A Quarter Of A Penny To End Hunger On Nantucket

There is a number that ought to embarrass us, and it isn’t the price of a waterfront teardown.

It’s this: roughly one in three year-round Nantucketers struggles to put food on the table. Thousands of our neighbors — the nurses at the Cottage Hospital, the teachers in our classrooms, the carpenters and caregivers who keep this island standing — regularly can’t afford to eat well on the island they hold together. Nearly half of our public school children qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The Nantucket Food Pantry feeds hundreds of full-time residents every single week.

We tell ourselves this is a hard problem. It is not. It is a small problem wearing the costume of a large one. And we already own the tool to solve it.

The arithmetic of conscience: In 2025, Nantucket real estate changed hands to the tune of roughly $1.8 billion. That is not a typo, and it is not an unusual year — annual sales volume here has run between $1.3 and $2 billion for the better part of a decade. We are a sandbar thirty miles out to sea that moves nearly two billion dollars in property a year.

Now set that next to the cost of actually closing our food gap. Depending on how you count it — whether you mean fully covering the food-budget shortfall for every food-insecure resident, or funding the network of programs that already do this work — the figure lands somewhere between four and six million dollars a year. Generous math, not stingy math.

Put those two numbers in the same sentence and the whole problem changes shape. A dedicated transfer fee of roughly three-tenths of one percent on home sales would raise enough to cover it. Not three percent. Not even one. About a quarter to a third of a single penny on every dollar of real estate sold.

On a $4 million home — close to our average sale price — that is somewhere around $12,000, paid once, at closing, by a buyer who just spent four million dollars. It would not move a single transaction. It would not cool the market by a degree. It would, however, mean that no one who works here goes hungry here.

We have done this before — at six times the size: Skeptics will say a new fee on real estate is a bridge too far. Here is the inconvenient fact for that argument: we already charge one, and it’s nearly seven times larger.

The Nantucket Land Bank has collected a 2 percent fee on most property transfers since 1983. Buyers pay it. The market absorbed it decades ago. And in exchange, this island protected thousands of acres of moors, beaches, and trails that are the very reason a home here is worth what it is. Nobody today seriously argues the Land Bank ruined Nantucket real estate. It helped make it.

What I am proposing is a fraction of that — a “people bank” alongside the land bank. If a 2 percent fee can permanently protect our open space, surely a fee one-seventh its size can keep the people who serve this community from skipping meals. We have already proven the mechanism works, that buyers will pay it, and that the sky does not fall.

Why a transfer fee, and not a bake sale: Food insecurity on Nantucket is not a charity problem; it is a structural one. It exists because housing costs swallow 60 to 70 percent of a working family’s income, leaving too little for the grocery store — and because our food simply costs more, freighted as it is across Nantucket Sound. You cannot fix a structural problem with one-off galas and grant cycles that may or may not renew. Programs here lurch from year to year on soft money and hope.

A modest, dedicated transfer fee does something charity cannot: it makes the funding permanent, predictable, and proportional. It rises and falls with the very wealth that drives our cost of living up in the first place. The people who benefit most from Nantucket’s astonishing real estate values would contribute a sliver of each transaction to ensure the island remains livable for the people who make it run. That is not redistribution. That is a community paying its own utility bill.

The ask: This requires no new bureaucracy we can’t build, no tax on year-round homeowners, no burden on the working families we’re trying to help. It requires a Town Meeting article, a special-act request to the Legislature — the same path the Land Bank itself walked — and the will to treat hunger as the solvable problem it is.

We are one of the wealthiest islands on Earth. We can find the moral imagination to feed our neighbors with a quarter of a penny on the dollar, or we can keep calling it complicated.

I know which Nantucket I’d rather live on.

Ed Mitzen