A multimillion-dollar home perched right on the edge of Sconset Bluff in Nantucket.
Photo: Kit Noble
In June, Don Vaccaro, the founder of TicketNetwork, a ticket-brokering business, bought a house so close to the edge of an eroding Nantucket beach that even he admits it’s unlikely to survive the year. The sellers, a Connecticut couple who’d summered at 28 Sheep Pond Road since 1988, had been hoping to spend one last summer there, but after a series of winter storms brought the beach perilously close to their back porch, they shifted course. “All winter I had been really frantically trying to see if any of the organizations would consider taking the house and moving it, and we would help with the cost of moving,” owner Jane Carlin told the Nantucket Current earlier this year. But free houses that need to be moved are common on Nantucket — owners have to offer their properties for the taking before they can get a demolition permit to knock them down — and no one stepped up to claim the shingled, 1,700-square-foot home, which had just been assessed by the town at $1.9 million. When Vaccaro, who also owns the property next door, called to offer $200,000, Carlin and her husband were thrilled: “We said ‘Whoa! We’re not going to say no.’”
“Everyone knows the houses are going to fall into the sea, but $200,000 is a bargain,” Vaccaro told me when we talked on the phone last month. “I took my whole family out for two weekends this summer. It’s a phenomenal location, surrounded by conservation land, no one is around you, no one is building there.” The neighborhood is, after all, being overtaken by the beach. When Carlin and her husband bought their house 36 years ago, there were three houses, an acre of land, and the road itself (since moved back) standing between them and the water. Last fall, the house just down the street at 21 Sheep Pond Road was demolished because of erosion.
A house being demolished last October on Sheep Pond Road.
Photo: Kit Noble
Nantucket, a 48-square-mile island studded with multimillion-dollar beach homes falling into the ocean, is a bellwether of what happens when the forces of nature run up against the forces of extreme wealth. The median price for a single-family home was $3.2 million in 2023, up from $1.86 million in 2019. Waterfront homes not immediately threatened by climate change have continued to trade for ever-higher sums — last year, a harborside compound sold for $38.1 million, a Massachusetts record. A few months later, the record was broken when Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy bought a $42 million compound, also on the harbor. Which makes oceanfront “deals” like those on Sheep Pond Road all the more tantalizing — if, that is, you can afford to pay cash (banks won’t finance them) and take the hit when they go (insurers won’t underwrite them). And then you wait to see what the winter brings. Erosion, while inevitable, is also erratic. You can map and model, but you never know exactly what will happen, and that’s what drives gamblers like Vaccaro, whose other house on Sheep Pond looked like it would last maybe two years but has held out for a decade. One year, a storm even dumped sand back onto the beach — a surprise windfall.
“There is now this small submarket of homes that people are willing to lose,” says Shelly Lockwood, a Nantucket real-estate agent who, along with a few others, started a continuing-education class for brokers to make sure they, and buyers, understand the risks of coastal erosion and rising sea levels — that, for instance, once the septic tank is compromised, you have to either move it at a cost of about $100,000 (if there’s anywhere to move it to) or pay to demolish the house. For those willing to take the risk on a waterfront house anyway, she says, “You can slap some white paint on it, fill it with Ikea furniture, and rent it out for $30,000 a month, and you might get it for ten years or you might get it for one.”
Lockwood, who’s lived on the island for decades, adds that homes being swept to sea is nothing new — several were lost during the 1991 “perfect storm” that Sebastian Junger wrote about. “But those were probably only worth $30,000 or $40,000. Now they would be $3 million to $4 million houses. The value is so much higher and it’s happening so much more frequently. That’s the intrigue. It’s not a little shack. We’re losing multimillion-dollar homes on the regular.”
That Nantucket, a giant sandbar about 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, is getting washed away is undeniable. The town’s most recent coastal-resiliency report projected that in the next 50 years, 2,373 structures would be at risk from coastal flooding and erosion. Steamboat Wharf, where the ferries come in, would be “completely cut off from surrounding roadways at mean monthly high water.” The airport? Also at significant risk of “damage and disruption.”
“There’s a joke on Nantucket that eventually everyone is going to have waterfront property,” says Chip Webster, an architect who specializes in helping homeowners move their mansions before they fall into the sea. When we spoke, he’d just returned from a meeting with a client whose house, “one of the most top-end, valuable homes” on the island, was now just 17 feet from the edge of a cliff. “It could be going into the ocean a year from now,” says Webster. “It lost 37 feet last year. If we have another winter as bad as last year, that could be it.”
This home on Sheep Pond Road in Madaket had just been moved back from the edge of the eroding coastline.
Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty
The difference between Nantucket and so many other places experiencing climate change is that people in Nantucket can afford to do something — often quite a lot — about it. In 2019, Webster coordinated the move of a historic, 10,000-square-foot mansion, En Fin, that was perched 25 feet from the edge of a bluff. En Fin had been owned by the Gamble family (as in Procter & Gamble), who sold the mansion at the discounted price of $8.4 million in 2012 (it had been listed for $16 million a few years earlier). “I think it might have been the largest move of a house in one piece — the on-island company that did it had to bring in a specialty company that does skyscrapers,” Webster says. Shifting the house 80 feet to the north and 60 feet to the east cost $1.6 million, a price that doesn’t seem to have fazed the new owners, who also opted to build a 6,500-square-foot addition as part of the project (bringing the total costs to about $4 million). “Ultimately, this move has been a no-brainer for us,” the owner told The Wall Street Journal.
The move made sense for a number of reasons: The house was historic and located harborside, meaning that the gains of the move wouldn’t be so easily wiped out — the waves there are less forceful, so there’s less erosion to begin with and more options for mitigating it. But perhaps most significantly, it was on seven acres, so there was somewhere to move it to. A lot of Nantucket properties don’t have that kind of land. “There’s often a property restraint, especially because so much of the land on the island is conservation land,” says John Correia, a manager at Toscana, one of the two companies on Nantucket that specialize in moving houses. The other option is to chop a house into several pieces and move it inland, giving up on waterfront living altogether. Correia says that the company already has about five inland moves lined up for the fall and winter.
“We move houses a lot here on Nantucket,” says broker Greg Mckechnie, the principal at Great Point Properties. He told me he’d sold a house that had been cut into four pieces and relocated from Baxter Road, one of the biggest ocean-facing erosion zones, to Monomoy, on the harbor side, for $11 million. “If it’s waterfront and not subject to erosion, that’s where you see the highest prices,” he says. Ocean currents, winds, and Nantucket’s many coastal shoals make every site unique. The Squam waterfront, on the ocean-facing eastern coast of Nantucket, which has been spared the kind of erosion seen on Baxter Road, has some of the highest valuations. The two record sales from last year? Both harborside.
But even harborfront properties benefit from erosion-stabilization measures, and such measures are expensive and ongoing. The methods that are considered most environmentally friendly, and therefore more likely to be approved by the town, involve creating bulwarks on the beach of biodegradable materials that slow erosion but must be replenished frequently: coconut-fiber logs heaped with sand, grasses, plantings. Sand alone can run anywhere from the tens to hundreds of thousands per year, according to engineer Arthur Gasbarro of Nantucket Engineering & Survey. And no matter how aggressive homeowners want to be, there’s a limit to what can actually be done, especially oceanside. “I look at it as coastal stabilization more than erosion control — what can we do to improve the upland without impacting the beach,” Gasbarro says. “We’re not in a situation of stopping it. We’re in a situation of trying to manage it as best we can.”
The house at 93 Baxter Road, as shown in listing photos, is named “Swept Away” and sold for $899,000 three years ago. The house, mere feet from the edge of the cliff, is likely to collapse if the geotubes below are removed.
Photo: Maury People Sothebys
Homeowners are also limited not just in what they can do or what they can afford to do, but also in what they’re allowed to do. Someone can’t just, say, build a seawall because they want to. Everything has to go through the Nantucket Conservation Commission, and the regulatory environment, Gasbarro says, “is dynamic, much like the shoreline.” More than a decade ago, a group of homeowners on Baxter Road, the imperiled enclave above Sconset Bluff on the east side of the island, applied for a permit to install 4,000 feet of geotubes — huge, sand-filled cylinders that would sit on the beach at the base of the cliff and absorb the impact of the waves to prevent the bluff from washing away further. The town denied their application, citing coastal-erosion experts who believe man-made installations, be they seawalls or the softer geotubes, interfere with a beach’s natural behaviors and may cause erosion elsewhere. But homeowners appealed to the state, 900 feet of tubes were installed (a concession, they believed short-term, given the untested nature of the project), and “the battle of the bluff” began.
Ten years later, the battle is still raging: a to and fro of permitting appeals and lawsuits, including several filed by neighbors (among them, mergers-and-acquisitions mogul Robert Greenhill, who owns a large home a mile to the north of the geotubes and claims to have lost two acres of beach since their installation). But there is an imminent ruling on whether the project can be expanded. The geotubes do seem to be working — there’s been no erosion where they’re located— but the project, a pilot that the homeowners believed would, if successful, be expanded into a larger and financially sustainable installation, has been at a standstill for years, mired in disagreement about what coastal interventions, if any, should be allowed. Homeowners, upset that the project’s expansion has stalled for so long, have stopped heaping the tubes with the sacrificial sand, which washes away in storms and needs to be replenished (at a cost of about $1 million a year), putting them in violation of their permit. They’re currently under an order (momentarily stayed) to remove the tubes, which would likely cause the immediate collapse of two houses a few feet from the edge of the bluff “that are hanging on by their fingernails,” according to Josh Posner, an affordable-housing developer and the president of the Siasconset Beach (i.e., Sconset) Preservation fund, which he helped found in the early 1990s.
It would also likely result in the closure of the road that leads to the Sankaty Lighthouse, a popular tourist attraction. Posner, who still summers in the house his parents bought in the 1960s, told me that he and about 25 other homeowners have collectively spent around $18 million on the pilot project so far. “We’ve been coming up with these major contributions, based on the belief that it would be expanded if it was not hurting anyone else and appeared to be successful.”
Geotubes filled with sand have been installed by homeowners at the base of Sconset Bluff, but are also the subject of many lawsuits from neighbors who claim they cause erosion elsewhere.
Photo: Kit Noble
Posner says that he already moved his house back 50 feet in 2007 (the same year the Sankaty Lighthouse was relocated away from the edge of Sconset Bluff) and would accept defeat if there was no remedy to the erosion endangering it. “We’ve had a good run; I can deal with that.” But, he added, “What I cannot deal with is, if we’ve found a solution that will not negatively impact anyone else, that can be privately paid for, that works, that’s allowed by law, to surrender in the face of diehard believers in ‘thou shalt not mess with mother nature.’”
The two Sconset Bluff houses in danger of imminent collapse, 93 and 97 Baxter Road, are also recent erosion deals. They both sold three years ago, in the summer of 2021, to Charles and Miglena Fotopoulos, who own car dealerships in Lowell and Westwood, Massachusetts. They paid $899,000 for 93 Baxter and $400,000 for 97 Baxter. In the interview Charles gave to Nantucket magazine at the time, he explained, “It was cheap and I said, ‘Hey, I’ll buy it. The foundation is structurally sound, and with the geotubes there, unless we have a killer storm, I think we’re safe.’ A lot of people think I’m crazy, but if I get five years out of it, I think I’m good.”
He did allow that the home’s precarity, a few feet from the edge of a 40-foot drop, offered “both a great view and a scary view.” (“I wouldn’t let young children play in that yard,” one broker told me.) But there were other indications that the purchases might have involved more than a little wishful thinking: A similar house down the street was $8.4 million, so, Charles said, it was “really worth $8 million if you really think about it.”
6 Sheep Pond Road, as shown in listing photos, lost more than a hundred feet of land between July and December of last year. It sold for $600,000 in February.
Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty
Even though buying a waterfront house on Nantucket these days generally involves maps upon maps, overlaying erosion and flood data from the past to arrive at some reasonable predictions about what will happen in the future, ultimately, some of the deals come down to the buyer remaining in a state of suspended fantasy, believing, even when staring at evidence to the contrary, that you will be the exception. Billionaire Barry Sternlicht, who demolished his second Hummock Pond Road house this spring, was said, in the words of Vanity Fair, to have been “caught off guard” by two hurricanes that hit in the fall of 2020, which, despite being out to sea, wiped out about 60 feet of Sternlicht’s land in a week. Sternlicht, who had bought the second property next to his first a year before the hurricanes, had plans to move his house there, but before he could, Mother Nature made it clear that the “safe” location was hardly that.
This February — a few months before Vaccaro bought his second home on the ocean — 6 Sheep Pond Road, a half-mile down the beach, sold for $600,000. It had last traded for $1.65 million in 2021, and a geological study for that time estimated that it would last two decades, maybe more, given the 100-plus feet from the shore and the current rate of erosion. But the property lost 15 feet in July, then 20 more in Hurricane Lee that September, shortly after the owners listed it for $2.3 million, according to Boston.com. By December, another storm had taken off an additional 70 feet. Which would seem like a cautionary tale, but after the price dropped to $600,000, the listing broker told the Nantucket Current that she was inundated with calls, 30 to 40 a day. The buyer, a managing partner at commercial real-estate firm JLL, struck the resigned, albeit cautiously optimistic note that has become typical in doomed beach-house sales. It was, he told the paper, “a losing battle” and he had “no certainty” around the time that erosion would “eventually — or maybe not” take out that house. But he’d be happy if he could keep it for a few years. Or “hopefully a little longer.”
Lockwood, the real-estate broker, had a bleaker outlook. “You look at these projections and think, ‘Oh, 11 feet a year, that seems manageable,’ But then you lose 70 feet in one storm and there goes your plan.” And “that storm didn’t even have a name!” she adds. “It was just really rainy and windy for a few days.”
