As a dog owner, your number one job is to clean up your dog’s number two.

One of the annoying byproducts of having more and more people on Nantucket is that the number of people who do not clean up after their dogs has grown as well. Some walking trails are so covered with dog poop it’s very likely that some of it will go home on someone else’s shoes. This …

Affordable housing, year-round housing, seasonal workforce housing, and vacation houses are mathematically linked. Let’s do the math.

A lot of communities around the country are struggling with affordable housing and have come up with some very interesting solutions, so far. But because we are an island, a lot of the solutions or changes that work elsewhere need to be modified to work on Nantucket. Adding more affordable and workforce housing is a …

A discussion on Facebook this week

I posted an article on Facebook about a proposed measure in Washington DC to heavily tax oversized personal vehicles that take up too much room and have an outsized impact on roads, traffic, and emissions. Interesting and rather defensive responses from many people. One person said that the problem with too many people and too …

Can peer pressure save Nantucket?

I ran a little survey this past week. 60 people responded. The goal was not to find out what people’s opinions are on housing, but instead to understand how people feel about those who sell their homes and the choices they make. Here’s the rather purposefully round-a-bout hypothetical question: Let’s say you have an older …

Are short-term rentals a property right? No.

Let’s talk about property rights as it relates to rentals on Nantucket. I’ve heard a few people say that regulating and limiting short-term rentals on the island infringes upon their property rights. And for them, it likely feels that way. But the truth is something different. As voters, we all need to grasp the fact …

Not participating has its consequences.

I wrote this on Facebook 8 years ago about a measure to add a new supermarket in the mid island. It’s even more true today. In a recent survey about the proposed supermarket on Old South Road, I received 368 responses (some people took the survey multiple times, but their duplicate responses were deleted.) And …