NIMBY: Liberal Elites Lose It Over Proposed Nantucket Low-Income Housing Project

Liberal elites spend their summers on Nantucket, an isolated island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Many year-round residents live in homes worth millions of dollars and are furious about the plans to build an affordable housing complex on the island. 

Surfside Crossing is planning to build 156 homes on a 13-acre affordable housing development has sparked a flurry of lawsuits and protests. A record amount of residents have turned out at hearings to object to the low-income housing development amid the worst affordability crisis for homeownership ever. 

Residents claim the new housing development “will damage the environment and strain resources, and that the developers are using the subsidized housing angle to skirt zoning restrictions,” according to The Daily Beast. 

Meanwhile, the developers say most elite residents are just furious that a low-income housing project will be in their own multi-million backyard. 

On an island where some homes are listed for sale between $30 and +$50 million, and the median listing home prices are above $3 million — it should make sense why residents don’t want these affordable homes priced between $261,000 and $373,000.  

Tucker Holland, the town’s housing director, said it was “the biggest controversy that I can recall in recent years.”

Meghan Perry, a year-round resident and opponent of the low-income housing project, said:

“I think the developers underestimated our community.” 

However, the rich liberals don’t want the working poor in their backyards. These workers clean their [rich people] pools, mow their grass, police their neighborhoods, and serve them food — are forced to live off the island and commute to work because of affordability housing woes. 

Residents, such as Perry, claim the low-income development isn’t a case of NIMBY-ism but instead about protecting the environment.

She added: “It’s going to weaken our infrastructure, it’s going to put our first responders at risk, it’s going to put the community at risk.”

The Daily Beast said residents are slamming the low-income development with lawsuits at every avenue they can get:

The Housing Appeals Committee gave Surfside Crossing its final seal of approval in September 2022, but the fight didn’t stop there. Less than a month later, the developers were hit with three lawsuits challenging the decision, including a filing from the nonprofit Nantucket Land Council that claimed the construction would threaten its work on behalf of public lands.

And about a 1.5-hour ferry ride away is another liberal enclave of elites in Martha’s Vineyard — where National Guard units were called in last fall to transport dozens of migrants out of the town.  

A pattern is emerging of NIMBY-ism in elite liberal New England towns. These are examples of hypocrisy at its finest.