Directed by Jasper Craven and Patrick R Kennedy
Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: 4
When most people think of Nantucket, they might imagine luxurious beachfront properties, secluded mansions and exotic summer bungalows. And they’d be right. Nantucket is one of the most expensive communities in the country.
The average home price is upwards of $4 million, and the cheapest freestanding house is nearly $2 million. Among the famous people who reportedly own (or owned) homes on Nantucket are actor Ben Stiller, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, football coach Bill Belichick, former Secretary of State John Kerry and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy. A who’s who of celebrities and world leaders have visited the island, from former presidents (Obama and Biden) to the Kardashians.
Look past the uber-rich and their gaudy homes and you’ll see a class of year-round islanders struggling to get by. Teachers. Nurses. Taxi drivers. Restaurant workers. Shop owners. People whose families have lived on Nantucket for multiple generations. Even people with stable jobs and six-figure salaries.
All of them share the same challenge of finding affordable housing. A teacher or nurse making $50,000 a year would have to work for nearly 40 years to be able to afford a house on Nantucket. And that’s assuming there’s no inflation and no other expenses, such as food and rent. Going rents for a 1-bedroom during the offseason run $2,500-$3,000 a month, but can spike to multiples of that in the summer.
It’s a failure of modern capitalism that in one of the richest communities in the country – in the richest country in the world – there are people who are forced to sleep on either friends’ couches, inside their cars, or outside in the woods. All while a majority of properties sit tantalizingly empty for much of the year.
Or as one resident put it, it’s an example of “capitalism on steroids.”
A new documentary, Room for Us? Confronting Nantucket’s Housing Crisis, tells the story of these year-round residents who are determined to carve a life for themselves on an island 30 miles away from any other major land mass.
The issue of affordable housing isn’t unique to Nantucket (see: Secret Mall Apartment). And it’s certainly one that the impact investing community is well aware of, given that more than a third of impact investors allocate some of their AUM to housing investments. But it’s one thing to look at charts of housing prices where the trend line shoots off into the stratosphere. It’s another thing to see the faces of people who are being priced out of their own communities due to factors entirely out of their control.
The two directors – Jasper Craven and Patrick R. Kennedy – make an effort to unpack these factors through conversations with year-round residents, housing advocates and government officials.
One organization working to address the housing crisis, for example, is Housing Nantucket, whose mission is to “to ensure equitable access to rental and homeownership solutions for Nantucket’s year-round community.” One of its main programs offers affordable, year-round rentals to income-qualified residents. But with just 62 units available, the problem seems to be getting bigger with each passing year.
“There’s a real movement happening here to build a parallel real estate market, housing that is set aside from the open market and dedicated entirely to year-round residents,” said Anne Kuszpa, Housing Nantucket’s executive director.
One lifeline for housing advocates is a state statute known as Chapter 40B, or the Massachusetts Comprehensive Permit Law, which is designed to encourage the development of affordable housing. It specifically allows developers to bypass local zoning regulations in communities where less than 10% of the housing stock is considered affordable, provided that at least 20-25% of the units in the proposed development are affordable.
But this is easier said than done in a place like Nantucket, which finds itself caught in a Catch-22 with no easy solutions to the current housing crisis.
- Build more housing, but only 2% of the land is undeveloped and 60% of that is conserved.
- Build up (instead of out), but that would put a strain on the island’s natural resources.
- Convert existing housing into affordable housing, but there is a limited supply of homes that fit the parameters.
- Discourage short-term rentals, but this would drive away many of the seasonal residents that drive much of Nantucket’s economy.
- Increase taxes on property owners, but this could lead to them moving to more tax-friendly havens
To illustrate the delicate balance faced by Nantucket’s policymakers, consider the Nantucket Land Bank. The Land Bank was established in 1993 as a land conservation program with a mandate to “acquire, hold, and manage important open spaces and endangered landscapes for the use and enjoyment of the general public.” The Land Bank funds its operations by collecting a 2% transfer fee from home sales and today owns about a third of the land on Nantucket. But given the current housing crisis, many full-year residents are beginning to question whether that land would be better used for housing rather than conservation.
Protecting rare and endangered species is obviously still important, but so is providing affordable housing to those who need it. The only people not expected to make any sacrifices seem to be Nantucket’s uber-rich. Although one wonders how attractive Nantucket will continue to be if all the construction workers, restaurant staff, nurses, firemen and other community members are forced to move elsewhere?
One proposal that seems to have gained some headway is a financing mechanism called a “local option real estate transfer fee” that would allow Nantucket to enact a small fee on real estate sales above a certain threshold in order to fund affordable housing initiatives. For instance, the fee could be used to incentivize the sale of homes to year-round residents rather than seasonal residents. So instead of selling to the highest bidder (typically a seasonal resident), a homeowner would sell to a year-long resident at a lower price, with the local government making up the shortfall through the transfer fee.
The proposal was initially included in Mass. Governor Maura Healey’s housing bond bill, but was removed after opposition from real estate lobbyists.
Housing advocates say they will keep pushing. If they’re successful, the option transfer bill could be a model for other communities with high levels of inequality and housing insecurity. But other solutions will also be needed.
The Room for Us documentary doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Sometimes it’s important to just ask the right questions, and remind us all what it takes to build a sustainable community. Trade-offs are inevitable and necessary, but negotiations don’t work well when one side holds all the power.
The American Dream is supposedly based on the idea that if you work hard enough, you’ll be able to own your own home – an idea that some of Nantucket’s wealthier residents seem to still believe in. But the year-long residents of Nantucket and other wealthy enclaves are proof that this idea is irrevocably flawed. Work shouldn’t be synonymous with worth.
