Nantucket has been debating short-term rentals for a long, long time. Tuesday, that debate just might finally come to an end.
After shooting down four separate proposals since 2021 that would limit who on the island community can rent out their house and for how long, Nantucket Town Meeting will vote on a measure that would broadly legalize short-term rentals for good. It’s an effort to lift the popular practice out of a regulatory gray zone and — perhaps — to finally put to rest a debate that has split this tight-knit community.
On one side of the debate are organizations such as Ack Now and Put Nantucket Neighborhoods First, who argue that unregulated short-term rentals take away year-round housing on the island and stress the limited local resources such as utilities and roadways, damaging the quality of life.
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“As (short-term rentals) take over more and more houses in neighborhoods, they really gut the community,” said Ack Now founder Peter McCausland. “It’s constant turnover. It’s like living next to a whole bunch of boutique hotels.”
On the other hand, organizations such as Nantucket Together and the website Save Nantucket Jobs argue that short-term rentals are essential to the island’s tourism economy. If severely limited, they would harm the small businesses that make up the island’s backbone, such as landscapers, cleaners, and restaurants.
Eithne Yelle, owner of Nantucket Catering Company, is wary that if the article to legalize short-term rentals doesn’t pass, her business — which runs weddings primarily in houses rented for the occasion — will suffer. Already, couples looking for spots in 2025 are wary of booking because of the uncertainty.
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“We hope to be able to hand down our (business) legacy to our children,” she said. “If it’s the wrong vote, it will be changed forever.”
With few hotels and no resorts, Nantucket has seen homeowners rent their properties to vacationers for a century. Doing so allows many to afford to keep their homes and allows visitors to come without paying exorbitant hotel rates, said Kathy Baird, cofounder and president of Nantucket Together, a nonprofit citizens group focused on preserving vacation rentals. The island has long taken a light hand in regulating who can rent their home and for how long, and at Town Meeting, residents have voted down several efforts to tighten those rules.
Then came a ruling in March by state Land Court Judge Michael Vhay in a lawsuit between two neighbors on the island. He ruled that using a house primarily as a short-term rental violated Nantucket zoning rules for residential areas, opening up the question of whether Nantucket’s entire approach could stand up to legal scrutiny.
“We couldn’t have written the opinion better for us,” said Ack Now’s McCausland, whose group funded most of the legal fees in the case on behalf of the resident who sued the next-door neighbors for renting out their four-bedroom home by the week.
But taken to its logical conclusion — outlawing short-term rentals across most of the island — the ruling could devastate Nantucket’s tourism-dependent economy, said Robert McLaughlin, a lawyer who represented the defendants in the lawsuit.
“The economy is predicated entirely on short-term rentals,” he said. “It’s not just the people running the houses. It’s the restaurants. It’s the T-shirt shops. It’s the landscapers and maintenance people, the real estate brokers — I mean, it goes on and on.”
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Vhay’s ruling threw the matter back to Nantucket’s Zoning Board of Appeals, which could write new rules clarifying where short-term rentals should be allowed. These would then need yet another vote by Town Meeting.
McLaughlin is among the many who are hoping for a resolution by voters on Tuesday — where the Town Meeting agenda includes a measure that would, at last, explicitly permit short-term rentals in all residential districts on the island. It would need a two-thirds majority to pass, and if it does, it would pre-empt the concerns raised in Vhay’s ruling.
If it does not, the matter the matter will go back to Nantucket’s Zoning Board of Appeals, which could write new rules clarifying where short-term rentals should be allowed and has scheduled a meeting in June to begin discussion. But if and when the ZBA finalizes those rules, they would still need another vote at Town Meeting, prolonging the debate into next year.
The number of short-term rentals on Nantucket, and the tensions around them, has grown steadily in recent years. The UMass Donahue Institute estimates there were 9,100 rooms available as short-term rentals at least some of the time in 2022, up 26 percent just from the year prior.
Some say that’s exacerbating the housing shortage on an island where the median home price last year was $2.5 million, according to the Warren Group. The number of so-called “seasonal vacants” — houses that sit empty for significant parts of the year — according to UMass Donohue, has roughly doubled since 1990, while year-round rentals have declined. And the island’s year-round population has grown by 40 percent over the last decade to more than 14,000, according to Census data, adding to the housing squeeze.
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While short-term rental supporters argue the market for vacation rentals and year-round housing are quite different, critics worry that full legalization would fuel more demand from investors and other off-island buyers who’d scoop up homes and rent them to vacationers.
“It could put a target on Nantucket’s back,” said full-time resident Matt Peel, who opposes the Town Meeting article.
However, for Charlene Nogueira, the owner of Nantucket Cleaning Services, if rentals are no longer allowed, it would have a “very bad impact on my company,” she said. “If I don’t have them anymore, what will I do? I cannot keep all my employees, right? Because I’m not going to need them.”
In the future if she wants to rent out her home on Nantucket to get her daughter through college, she believes she should be able to do so.
“It’s my right to do whatever I want with my house,” Nogueira said.
Of course, those opinions will persist. It’s human nature. And that has some in the tight-knit Nantucket community, like real estate agent Stephen Maury, predicting the debate over short-term rentals will go on and on, no matter the outcome on Tuesday.
“I have a feeling, in one form or another, we’ll be talking about this for years to come,” he said.
