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Nantucket Roiled by Surfside Crossing Affordable Housing Plan


Above Nantucketluxury summer getaways of the rich and famous, an average home costs $4.43 million, and hotels are among them. The most expensive in the country. Wealthy summer residents like former Secretary of State John Kerry and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman spend summers by their pools or sunbathing on the beach, while year-round residents and workers increasingly have to Struggling to pay rent.

On this island paradise, the solution seems to cause more conflict than the problem itself. The proposed 13-acre affordable housing development near a popular beach has sparked protests and lawsuits, and attracted a record number of townspeople to attend hearings. Angry residents say the 156-unit condominium development will destroy the environment and strain resources, and developers are using a subsidized housing angle to bypass restrictions on housing zoning. Meanwhile, the developers claim that residents are just upset about having a low-income housing project in their own backyard — huge —.

Tucker Holland, the town’s director of city housing, told The Daily Beast it was “the biggest controversy I can recall in recent years.”

Meghan Perry, another year-round resident and staunch opponent of the project, says otherwise.

“I think the developers underestimated our community,” she said. “They don’t read the room.”

Most people on the island can agree that Nantucket has a severe year-round housing shortage. Its popularity as a luxury-class vacation destination—where a 5,075-square-foot home was recently valued at $33 million—has led to what the Massachusetts General Court described as a “crisis of House”. When prices were even lower, a family would have to earn $530,000 a year to afford the median house price, according to a study conducted by the Netherlands last year. “You have people who are making money that would otherwise be considered very good… but still struggling to find housing here,” he explains.

The housing crisis has also strained workers on the island, from waiters and shopkeepers to police and firefighters. Fire Chief Stephen Murphy says state legislators in February, the police department had six job openings and three other officers were preparing to leave because they couldn’t afford to live there. Brooke Moore, an employee of the island’s affordable housing trust, testified that the pantry received requests from three families sharing a three-bedroom home. At the time of the hearing, no home was sold on the island for less than $1 million.

Lawmakers have proposed a variety of solutions, from taxing all real estate transactions over $2 million to increasing the town budget by $6.5 million to fund public housing add. The cause even attracts big names—and big pockets—including Wendy Schmidt, the wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who started an economic revitalization project on the island. But progress has been slow and the supply of subsidized housing remains below 10% of the island’s total property.

In 2018, developers from Nantucket and Cambridge, Massachusetts, weighed in with their own solution: a 156-unit affordable housing development a few miles from the main downtown area, near Surfside Beach popular. The couple, Jamie Feeley and Josh Posner, previously built an award-winning, affordable housing project of 40 homes on the island called Plum Village Beach. But the new proposal—Surfside Crossing—would be significantly larger, with 60 standalone homes and 96 apartments on 13 acres.

They promised that 15 homes and 24 apartments would sell for between $261,000 and $373,000, and all properties would be under $1 million. They also proposed using a decades-old Massachusetts law called Chapter 40B, which allows developers to build under a “flexible rule” if 20 to 25 percent of units meet the definition of housing. Cheap. The law also allows Feeley and Posner to appeal to the state if the Nantucket Zoning Board rejects their plan.

Having just finished their construction on Plum Beach, Feeley – who lives on the island year-round – and Posner, who has spent summers there since childhood, knew they would face some against. When Feeley told the civil engineer at Plum Beach that he was thinking of starting another 40B project on the island, he said he was asked to prepare a “200-person auditorium with pitchforks father”. (“That really haunts me,” Feeley admits.)

Meanwhile, Posner is a 30-year veteran of affordable housing and knows that such projects are rarely favored by neighbors — even in liberal communities like Nantucket.

Courtesy of Joshua Posner

“Most people on the island think affordable housing is the number one problem they face,” he said. “However, attempts to try to do something about it often have a tragic flaw: They’re right next to someone.”

As it turned out, that person was Perry – one of nine residents whose property was adjacent to the proposed development and who ultimately sued to stop it. When the islanders first learned of the plans, Perry and a related group of residents formed a group called Tipping Point Nantucket to protest construction and “education about responsible development to promote responsible development.” protect the long-term sustainability of Nantucket’s finite resources,” according to their website. The group’s board of directors is mainly composed of year-round residents, but Perry said the group’s membership ranges from waitresses and teachers to “the billionaire who just flew on his plane.”

Perry, who responded to a 1,700-word email when asked to explain her concerns with the development, denied that this was a case of NIMBY-ism, pointing to more than five housing developments Affordable prices have been built recently. Instead, she said, the point is to protect Nantucket’s infrastructure and natural resources.

Courtesy of Joshua Posner and Jamie Feeley

Perry pointed to statements from the fire chief, who testified that the development raised “serious public safety concerns” and concerns about the impact on the nearby school, describing traffic patterns and rare species in the area. She also noted that only 25 percent of housing developments will meet the state’s affordability guidelines.

The developers say the project is about affordable housing, she said, “but it’s not—it’s meant to make a profit for the developers that won’t benefit us.”

“It will weaken our infrastructure, it will put our first responders at risk, it will put communities at risk,” she added.

Oher Islanders agree. Less than a month after the proposal appeared, the island’s Selection Board wrote a letter to the state’s public housing agency calling the project “totally inappropriate.” (The council was forced to rewrite the letter several times after residents mocked the language for being too weak, according to local) The Questioner and the Mirror.). In July 2018, the Zoning Appeals Board was forced to halt a public hearing on the proposal after 150 residents flooded the boardroom. In August, more than 700 people packed the high school auditorium for the rescheduled hearing. “If there were a dozen people out there supporting the project out of 700 or 800, I would be very surprised,” Holland said.

A community hearing on the Surfside Crossing development project, where an attorney asked anyone opposed to the project to raise their hands.

Courtesy of Susan Carey

In response, the developers offered to scale down their project, down to 40 houses and 60 apartments, with more open space between buildings and larger landscaped buffer zones along real estate road. When that didn’t work out, they suggested limiting year-round rental capacity to residents and employees of local nonprofits, and then reducing the number of apartments to 40. No Which solution is effective? In April 2019, the zoning council received more than 100 letters opposing the project, many reflecting the language proposed by Nantucket Tipping Point, according to The Questioner and the Mirror.

That summer, after the local zoning board approved a project that was half the size of the original proposal, the developers appealed to the state. When members of the state’s Housing Complaints Commission arrived to inspect the proposed development, they were greeted by nearly 100 angry Nantucket residents carrying signs that read “Not Safe ” and “The Threat to the Nantucket Aquifer.” According to an article in Nantucket . Magazine, one of the protesters whistled Feeley, pointed to a smaller development nearby and shouted, “Jamie, this is a good development. Why don’t you do it, then we can all go home?

“[This] it’s not a neighborhood problem, it’s a Nantucket problem,” another, Mary Beth Splaine, told the magazine. “We’ve reached a point where our island can’t stand the infrastructure that goes with this.”

“I live next door to what I hope will be my forever home, but I don’t know,” she added. “The neighborhood is changing.”

The Housing Complaints Commission gave Surfside Crossing its final seal of approval in September 2022, but the fight doesn’t stop there. Less than a month later, the developers were embroiled in three lawsuits challenging the decision, including a filing from the nonprofit Nantucket Land Council claiming that construction would threaten their jobs instead. for public lands. The group of nine neighbors, including Perry, claimed that the Housing Complaints Commission had “effectively deprived[ed] they have every opportunity to challenge the massive project that will be built next to their home,” while Nantucket Zoning Council claimed the appeals committee “mistakenly rejected Council’s approval.”

“Nantucket should decide how to balance its own resources and priorities,” the land board complaint reads, “not a state agency in Boston.”

Courtesy of Joshua Posner and Jamie Feeley

While both sides appear to have engaged in a protracted fight, Holland said he thinks a middle ground can be found. Developers have floated the idea of ​​leaving another 25 percent of the development open to residents year-round, which Holland said could “cool down” the debate significantly. Even Perry said she thought there would be a “pleasant outcome,” though she added of the developers: “I don’t think they’ve seen it.”

Feely and Posner seemed confident that their vision would prevail. Posner said they faced similar legal troubles when they got Beach Plum out of the ground, but were eventually allowed to build. They have been doing pre-licensing work for Surfside Crossing, with the goal of starting construction in the spring or early summer.

“We hope that as the reality of this and the hugely positive impact this will have on the island sinks, we won’t have to go through the whole legal process,” Posner said. “But if we have to go all the way, we will go all the way.”

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