Town Buying Two Properties At Corner Of Fairgrounds Road, Parker Lane For $6.4 Million

The town is poised to acquire two mid-island properties for the development of affordable housing after the Affordable Housing Trust voted unanimously on Tuesday to sign a $6.4 million purchase and sale agreement for 10 Parker Lane and 55 Fairgrounds Road.

The adjacent lots at the corner of Parker Lane and Fairgrounds Road total two acres, and were presented to the Trust by an island resident during her estate planning process, according to Brian Sullivan, chair of the town's Affordable Housing Trust.

The funding for the transaction must still be approved by the Select Board.

Sullivan said the goal of the acquisition was to create year-round homes with deed restrictions that will reserve them for households earning up to 240 percent of Nantucket's area median income.

Under the current R-10 zoning, the properties allow for 10,000-square-foot lots, but no formal plan has been developed yet. The property at 55 Fairgrounds Road is undeveloped, while the Parker Lane lot includes an existing single-family home.

The properties are owned by Margaret Feindel, a board member of the nearby Nantucket Lighthouse School, who has been coming to Nantucket since the 1970s and moved to the island year-round in 2008. Feindel, who built the existing home at 10 Parker Lane in the early 1970s with her late husband David, will retain life rights to the dwelling.

"A life estate agreement will allow the current resident to remain in their home while plans are developed and implemented for the property’s overall development in a staged approach," Sullivan stated.

Feindel told the Current on Tuesday that it had always been a goal with her husband to have the properties benefit Nantucket's year-round community.

"My husband who passed a couple of years ago and I, we've been here since the early 1970s and we retired here," Feindel said. "We've always been keen on doing something, eventually, with our land that would be helpful to the year-round community. I'm really pleased the housing trust is buying it to provide home ownership to island residents. It's a marvelous opportunity."

Sullivan added that the two properties were particularly attractive to the Affordable Housing Trust because the lots have direct access to municipal infrastructure from Fairgrounds Road.

"It's an approval-not-required site, meaning no additional infrastructure expenses for a road or drainage, so it was a very attractive opportunity because the soft costs are not there," Sullivan said.

While the Affordable Housing Trust has been successful in acquiring existing units for affordable housing on First Way, Somerset Road, and Surfside Road, it has struggled with developing several vacant properties it has acquired with a war chest of nearly $90 million approved by voters for affordable housing initiatives over the past six years.

The Trust now owns properties on Orange Street, Bartlett Road, White Street, Vesper Lane, and Amelia Drive, all of which remain vacant and undeveloped. In March 2024, the town rejected the lone bid it received to develop the property on Orange Street into 32 affordable rental units, illustrating the challenging complexities of its efforts to address Nantucket's housing crisis.

The two lots at 135 and 137 Orange Street were acquired by the Affordable Housing Trust in 2020 for $3.5 million, the first of its acquisitions under the so-called "Neighborhood First" initiative. In 2023, the Trust and the Nantucket Land Bank joined forces to buy an adjacent vacant lot at 141 Orange Street for $1.7 million. Combined, the lots are nearly an acre of land where the 32 units of affordable workforce rental housing are slated to be built.

The town has since reissued a combined RFP to develop the lots Orange Street, Vesper Lane, and Bartlett Road and is awaiting responses.

Meanwhile, the town's high-profile Wiggles Way affordable workforce apartment complex off Fairgrounds Road remains under construction after several setbacks that have pushed back the timeline for completion and required two multi-million-dollar infusions of additional capital from the town.

The Wiggles Way project will ultimately include 38 bedrooms in 22 new apartments across eight buildings at 31 Fairgrounds Road. The apartments - which include one-, two-, and three-bedroom units - are restricted to eligible households earning between 80 percent and 150 percent of Nantucket's area median income. Six will be reserved as "municipal preference units" for town and school employees.T

The total cost for the Wiggles Way apartments now stands at $22 million, including the initial $3.6 million grant from the town to Housing Nantucket to acquire the land from the Coffin family in 2021.