Has Nantucket Reached The Tipping Point?

I’ve been coming to Nantucket since I was 12 years old. I was lucky enough to have friends that brought me when I was younger and a husband who loved it in my married years. Nantucket has always been a special place — quaint, well preserved, preppy. When I was younger my friends whose families had houses there often had summer jobs scooping ice cream or making deli sandwiches.  
Over the years Nantucket has gotten fancier and pricier. Yes, the quaint still exists but more and more the houses are getting bigger and more outrageous. On this visit my friend Candi looked at the real estate listings and wondered where all the second, third and forth home owners who could afford a five to fifteen million dollar house came from. This got me thinking about the economics of the small island and wondering where all the support people lived.
There has been a strong faction of people who want to keep Nantucket sparsely populated with lots of land in trust. The only problem is that most people who own a six million dollar house don’t clean it, paint it, cut the grass, fix the plumbing, or maintain the security system themselves. In fact most of them only live in it at most a few months a years so they are not even around to keep an eye on their valuable property.
Today while I was taking my long morning walk west of town the majority of people who drove past me were construction, lawn maintenance or house cleaning people of some kind. Where do these people live I wondered? We had a conversation with a restaurant owner last night about the issue of where workers live and she said that it is getting harder and harder for seasonal help to find a bed, let alone a home. College kids whose families own houses no longer want to scoop ice cream. 
N magazine, the island’s full color local yielded some answers to my questions. I found out that last year the most expensive house on the island sold for $21.5 million and the least expensive for $325,000. Imagine you are a waitress, do you think you could afford a $325,000 house. And the supply at the low end is minuscule. N magazine did a feature on how the island relies on a bastion of commuters from the mainland who travel daily either by ferry or plane to their jobs on the island. People like all the fire fighters, the hospital staff, including all the doctors, and most of the craftsmen who build and maintain the multi-million dollar homes. Even the Stop and Shop grocery flys works in daily. Why do they spend two hours a day commuting? Because they can charge a premium to their island customers who have no other choice. But is it really good to have a community where the firemen can’t afford to live?
N magazine was full of ads for the most fabulous estates for sales from $31 million down to a couple of million, but then I ran across a little bullet, home prices are down 20% this year on Nantucket. Wow, that’s a lot. And there are many houses for sale. Have people who own these luxurious places tired of how hard and expensive it is to take care of them?   
Don’t get me wrong, Nantucket is still a fabulous place to visit. And the very rich can certainly spend their money any way they want. Please spend it and keep the economy greased up, but I think Nantucket could benefit from growing their middle class by creating some reasonable housing. Everywhere I went on the island I saw help wanted signs. I probably should have taken on a job for the few days I was there, at least while Russ was working. The business owners I talked to were dying from a lack of help.
Those people who thought they were doing the right thing to keep Nantucket sparse didn’t realize they were creating a place where they might have to clean their own house or cut their own grass or replace their own roof.
This coming weekend a large number of important movers and shakers from all over the world are coming to the island for something called the Nantucket Project. It is a big conference on how people of influence can improve the world. I hope they spend a session or two thinking about Nantucket itself. It just can not be healthy to have an all 1% economy. Eventually it will collapse.