Nantucket: A Bubble Inside a Bubble

My 20 years in real estate development didn’t fully prepare me for what I encountered when I visited Nantucket. I often describe the island as a “bubble within a bubble.” A place so particular that there are no name-brand anythings on Nantucket. A Starbucks would never get approved for construction, and the national quick serve like Chick-fil-A would be outcasts on an island where $200,000 1980s retrofitted Land Rover Defenders outnumber street lights 100 to 0.

It's a wonderful place to live and a wonderful place to visit, but working in the service or public sector may not be so wonderful. The tradeoff for access to the uniqueness of Nantucket for lower and middle-wage workers is that even the lowest-cost apartment is often out of financial reach.

The median home price in Nantucket is currently around $2.5 million, which is out of reach for many of the people who work on the island.

Those who own homes and enjoy the island understand that it needs to be affordable for the waiter who shucks the highly coveted Pocomo Meadow oysters or delicately pours the perfectly chilled glass of Sancerre. With homeowners, there is no animosity against affordable housing on the island, as long as it's unseen and unheard. New affordable workforce housing becomes almost impossible when 50% of the island is a nature conservation, and homeowners are fighting to relegate affordable housing into smaller and smaller pockets on the island.

You might be asking, what does any of this have to do with self storage or the economy? I know some of you are saying, "I hope this isn't another of Drew's random blogs like the  $6.2 Million Dollar Banana ." Here is the relevance, as a requirement from the Town of Nantucket for the approval of our 96,000 SF self storage facility, they required us to build two townhomes adjacent to our facility on the property. The Town’s intention, which was well thought out, is that if we bring new jobs to the island, like a self storage facility manager and staff, we better not add any additional pressure to an already hyper-stressed housing market. By approving this development, the Town does not want to make a bad housing situation worse.

Residential townhome under construction on the DXD - Nantucket site

Living next to self storage is far from exciting, but we're not a bad neighbor. Only a few customers visit per day, it's not noisy, we don't use a lot of water, traffic is light, etc. When we sit down with neighbors and explain why self storage would be a good fit adjacent to homes, they tend to agree. I've written about these ancillary uses adjacent to self storage before in the blog, Creative Self Storage Solutions Offer Community Appeal. 

When I read this NY Times article about public workers sleeping in their cars because they cannot afford housing, at least I can say I know there will be two more rental units coming online this fall.