Hospital Unveils Plans For $69 Million Housing Project And New Clinical Building Off Vesper Lane

Nantucket Cottage Hospital is moving forward with plans for a $69 million expansion on its property at 16 and 18 Vesper Lane, including a 48-bedroom residential complex and a large new clinical building for its physical therapy department.

“The biggest resource that we have is our people,” Nantucket Cottage Hospital president Amy Lee told the Current. “To be able to care for our community and our patients, we have to be able to provide housing.”

The expansion consists primarily of two buildings, one residential and one clinical. The residential building will provide the hospital with 48 units of employee housing in a single two-and-a-half-story structure with a basement. The clinical building, which will also be two and a half stories with a basement, will be a little over 31,000 square feet. An existing structure at 16 Vesper Lane will also be refurbished as part of the project.

“Producing housing for the hospital is directly linked to the quality of care. It is essential in order for us to attract and retain skilled personnel that we provide housing. Over the next 24 months, we hope to raise the full $69 million to complete this project, which will serve the hospital for decades to come,” according to Bruce A. Percelay, chairman of Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s Board of Trustees.

The expansion will be privately funded, and the hospital is not asking for any taxpayer money.

“We're fortunate to be able to fund this entirely through philanthropy. We've raised quite a bit of the money already,” said Chris Glowacki, Nantucket Cottage Hospital vice president of strategy and community development. “This is an existential issue for healthcare on the island going forward.”

While the current cost estimate is $69 million, that could change during the permitting process. The timeline also could change, but Glowacki said the hospital hopes to break ground by the end of the year, and estimates that construction will take around 18 months.

“The Project is necessary for Nantucket Cottage Hospital, the sole Hospital on the island, to continue to provide the much-needed healthcare services on the island, to keep up with the ever-growing population of year-round and seasonal residents, to accommodate the growing need for housing medical staff and professionals, and to keep continuity of its facilities in a central location,” hospital representatives wrote in an application filed with the Planning Board.

The new clinical building will allow Nantucket Cottage Hospital to consolidate all of its physical therapy offerings in a single, hospital-owned building. The hospital currently leases space in Bayberry Court for its outpatient physical therapy program. The project will also allow the hospital to increase the care it can offer as Nantucket’s population continues to grow and the demand for clinical services on-island soars even higher than it was when the hospital completed the construction of its current $120 million new facility in 2019.

“Our volumes have gone up across the board,” Lee said.

In 2019, the existing building, also funded entirely by private donations, was the first new medical facility built on Nantucket in over 60 years. It only took seven more years for the next medical facility to be proposed.

“The driving force behind the Project is to improve the health, safety, convenience, and general welfare of the [inhabitants] of the Town by modernizing and improving NCH’s facilities and the quality of healthcare available in the Town while at the same time providing much-needed employee housing,” the Planning Board application reads in part.

Nantucket Cottage Hospital will need approvals from the Planning Board and the Historic District Commission to move forward with the construction of the new facility off Vesper Lane. But if it is able to navigate the island’s approval process, it is not just the medical building that will be notable.

The large, 48-unit employee housing complex is also indicative of the direction many Nantucket employers have taken in recent years. Employee housing is now routinely included in major developments, frequently offered by both seasonal and year-round employers, and has even become a strategic priority of the town of Nantucket, which recently received approval for 20 units of employee housing, the first step in a plan to construct up to 50 units in the next 10 years. The hospital’s struggles are increased by the size of its operation: only the town has more employees.

“We're the second largest employer on Nantucket,” Glowacki said. “The scale of our challenge with housing is dramatically different.”

One study by the UMass Donahue Institute found that fully 58 percent of businesses on Nantucket have helped employees secure housing. As Nantucket’s housing crisis continues and prices remain unattainable for many islanders, it’s the only way that many employers are able to secure staff.

Glowacki said that the development isn’t part of a plan to add more staff. Instead, existing staff will be relocated closer to the hospital. Lee added that the hospital already owns 38 homes, and the new building could allow some of those homes to re-enter the year-round housing market.

To make way for the new buildings, an existing structure on the site will be demolished. Most of the site is currently undeveloped and covered with brush and shrubs, much of which will be cleared to create space for the new construction.

The expansion also includes additional parking, though not as much parking as would usually be required. Nantucket Cottage Hospital is asking for a waiver from the Planning Board allowing it to provide 102 of the required 116 parking spaces.

The buildings will be accessed through the Gouin Village neighborhood. The property where the new buildings will be constructed was acquired by the hospital through a land swap with the town in 2023. 

Disclosure: Bruce A. Percelay is the chairman of the Nantucket Cottage Hospital Board of Trustees, and the publisher of Nantucket Current.