Nantucket Needs To Answer The Land Court Judge

To the editor: When the judge spoke to the Ward vs. Town of Nantucket legal teams this July, he made a quip that the next meeting should be on Nantucket since he’d heard it’s a nice place to visit in the summer. I took it as a hint that we should remember who and what we are.

Nantucket's a working island of 20,000 people that hosts 80,000 “summer people” and earns its keep doing so. We’re not a museum — yet. Massachusetts says we’re a bona fide Seasonal Community. Fortunately, that gives us access to tailored affordable housing initiatives designed for coastal tourist towns like ours, where the primary form of visitor accommodations is the rental of private homes on our American landmark island.

We’ve been so good at who and what we are for so long that the whole island earned that status for not one but two periods of historical significance. We’re no Southampton, and we don’t much resemble Cape Cod either. However, we are going to need tenacity to survive things like influencers, erosion, zoning “oopsies,” and the arrival of 75 billionaires if we want to keep Nantucket real.

Recently, the Select Board began to uphold our unique island identity by speaking of damage the wind farms do to it. It’s important for Nantucket’s future that the Select Board and the Department of Culture and Tourism apply their reasoning consistently around economic impact to our cottage industry of vacation renting (by supporting the local hospitality of Nantucket’s vacation rentals, not just corporate hotel ownership) or the island will run the risk of becoming a private museum stiffening at her joints.

Over the summer, instead of the Select Board or Planning Board frankly acknowledging the ‘unintentional deletion’ which caused Nantucket’s zoning mess, town counsel suggested a legal mediation between those funding the lawsuit against the town and the various citizens offering to put their finger in the dam. Then the boards urged the parties to “compromise.” Why didn’t they just offer an explanation to the community of what caused the mysterious zoning loophole in the first place? It provides a defined problem with an obvious solution for a whole bunch of confused people. Don’t owners of property need to know there’s a zoning emergency whereby “renting and leasing” uses (presumably including restaurant and retail spaces, long- and short-term rentals) were accidentally struck out of our zoning code in 2015 when voters were unaware of this fact? Without that knowledge, citizens are handicapped from coming up with the most efficient fix.

A broad, grassroots effort is the best way to allow for the restoration of the community’s spirit, rather than cobbled-together efforts by the boards and lawsuits that have been deepening the problem for years. We don’t need three-page warrant articles scapegoating short-term rentals (STRs) when the judge is looking for a straightforward fix.

The state doesn’t want Nantucket to scapegoat our 1,300 STRs either, according to the Seasonal Community designation. It recognizes that we need those rental accommodations in order to run our primary economy. With these recent developments since the last Town Meeting, we ask our local governance to now give clear support to Nantucket’s vacation rental practice instead of allowing constant attempts to restrict them unnecessarily.

The nation is watching Nantucket because we’re one of the oldest standard bearers of coastal summer resorts. Southampton folded on their rental rights this week — Hollywood made movies about its intense partying, making it infamous and attracting poorly behaved hosts and guests, it seems. Unfortunately, Nantucket’s Select Board just gave Universal Studios permission to begin filming here.

What I hope the Select Board will take up soon is the fact that our occupancy tax receipts from short-term rentals are trending down, not up. STRs once represented 72 percent of Nantucket’s occupancy tax revenue in 2019. By 2024, that share had fallen to 48 percent, leaving the town more than $1 million short of its own budget. So STRs are not spiraling out of control on Nantucket — they are softening, even as our finite hotel universe increases its share. This certainly doesn’t suggest a need to restrict our heritage tourism trade, but I don’t think we need to advertise it either.

A citizens’ petition, signed by hundreds of Nantucketers over the summer —of which I am one petitioner — answers the judge in simple fashion. It restores zoning, moots lawsuits, and protects the budget. Restrictions, if ever needed, can be debated after this emergency is repaired.

The petition creates no new rights for corporations or financial investors. The town has the tools it needs to deal with those, and the citizens need the town to do its job of enforcing those tools, with clarity and without conflicts of interest, before its boards ask Nantucketers to give up their property rights. Keep in mind, there were no nuisance behaviors found in the Ward case, just a missing sentence from our zoning code.

As we take stock of who and what we are, it’s important to note a possible shift occurring here. Are we moving from being a working community to one increasingly subsidized by philanthropy? The renting of cottages has long been our main form of preserving those Grey Ladies. Will philanthropy take over the preservation function if we restrict STRs? Younger homeowners told Town Meeting they will need their full rental rights to stay on Nantucket. Let’s listen to them.

Nantucket is a place that inspires people to stay and return for generations. Many islanders and summer families made it a generational practice to rent extra dwellings when they weren’t using them. No one ever thought in terms of “primary,” “accessory,” or “customarily incidental” when they used their properties because those terms didn’t exist here until the Ward case. But the way families used, and the way we use our properties now, is a continuous part of our protected historic heritage and should be respected as a basic property right on this seasonal resort island. Not only is our tradition of vacation renting part of Nantucket, it sustains many a household and drives a successful economy to boot.

The bottom line is that Nantucket is famously good at hosting visitors on an American landmark island. We’ve got bylaws to deal with nuisance behavior, and it’s the governance’s job to enforce honest complaints when and if necessary. Rental income on Nantucket in 2025 is no luxury — it’s become the difference between families staying or being forced to sell off. Restrictions amount to a property taking. They’re not appropriate for this working island if they’ll cut down the middle classes. Even the philanthropy of 75 billionaires can’t replace those deep roots.

Caroline Robinson Baltzer, 
member of the Capital Program Committee and the Town Counsel Study Committee (views expressed are personal)