On .). In July 2018, the Zoning Board of Appeals was forced to halt a public hearing on the proposal after 150 residents swarmed the meeting room. In August, more than 700 crowded into the high school auditorium for the rescheduled hearing. “If there were a dozen people there in support of the project out of the 700 or 800, I would be surprised,” Holland said.
A community hearing on the Surfside Crossing development, where an attorney asked for a show of hands of who was opposed to the project.
Courtesy of Susan Carey
In response, the developers offered to downsize their project, reducing it to 40 houses and 60 condos, with more open space between buildings and larger, landscaped buffer zones along the property line. When that didn’t fly, they offered to restrict occupancy to year-round residents and employees of local nonprofits, and later, to reduce the number of condos to 40. None of it worked. In April 2019, the zoning board received more than 100 letters in opposition to the project, many of them mirroring the language suggested by Nantucket Tipping Point, according to the Inquirer and Mirror.
That summer, after the local zoning board approved a project just half the size of the original proposal, the developers appealed to the state. When members of the state Housing Appeals Committee arrived to inspect the proposed development area, they were greeted by nearly 100 angry Nantucketers carrying signs reading “Unsafe” and “A threat to Nantucket’s Aquifer.” According to an article in Nantucket Magazine, one of the protesters heckled Feeley, pointing at a nearby, smaller development and yelling, “Jamie, this is a nice development. Why don’t you do that, then we can all go home?”
“[This] is not a neighborhood issue, it’s a Nantucket issue,” another, Mary Beth Splaine, told the magazine. “We’ve reached a tipping point where our island cannot bear the infrastructure to go with this.”
“I live next door in what I’d hoped would be my forever home, but I don’t know,” she added. “The neighborhood’s changing.”
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. The group of nine neighbors, including Perry, claimed the Housing Appeals Committee had “effectively depriv[ed] them of all opportunities to challenge the massive project to be constructed next to their homes,” while the Nantucket Zoning Board claims the appeals committee “erroneously overturned the Board’s approval.”
“Nantucket should decide for itself how to balance its own resources and priorities,” the land council’s complaint read, “not a state agency in Boston.”
Courtesy of Joshua Posner and Jamie Feeley
While both sides appear to have dug in for a prolonged fight, Holland said he thinks there is middle ground to be found. The developers have floated the idea of setting aside another 25 percent of the development for year-round residents, which Holland said could “bring down the temperature” on the debate significantly. Even Perry said she thought there was an “agreeable outcome” to be had, though she added of the developers: “I don’t think they’ve seen it yet.”
Feely and Posner seem confident that their vision will emerge victorious. Posner said they faced similar legal troubles when getting Beach Plum off the ground, but wound up being permitted to build. They are already doing pre-permitting work for Surfside Crossing, with an eye toward starting construction in the spring or early summer.
“We do hope that as the reality of this and the overwhelmingly positive impact this is going to have on the island sinks in, we won’t have to go through the whole legal process,” Posner said. “But if we have to go the whole route, we’ll go the whole route.”
