For many years, locals talked about Nantucket like it was still the sleepy whaling town it had been centuries ago. And they weren’t wrong. The clapboard houses, lightship baskets, and roses climbing up the side of Sconset roofs inspired a sense of permanence.
Lately, though, it has been getting harder to go on pretending things haven’t changed. As the rich get richer, they get more competitive, it seems, which means that real-estate prices on the island have exploded and space for private jets at the airport is getting harder to find. But that’s not the new part—that’s been happening for decades.
The change is that, in a twist that combines Lord of the Flies with And Then There Were None, and maybe also the New England gothic of Nathaniel Hawthorne, some of the well-off of Nantucket finally seem to be losing their minds—and much to the detriment of their neighbors.
Teslas are crashing through plate-glass windows, beachgoers are wrangling sharks and getting airlifted to the hospital when—surprise, surprise—they get bitten, and there are so many Mercedes G Wagons knocking around that it’s not unheard of for someone to get into another person’s S.U.V., drive it onto the ferry, and take the two-hour trip across Nantucket Sound to Hyannis, only to realize something like they don’t own a car seat and have picked up the wrong gas-guzzler.
Earlier this summer, the Nantucket Health Department announced it is going to begin testing the town’s sewage to determine the levels of cocaine, fentanyl and other opiates to “get an idea of the standard usage of drugs,” said Jerico Mele, the town’s human-services director, to the Nantucket Current. I thought it was an Onion headline when I first read it, too.
That these are merely quotidian news events does not bode particularly well for the island. There’s also the e-word—erosion—which is a constant threat along the coastlines of Nantucket, considering it’s just a big pile of sand 30 miles off of Massachusetts. Meanwhile, other serious developments—things that really affect the whole island, rich and poor, not to mention its fragile ecology—are unfolding at an alarming pace. Herewith, a diary of some of this season’s most troubling examples.
The Chopping Block
There must be something in the water on Nantucket, because the island has been plagued by a rash of illegal tree cuttings.
In December 2022, shortly after a 3.2-acre ocean-view property in the village of Sconset had agreed to be sold to the Sconset Trust, a preservation group, for $4.7 million, out came the chain saw. Soon after, the sellers, the DiMartino family, had chopped down 158 trees, including Japanese-black-pine trees and pitch-pine trees, in order to “open up their view of the waterfront,” according to the Nantucket Current. The sale to the Sconset Trust closed after the tree chopping had occurred. Six months later, the Nantucket Conservation Commission ordered the family to fully restore the property at its own expense, and then some, by planting 445 trees, shrubs, and other native plants over a three-year period.
This past March, the developer-owners of a one-acre piece of land in the Wauwinet neighborhood started clear-cutting it without permission, drawing the ire of their neighbors. The local conservation commission quickly got on the case and fined the owners $300 a day, retroactive to February, until they presented to the town a restoration plan. (A remediation plan has since been submitted to the town, and the conservation commission fined the landowners a $11,100 civil penalty.)
But Nantucketers still aren’t getting the message, apparently. On February 22 of this year, Jonathan Jacoby walked across his neighbors’ driveway at 1 Tautemo Way and proceeded to cut down 16 of their mature cedar, cherry, and Leyland-cypress trees. According to a subsequent lawsuit filed by the property owners, Patricia Belford and the Belford Family Trust, against Jacoby, “many [of the trees] … were over 30 feet in height and decades old.” Making matters worse, Jacoby, who felled the trees himself, appeared to make a hash of the job, as evidenced by the pictures included in the lawsuit, leaving large, jagged stumps strewn around the property. (Jacoby enlisted Krasimir Kirilov, his former landscaper, to help with cleanup, but he was dismissed from the scene when the Belfords’ property manager, Matt Erisman, showed up and later called the police.)
The Belfords, who had lived there and cared for the trees for 50 years, were not home at the time—they now live in an assisted-living community in Florida—but allege that Jacoby cut down the trees so he could claim that his home had an ocean view.
Jacoby subsequently put his four-bedroom, nearly 5,000-square-foot home on the market, in May, for a little less than $10 million, boasting that it was “developed and situated to capture the sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean, Hummock Pond, and the 780 acres of conservation land between Hummock Pond and Madaket.” (The home was removed from the market in July, in the wake of the controversy. Jacoby claimed this was the same description of the property he’d used when he’d first put it up for sale, in August 2024.)
According to the complaint, the Belfords estimated that it would cost $486,000 to replace the trees that Jacoby had cut down. There was also the additional cost of planting them and the reduction in property value as a result of the mess that Jacoby left behind.
“The Belford property is now exposed to full view from the street,” they wrote in their complaint, “and occupants are subject to significantly increased road noise, light, and property intrusion.” They sued Jacoby for more than $1.4 million. In response to a Boston Globe reporter’s questions about the suit, Jacoby wrote a one-line e-mail: “I wasn’t trespassing, I was clearing out her crappy trees.”
In his formal answer to the Belfords’ complaint, filed in court this month, Jacoby argued that he had “permission” to cut down their trees, just as he had permission to cut down two other trees on a previous occasion. He asked the judge to dismiss the Belfords’ complaint. Jacoby denied he did anything “unlawful.”
In the meantime, Jacoby also faces criminal charges of trespassing and felony vandalism, and he could face up to three years in prison if convicted on the latter charge. The first hearing in the criminal case is set for September 15, in Nantucket District Court. (Jacoby’s attorney, Alan D. Rose, did not reply to a request for comment. Glenn A. Wood, the Belfords’ attorney, declined to be interviewed.)
If Jacoby gets convicted, will that put an end to the epidemic of unauthorized tree cutting on Nantucket? One can only hope.
Against the Wind
Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for windmills. A decade ago, he tried unsuccessfully to block the construction of a windmill project off the coast of his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Since then, he’s tilted at windmills by hurling the kinds of insults that he usually reserves for Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. He’s called them “ugly” and “monstrous,” and said they’re “a blight on the landscape.” He’s claimed they kill birds and injure whales, and that the power they generate is unreliable when the wind stops blowing. And in his second term as president, Trump has used executive orders and his Big Beautiful Bill to block new wind projects, stall existing ones, and end once robust benefits for wind power, such as tax credits, leasing rights, and loan programs.
Offshore wind projects are federally regulated, after all, by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). States and localities can neither approve nor deny the projects. At best, they can hope to influence where, when, and how they are built.
In 2015, a company called Vineyard Wind—a joint venture between the U.S. subsidiary of Iberdrola, the Spanish utility company, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish investment firm—proposed building a wind farm comprising 62 offshore wind turbines, each 800 feet tall, spaced roughly one nautical mile apart some 15 miles off the southern coasts of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. BOEM approved the project in 2021. For his part, Trump has not been able to stop the project since it was already permitted, although he has managed to criticize it, calling it an eyesore and claiming, inaccurately, that it was “built in China.”
If and when Vineyard Wind’s project becomes fully operational, it’s estimated the development will supply electric power to 400,000 homes in Massachusetts. So far, 23 turbines have been built, 17 of which are generating electricity. On a clear summer evening, before sunset, the turbines are clearly visible off Nantucket’s southern beaches.
Unable to block the Vineyard Wind project, the town of Nantucket decided to support it, provided that several requests were fulfilled: they asked Vineyard Wind to move the first row of turbines farther away from the Nantucket coastline; to paint them a non-reflective, off-white color; and to install an Aircraft Detection Lighting System (A.D.L.S.) designed to reduce light pollution in the night skies around the two islands by having the turbine lights activated only when an aircraft was nearby, as opposed to around the clock.
In August 2020, some eight months before BOEM approved the project, the town and county of Nantucket also signed a Good Neighbor Agreement with Vineyard Wind, which agreed to pay Nantucket $16 million over a decade or so—the first payment, of $4 million, was made in November 2023—in exchange for the community’s support for the project.
But the local infatuation with wind power, which was formerly regarded as a respectable way to generate much-needed energy, is now waning.
In July 2024, a fiberglass rotor blade the length of a football field and weighing more than 57 tons broke apart and fell from one of the windmill towers. Pieces of the blade, which was manufactured by a division of G.E. Vernova, washed up on Nantucket’s beaches. Needless to say, the debris field helped unify townspeople against Vineyard Wind and the project. G.E. Vernova claimed it was an “isolated event.”
Trump’s opposition to wind power seemed to put Vineyard Wind further down on its heels, and this summer Nantucket pressed its advantage. Town officials grew increasingly frustrated by Vineyard Wind’s lack of communication and its failure to implement the A.D.L.S. system, meaning the night sky was often ablaze with the red lights on the turbines, whether planes were flying nearby or not. In February lightning struck one of the turbines, but Vineyard Wind did not inform the town for days. In July 2025, a year after the blade disintegrated, G.E. Vernova agreed to pay the town of Nantucket $10.5 million. Vineyard Wind was intentionally excluded from the settlement agreement in an effort to further extract a payment from the company.
Then, on July 29, the Nantucket Select Board, which is effectively the island’s governing body, went public with a list of 15 demands for Vineyard Wind. There were calls for greater transparency and communication, for the activation of the A.D.L.S. system, for the creation of an escrow fund to cover cleanup and damage, and for the creation of a contingency plan for future blade failures or other problems.
“Vineyard Wind has repeatedly failed to meet three fundamental obligations to our community,” Brooke Mohr, a Select Board member, said in a video when she presented the list of demands. “They leave our community vulnerable to future project failures.”
In early August, Vineyard Wind announced that the A.D.L.S. system was finally working properly. “Vineyard Wind has worked hard for the past year to accelerate the deployment and implementation of A.D.L.S across the project as quickly as possible,” Vineyard Wind C.E.O. Klaus Møeller said in a statement to the Nantucket Current.
Skeptics remain on the island. ACK for Whales, a grassroots organization, has been a longtime opponent of the Vineyard Wind project. On August 9, they posted a video on X of the red blinking lights in the night sky. The caption read, “Check out that horizon. What an environmental and economic nightmare. Vineyard Wind continues to mislead. A.D.L.S. is never going to answer the harm being inflicted to the ocean and to coastal communities.”
The town gave Vineyard Wind until August 12 to respond to its demands. Mohr said that was plenty of time for the company, given that many of the demands were not new. But there was no response from Vineyard Wind.
Instead, the two sides agreed to meet on August 21 to discuss the situation. At the meeting, Vineyard Wind and the town agreed to cooperate better on improving communication, making sure the A.D.L.S. system is working properly, and creating an updated emergency response plan. They plan to meet again in September to continue the negotiations. (Vineyard Wind didn’t reply to a request for comment.)
This one ain’t over, not by a long shot.
An Island Divided
Nantucket is said to play home, at least during the summer months, to an estimated 75 billionaires, according to a local source. Everyone from Stephen Schwarzman, a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, and Peter McCausland, the founder of Airgas, to David Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, and Eric Schmidt, the multi-billionaire and onetime C.E.O. of Google, has a residence there. Considering there are only roughly 900 billionaires in the country, it’s quite something for nearly 10 percent of them to be concentrated on an island of only some 48 square miles.
For a small example of the island’s immense wealth, more than 45 people spent $50,000 or more on an event this month featuring the Boston Pops that benefited the Nantucket Cottage Hospital.
Making the preponderance of ultra-wealthy residents on Nantucket even more staggering is the fact that there are also hundreds of residents who do not have enough to eat and who can’t afford a place to live. They sleep in tents in Nantucket State Forest, in their cars in the parking lots of the many public beaches, or on the beaches themselves.
According to data compiled by Matt Haffenreffer, the founder of Process First, some 21 percent of Nantucket’s year-round population of approximately 14,255, or nearly 3,000 people, suffer from a degree of “food insecurity.”
“That can range from not having enough food to not knowing where their next meal is coming from, to people who are skipping meals and actually are hungry,” explains Bruce Percelay, a Boston developer who owns N Magazine and is also the new chairman of the board of the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. About 46 percent of the students in the Nantucket public schools apply for some form of food assistance, Percelay added. (Meanwhile, a catered, in-home dinner on the island can cost as much as $400 a person, according to a recent posting on Reddit, although there certainly are less expensive options, too.)
Percelay said the “knee-jerk reaction” to these facts is that the people who are hungry on Nantucket are either illegal aliens or at the bottom of the workforce. But that’s not completely true.
“That’s the most surprising part of it,” Percelay continues. “There are schoolteachers. There are people who work at the hospital. There are members of the Coast Guard who just can’t get enough food based on their incomes.”
The root cause, Percelay says, is a combination of exorbitant real-estate costs and the extreme lack of affordable housing. Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that paying for housing and food is a year-round expense for full-time residents, while the bulk of their income often comes during the short summer season, when the island’s population explodes to more than 80,000.
Nantucket’s response to this problem has been somewhat haphazard and uncoordinated. According to Percelay, there are something like 12 different organizations on Nantucket trying to address food insecurity, with the largest being the Nantucket Food Pantry, which serves around 3,500 meals a year.
Other efforts include those by Pip & Anchor, a gourmet-food store, which provides weekly boxes of locally sourced produce to some 80 Nantucket families in need, feeding about 300 people. There are another 150 people on the waiting list.
In order to remove any stigma, the boxes of food that Pip & Anchor provides look no different from the boxes of food prepared for those participating in the store’s co-op food program. “We’re not giving the scraps,” says Chris Sleeper, a co-founder of Pip & Anchor. “We’re giving fresh, sustainable food for nutrition and watching our community grow and watching these kids that come into our shop and pick up their boxes grow up and have more energy at school and more energy on the playing field or in their art classes.”
The two local Stop & Shop supermarkets, which are among the most successful in the Dutch-owned chain, participate in the Fresh Connect program, which provides $100 pre-paid debit cards to those in need for the purchase of healthy foods. But there are some 400 people on the waiting list to receive such cards. The supermarket chain has also just started lowering the prices of some goods in its stores.
An enterprising, young summer resident, Grant Ramirez, has started Feed Nantucket, which collects unopened, non-perishable food left behind by renters. Ramirez, in conjunction with Great Point Properties, is leaving empty bags at hundreds of rental properties this summer.
To coordinate these disparate efforts—and to give wealthy donors on the island an easier way to direct their philanthropy—Percelay created Nourish Nantucket, a nonprofit attempting to raise some $4 million a year to distribute to these organizations. He’d also like it to have a $20 million endowment.
Percelay worries that if the people who keep Nantucket running can’t afford housing and can’t afford food and decide to move off-island, to places such as Hyannis and Barnstable, or farther away, the island’s entire eco-system will begin to break down.
“This is obviously affecting the people that make the place function,” Percelay says. “Starting from the people that mow your lawn, pick up your trash, climbing up to people in the hospital, and all the way up to the Coast Guard. If these people start leaving, then you’re going to have billionaires mowing their own lawn.”
And, you know, we can’t have that.
William D. Cohan is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of such best-selling books as The Last Tycoons, House of Cards, and The Price of Silence. He is a founding partner of Puck. His latest book, Power Failure, is out now
