IN A SCENE that has played out in communities across the state, residents and town officials on Nantucket have waged a yearslong campaign to stop a development proposal for new housing. This one would bring 156 condominiums — a quarter of which would be set aside as affordable housing — to a neighborhood in the central part of the island. Opposition to new housing on Nantucket puts the island squarely in company with lots of affluent communities in Massachusetts, where efforts to address a dire housing shortage often run into stiff resistance.  

But in the latest chapter of the battle on Nantucket, which has stretched on for seven years, opponents have seized on an issue often championed by communities of color and progressive activists to fight industrial pollution in low-income communities as part of their campaign to block affordable housing in a high-cost enclave where it is desperately needed.  

Based on the 2020 Census, the section of Nantucket where developers hope to build their 40B affordable housing project known as Surfside Crossing is now recognized as an environmental justice community under state rules.  

To qualify, an area’s population must have below-average median household income or high percentages of minority individuals or households with limited English proficiency. This part of Nantucket, home to a large Hispanic community, qualifies an environmental justice community because minorities make up 40 percent or more of the population.  

Citing the new environmental justice designation, residents opposed to the project filed a “fail-safe review” petition with the state’s top environmental official on August 25 — a direct appeal to Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper to order the developer to release additional environmental information before the project can advance, a move that would further stall the proposal.  

Whether it’s just a calculated bid to pull any available lever in the NIMBY arsenal or the legitimate invocation of a serious environmental threat, or perhaps both, it is now in the hands of the Healey administration. 

It’s the exact kind of bureaucratic wrangling Gov. Maura Healey has sought to reduce, and it cuts right at the heart of the tensions surrounding her push to build 220,000 new homes by 2035. And while Healey has also voiced strong support for environmental justice issues, she has proposed changes to regulations under the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act, the main law governing state environmental review of development projects, that her administration say are aimed at promoting more affordable housing.  

The project is filed under the state’s 40B affordable housing law, which lets developers bypass local zoning approval in communities where less than 10 percent of existing housing stock is deemed affordable if they set aside 20 to 25 percent of units as affordable housing. 

Like all development proposals, however, 40B projects are still subject to environmental regulation.  

The Surfside project would be located within the public water supply zone for an EPA-designated sole source aquifer that “if contaminated, would create a significant hazard to public health,” according to the agency. A 2018 hydrogeologic assessment of the project found that there is “increased potential” for contamination that could “impair the Town’s water supply,” though the report ultimately concluded that the proposal does not present a significant threat to Nantucket’s water. 

Opponents have cited the threat to the local water supply in their petition to the state for further review under the environmental justice designation. They also argue that the presence of five other affordable housing projects within a 1-mile radius of the proposed site creates “an overwhelming and disproportionate burden on one section of the island” — overdevelopment concerns that town officials have shared from the beginning.   

“I think that rules are in place to safeguard communities are important, and I think when politicians or developers try to streamline those or circumvent them, or look for a waiver from them, that’s the only reason to do it: because you’re trying to do something outside of what should be allowed,” said Meghan Perry, who serves on the board of Nantucket Tipping Point, a local group that has fought the housing proposal. “If you don’t have clean water, it doesn’t matter how many housing units you have.” 

The Healey administration wouldn’t comment on the pending petition, but it is sticking by its view that the state can unlock more housing production by streamlining permitting and speeding up approvals. 

“The same communities that face some of the biggest environmental issues also struggle to find affordable, energy efficient homes,” Maria Hardiman, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement. “Gov. Healey’s proposed changes to [Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act] regulations will help us ensure that we’re incentivizing the kinds of housing we need the most – dense, affordable, and resilient projects with low energy bills. This kind of balanced approach can help us build healthier, more affordable neighborhoods.” 

The developers of the Surfside project took aim at the use of the environmental justice designation as little more than a cynical attempt to find any excuse to block affordable housing on the island.   

“In my 40-plus years developing affordable housing I have seen so many fake claims from the NIMBY crowd aimed at stopping much-needed housing, but this might take the cake as the most hypocritical and disingenuous move ever,” said Josh Posner, Surfside Crossing’s co-developer. “We hope [the state environmental policy office] can see through this upside-down perversion of the environmental justice guidelines and not inadvertently establish yet another tool for opponents trying to kill this high quality, well-located development.”   

Nantucket is rightly regarded as the ultimate New England address of the ultra-rich, with a median home sale price last year of $2.8 million. A waterfront compound sold for more than $38 million in 2023, shattering the record for the most paid for a single residence on Nantucket, and more than half of the island’s housing units are owned by seasonal residents.  

Elsewhere on the island, though, the first overnight housing shelter on Nantucket opened two years ago to accommodate a growing population of year-round residents that can’t make ends meet. The median home sale price has risen nearly 90 percent over the last five years ago as wealthy buyers snatch up vacation homes, compounding the island’s permanent affordable housing challenges tied to its limited land availability and high costs of shipping in construction materials. 

Housing advocates are urging Healey to keep the focus on the need to reduce the state’s cost of living. Jesse Kanson-Benavav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, said that protracted reviews like the one sought by the Surfside opponents can ultimately hurt the community that the reviews are intended to protect. 

“This is a tension point for us in Massachusetts,” said Kanson-Benavav, who also served on Healey’s Commission on Unlocking Housing Production. “We want to protect environmental justice communities. At the same time, what are we giving up when we’re making it incredibly costly to build homes around those communities? When it takes a year or more for an environmental review to be completed, that increases costs. Those costs are borne somewhere, and where they are borne is in the ultimate rental or sale prices of the homes that are built in that project if it is finally completed.” 

But Tristan Thomas, director of policy at the Roxbury-based Alternatives for Community & Environment, a nonprofit focused on environmental justice, or EJ, issues, said it’s important to separate whatever motives one thinks might be driving opponents from the facts on the ground or, in this case, underground.  

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just some NIMBY community trying to use whatever law in the books to keep their neighborhood quiet or keep their neighborhood how they want it to be,” Thomas said. “But if the aquifer needs to be protected, and there are legitimate EJ concerns, I’m glad that there’s a law to work it through a process to make a determination.” 

Marcos Luna, professor of geography and sustainability at Salem State University and a member of the state’s Environmental Justice Council, said he fully recognizes the dire conditions of a lack of affordable housing in Massachusetts as a whole — which itself disproportionately hurts those that environmental justice laws are aimed at protecting. At the same time, Luna said he’s skeptical of efforts to get rid of red tape for the sake of it, since those rules were put in place to correct past mistakes of overdevelopment without due consideration. 

That’s precisely what makes projects like Surfside Crossing so difficult for state and local officials to navigate.  

“On the Cape and Islands, housing affordability is a real crisis, and a significant amount of folks who are crucial to the workforce and are themselves residents and deserve access to housing,” he said. “That’s a real thing – as real as water. It should be evaluated in that context.” 

State officials already reviewed the project five years ago and declined to require the additional environmental scrutiny now sought through the environmental justice petition. That endorsement of the project came after the developer in 2020 changed its proposal from a mix of multi-unit buildings and single-family homes to only multi-unit buildings with fewer overall bedrooms. 

The state-level Housing Appeals Committee, which has oversight on 40B projects, approved that new plan. But opponents went to court, arguing that the 2020 changes were substantial enough that the review process should start over. A Superior Court ruling found in their favor, ordering the project to go back through the bureaucratic wheel by remanding it to the local zoning board.  

The Nantucket Zoning Board of Appeals rejected the proposal in a unanimous 5-0 decision earlier this year. Surfside Crossing promptly took the case for a second time to the state Housing Appeals Committee, which held a hearing last month on the proposal.  

But opponents have now thrown their environmental justice curveball, hoping Tepper, the environmental affairs secretary, will order further review of the project, while the developers are banking on the state Housing Appeals Committee to again green light it.  

All of that leaves the Healey administration walking something of a political and policy tightrope, trying to balance its commitment to environmental justice issues and its stated determination to see more housing built, even when it ruffles local feathers.  

“It’s true that these things have been used by people who are just opponents of housing,” said Mark Martinez, housing staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. “So there’s a big tension there. I don’t think there’s an easy bright red line that says here’s how you fix that to perfectly balance those tensions.”