Nantucket Select Board: Candidate Questions, Round 4

The 2022 Annual Town Election is tomorrow, Tuesday, May 10. Nantucket Current is continuing a series of questions today for the four candidates vying for two seats on the Nantucket Select Board, the island's lead policy-making body. With current Select Board member Kristie Ferrantella not running for a second term, and the other incumbent, Matt Fee, seeking another three-year term, that means there will be at least one new face on the board this year. Fee is being challenged by Brooke Mohr, Henry Sanford, and Cliff Williams.

Question #4: Town Meeting just voted to appropriate more than $40 million for housing initiatives. What more can town government be doing in the short-term and the long-term to help island families, businesses and non-profits address Nantucket's affordable housing crisis?

Matt Fee: While town meeting approved $40 million for housing initiatives, advocates shouldn’t take support for granted. Maintaining a vibrant community requires much more permanently restricted housing than 10% of year round units required to maintain Safe Harbor. Similar communities have found the sweet spot is about 30% of total housing units. There’s a lot of work, which will require many different initiatives. It’s not as simple as increasing supply, as outside demand dwarfs potential supply. Selling town land won’t meaningfully improve housing opportunities. Don’t copy traditional short-sighted policies and expect a different result.

Continue to work with our state representatives to pass a housing bank to obtain a permanent funding source to pair with a portion of STR tax receipts.

Clarify and solidify the vision. What are town departments doing, why, when, who is responsible, and how much will it cost. Create a matrix that examines the cost effectiveness of various options to insure we’re spending dollars wisely. Create a list of town properties suitable for housing, updated regularly. Create a Fairgrounds master plan which mimics our urban downtown to guide development so that the neighborhood that emerges is dense and beautiful- a place anyone would want to call home.

Town’s got to concentrate on housing its own employees. Without staff, other critical priorities stall. Select Board should require quarterly public progress reports.

Implement options that don’t require large capital expenditures. Tier pricing, waive or lower fees, and streamline the building process for individuals or businesses constructing year-round or employee housing to encourage more of it. Examine zoning, so whenever we increase density or buildout, it is well designed and a percentage permanently set aside for year-rounders. Articles appearing at town meeting should run through a housing filter to insure any that can, impact this top priority.

Longer term, insure the Housing Office is staffed and capable of administering larger, tax credit worthy, projects. Rather than an off island group obtaining the initial hefty developers profit and yearly income stream, insure those funds flow back to island housing. First step is the town being a co-general partner, but soon, Tucker Holland, who’s savvy and intelligent, would excel at this task.

Some of the most knowledgable housing developers in the country summer on Nantucket. Ask for help. Their resources and expertise focused on this issue, much like happened with land conservation, provides reason for optimism that this seemingly intractable problem can be solved.

Brooke Mohr: Nantucket has lived with a housing shortage for decades, but we are now in crisis. The conversations about the ripple effects of this crisis has reached a fevered pitch, reflecting the justified fear of employers that the resulting lack of workers now threatens their businesses and the visitor experience that drives our economy.

The community has supported funding for the creation of year-round housing and the Affordable Housing Trust (NAHT) has deployed those funds judiciously to keep us in Safe Harbor under Chapter 40(b) by adding units to the Subsidized Housing Inventory at the required pace. However, the need is far greater than the 10% state requirement and is growing faster than our current pace of unit creation, all while unit cost is skyrocketing.

Non-profit housing organizations and private landlords have more than 700 families who have active applications pending for rental housing. These are folks who are already employed on Nantucket.

We need to:

• Do the analysis that will quantify the scale of the problem – how many units of housing do we need for our workforce to keep our economy sustainable?
• Continue the work to determine how to house the staff needed to keep our Town government functioning.
• Evaluate the impact of the short-term rental industry and establish appropriate regulations to support a balanced worker/visitor housing supply.
• Continue to advocate for the passage of the Housing Bank Bill AND, if it is delayed another session, commit a larger portion of the increased lodging tax revenues for housing initiatives in the FY 2024 budget.
• Develop and invest in new programs (down payment assistance; community land trust) to create home ownership opportunities at income levels above the Covenant Program’s 150% AMI.
• Have an honest dialog about the substandard conditions many people live in and our inability to enforce health codes without making people homeless.

While employer-owned housing can be one part of the overall solution, having one’s housing tied to employment can have unintended negative consequences and will ultimately make it impossible for new businesses to develop on Nantucket. We need an adequate ratio of housing that is deed-restricted to occupancy by people who live and work here so we can have a healthy economy and a thriving, sustainable community for generations to come.

Henry Sanford: To understand Nantucket’s housing issue, it is important to know what has already been done. Over the past several years, voters approved nearly $75,000,000 for housing. A large majority of that money has been used to purchase land and commit to building projects. The housing issue is entering a new phase, and as a member of the Select Board I will promote an agenda that focuses on education and innovation.

$75,000,000 is a big number, so the Town must consistently educate citizens about how money is spent and the impact of each project. That isn’t to say it is being spent unwisely. However, citizens deserve regular updates to feel confident about supporting future initiatives. Housing advocates will need large buy-in to continue and education is integral to maintaining support.

The Town has many constraints as a housing developer, and must innovate new ways to facilitate housing initiatives. This could mean the expansion of the covenant program to include higher income levels. Another idea is a housing bank: a non-profit who purchases the underlying land, and sells the attached structure as a 99 year leasehold to year round residents. This idea has been successfully implemented on Martha's Vineyard. You can learn more at https://www.ihtmv.org/.

Lastly, Town leaders must open dialogue with conservation groups to ensure preservation efforts are not competing with housing projects. The key is switching the conversation from creation of housing to preservation of housing, and that preservation of housing is directly correlated to protecting Nantucket’s environment and open space.

Other candidates have supported spending large sums of tax dollars, or restricting property rights in the hope of driving down housing costs. Neither are realistic, and both could have drastic consequences. To this point, Nantucket needs a capacity study as to what our limits are in regards to population, year round housing, labor, short term rentals, vacant second homes, open space, and the amount of visitors. Without this larger context, we are prone to tipping the scales too far in any one direction.

As my final point, I want to strongly emphasize that housing must go where there is the greatest need for the whole community - police, educators, firefighters, healthcare workers, and skilled labor. These are groups that have the largest direct impact on the quality of life for year round residents, and their housing stability must be prioritized in any effort going forward.

Clifford Williams: There is a law that states "equal work of equal pay"? I'm sure you can look around the town and find people doing the same job or more, but don't get paid the same. I don't believe we have ever put in place a pay scale giving people compensation for the type of work they do and qualifications they hold, with a starting base pay to were the position tops out. We need to, most of all, add in the Nantucket cost of living or we will never retain any employee long term. I just offered, at Town Meeting, Article 63, 2.33 acres of land to develop affordable housing for town employees, but it was not recommended. It's been over five year since we passed $20 million at ATM, but the question is; are we getting the best bang for our buck. I could have built 5 houses by January 2023 with a cost to the town of $2 million. With the price of land going up exponentially, the town could have made some agreement with me, if not now, then within the next year or so, but they didn't. With the price of land and housing going up due to the current administration's war on fossil fuel I'm not sure any of us are going to be able to live here. You need to develop the new technology and fuel source and implement it, before try to eliminate what we have now, I don't think they get that. "I'm with the government and I'm here to help" we're in trouble!