite destinations like Aspen, Colo., or the Hamptons – places that, for geographic reasons, can't accommodate a seasonal workforce of landscapers, chefs, pool maintenance crews, and housekeepers that extreme luxury tourism demands.
And it demands a lot. 'It's kind of laughable that you would build a swimming pool on an island that has got nothing but water everywhere, but it's considered the type of amenity – like wine cellars and gyms – that these people want,' Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian, told the Boston Globe editorial board. 'The distance between the very, very wealthy and the year-round people is very, very great. That wasn't the case 25-30 years ago.'
The influx of wealth has sent home prices skyrocketing. Nantucket set a Massachusetts record in 2023 when an estate sold for
Nantucket's biggest employers, like Cottage Hospital, struggle to house their workers – sometimes simply
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The forced transience, low wages, and sometimes precarious housing opportunities have also shifted the worker population toward immigrants and their families, who have fewer overall employment options. Students who speak English as a second language now represent almost 50 percent of the Nantucket Public School district's students.
Nantucket's housing authority is striving to increase the island's stock of affordable housing from
Measures to finally codify short-term rentals through zoning, however, are largely missing. At Nantucket's town meeting in May, all four proposals regarding vacation rentals
New developments from the Nantucket Affordable Housing Trust are encouraging, but are still only making room at the margins. There are only several hundred affordable units for the island's 14,200 year-round residents. During a recent housing lottery, the trust received 139 applications for just seven homes.
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Until summertime tourism demands somehow lessen, local leaders finally create rules for short-term rentals, or current residential areas opt into a housing boom, inequality will remain Nantucket's most defining feature.
This column first appeared in
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Rebecca Spiess can be reached at