Nantucket’s Six-Figure Working Class Can’t Afford to Eat

This was hardly an isolated incident for Sarah, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, and her husband, who worked as a personal trainer at the time. “I struggled with food expenses because I put my kids first,” she says. Between the astronomical cost of daycare, utilities, and rent for their two-bedroom apartment above a garage, there was little left for food at the end of the day—about $100 a week, she estimates. Ultimately, the couple chose to go on WIC, the federally funded nutrition program for families, receiving about $1,100 a month to supplement their groceries. “It’s not a fun feeling, working as hard as you can for a long period of time and not having enough to provide for your kids,” Sarah says. “It’s embarrassing telling people that you’re on WIC when they think that you’re so put together on the outside, when in fact, you’re scared for when you’re going to eat your next meal.”

It is hard for most to imagine that in the shadows of the multimillion-dollar seaside estates and boats that have become synonymous with the island of Nantucket, there’s something highly counterintuitive afoot: Some 21 percent of islanders, according to a local nonprofit, are struggling with food insecurity. Almost half of all local schoolchildren (46 percent) qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and every week at the Nantucket Food Pantry, manager Ruth Pitts says she’s feeding anywhere from 400 to 550 residents who call this place home all year long.

While hunger is a national issue, food insecurity on this exorbitantly expensive isle affects a much wider demographic than in other places. “It isn’t just people at the very low end of the economic ladder; it includes nurses, schoolteachers, perhaps members of the Coast Guard. And it is shocking,” says N Magazine publisher Bruce Percelay, a philanthropist who’s working on an initiative to connect hungry residents—some earning six figures yet still struggling—with the support they need.

Multiple factors contribute to this reality. Nantucket has one of the highest housing costs in the country (a $2.3 million median home price and rent for single-bedroom apartments as high as $3,000 a month), inflated utility rates, soaring childcare costs, and expensive everyday necessities that force countless residents to choose between paying their bills or buying food. And increasingly, the choice they’re making is to leave Nantucket altogether. “We’re losing good people every day,” says Marian Ravenwood Ray, a local property manager. “We recently lost one of our best carpenters because he couldn’t afford to live here. If we lose not only our carpenters, but teachers, policemen, and doctors, too, soon all we’ll be left with is excited vacationers ready to enjoy the island and no one to serve them.”

Yet just as local efforts to address the crisis gain momentum, the White House is pulling the rug out. Trump-era reductions have already begun affecting food supplies, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceling $500 million from programs that help food banks nationwide. Nearly $2.3 million worth of food from those eliminated funds were destined for the Greater Boston Food Bank—Nantucket’s primary supplier. Fortunately, a handful of groups around the island have organized to help the hungry in their midst and ensure everyone has enough to eat. The stakes couldn’t be higher: If everyday workers start to leave, this iconic
vacationland could see its carefully cultivated image shatter completely.

Just steps away from where tourists browse $3,000 cashmere sweaters and a $14,000 diamond, Nantucket’s invisible workforce slips through an unmarked door to collect free groceries. On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in June, as tourists in designer sunglasses drift past boutiques clutching iced lattes that cost more than some locals spend on dinner, a man behind them, still dressed in his workday clothes, tucks into that open doorway to the Nantucket Food Pantry. “It’s not even a Thursday!” Pitts, the pantry’s manager, says with a smile as she greets 66-year-old Terrell Titus, who usually comes in later in the week.  A volunteer packs Titus’s groceries in his reusable bags and asks, “Would you like a meal?” Inside a nearby fridge are plastic food containers filled with food prepared by Pitts’s husband, a local chef. With a smile and a nod, the volunteer places a single serving of today’s offering—chili con carne—in Titus’s hands.

Since 2004, Titus has been working summers on Nantucket, and cleaning bikes at a rental shop since 2008, but with the escalating cost of living on the island, what he earns doesn’t cover his basic needs. “Right now, I only have one job, but you need to have two or three. Around the end of August, everybody’s walking around like zombies,” he says of the exhaustion many local workers feel after working multiple jobs just to afford to get by.

The reality is Nantucket’s food problem is a housing problem—and the numbers read like a cruel joke: Almost half of schoolchildren qualify for free or reduced-price lunch in a place where lunch costs $75 for two people at the local deli. In the nearly three decades between 1995 and 2024, the price of the median home on the island has also exploded more than 1,000 percent, yet the median annual income crawled up around 270 percent during that same time.

What that means in layman’s terms is that the year-round people who make this paradise run can’t even afford to think about getting into the local housing market. Rents have followed home prices, with people often having to pay $1,500 to $2,500 for a single room in a shared home, many times with no access to kitchen facilities. “A living wage for a family of four is $75.22 an hour,” says Nantucket Chairman of the Select Board Brooke Mohr. “Even with both adults working, this is a tough number to reach for many here. Single parents are in the worst shape.”

This has led many Nantucketers to make tough choices about their finances—and filling their bellies. Take Sabrina Wallace, a single mom of two adult children and one toddler. While she loves her full-time job as a clerk at the post office, her pay doesn’t quite cover her bills. She pays $2,000 a month to live with her two younger children in a one-bedroom studio apartment where she cooks on a hot plate because their apartment has no access to a kitchen. “I can’t even pinpoint each time I’ve had to choose between food and paying bills, but you make it work,” she says.

Life on Nantucket wasn’t always like this, but it became this way largely by design. After the collapse of its whaling industry in the early- to mid-19th century and the economic depression that ensued, the island became a tourist destination—and not just any tourist town, but a veritable playground for the elite. That was the vision imparted by preservationist and millionaire Walter Beinecke Jr., whose famous words were printed within the pages of Time magazine in 1968: “Instead of selling six postcards and two hot dogs, you have to sell a hotel room and a couple of sports coats.”

Beinecke’s revolutionary idea for Nantucket was to create an aesthetic that simply could not be found elsewhere, to replace the cheap and fleeting thrill associated at the time with family-friendly beach towns such as Atlantic City, New Jersey. Instead, he created what would become the Aspen of the East—an island synonymous with elitism, all in a bid to preserve its history and character. He would go on to snap up 80 percent of the commercial property on the island. In 1987, he sold off his properties to Winthrop Financial Associates for $55 million, which held on to most of it until the late 1990s, when the firm began selling it off to another now-notable Nantucket developer, Steve Karp. Today, Karp is the largest property owner on Nantucket, with a large portfolio that includes White Elephant Resorts, where a single hotel room can cost upward of $1,000 a night.

It could be said that Beinecke’s and Karp’s vision for the island was cut from the same crisp Oxford cloth: an island of abundant wealth and style. Today, Nantucket remains a sought-after and wildly expensive destination, recently trending as the third-most-searched destination on Google Flights, and one frequented by celebrities and billionaires.

Like many vacation destinations, property values only rose higher after the pandemic as city dwellers sought farther-flung retreats. “People felt they could escape here, and they did. Outside pressures have driven up the cost of real estate to a point where it’s really difficult for locals to work and live here,” says Robert Young, a native and third-generation Nantucketer.

Still, if a conscious desire to develop the island a certain way drove up home prices for decades, now, some say, it is a lack of development that is the problem. A big reason why is that much of the island’s land has been bought up by land trusts and conservation organizations, leaving less than 3 percent of the island developable for additional housing today.

Homes aren’t the only things that have gotten expensive on the island; even successful shop owners are feeling the pain. “Our shipping rates have doubled; electricity is insane. I’m paying $1,000-plus a week in childcare, and $500 a week in groceries for our family,” says Lauren Berlin Johnson, co-owner of Nantucket Surf Club.

As bad as it has gotten, it may still get worse. The federal government is considering making cuts to SNAP and WIC, two food-stamp programs, something that would force many people who today receive food stamps to resort to food pantries. Meanwhile, food pantries are also struggling. In March, the USDA shaved $500 million from the budget of a program that helps food banks across the nation feed people in their communities. Nearly $2.3 million of these eliminated funds were destined for protein, dairy, and produce for the Greater Boston Food Bank, which supplies the Nantucket Food Pantry. “We have grave concerns about the eligibility changes and funding cutbacks to our programs at the federal level,” Mohr says. “Our food pantry relies on free or very low-cost food from the USDA. They are already being asked to pay for food that used to be free. If they have to go into the marketplace to purchase food, the additional costs on Nantucket could be in the $500,000 range.” That’s half a million dollars—the cost of a luxe summer cottage rental—just to buy groceries for the people who make this place run.

It took the island’s local media mogul to spot what no one else could see: Nantucket’s hunger crisis was, in part, a communication problem. Percelay, who owns the island’s glossy N Magazine and runs the online news site Nantucket Current, realized that one of the biggest barriers facing food-insecure residents wasn’t just money—it was that they had no idea what help existed. Meanwhile, existing programs were having a hard time getting the word out to potential beneficiaries. After helping make the new Massachusetts General Hospital–affiliated facility on Nantucket possible through his fundraising leadership, Percelay then applied that energy to something equally vital: ensuring all his fellow islanders could feed themselves.

The result was a platform called Nourish Nantucket. Its mission is simple yet transformative—to create a virtual umbrella and fundraising platform that can connect people to services that would be helpful to them. Do they have a child in the family under five years old? Then WIC would be beneficial. Are they older than 60? Perhaps they would be interested in Meals on Wheels? “There were 12 different agencies that were providing food services on Nantucket in one form or another, and they weren’t getting their message out very effectively,” Percelay says. “I thought it would be far better to create a single umbrella brand to fundraise in a very visible way versus having these different agencies compete with each other on a small scale.”

Having already connected more than 1,100 people in need of services, Nourish Nantucket hopes to expand the reach of the island’s food-assistance programs. It’s a necessary endeavor, according to Meg Browers, director of development and operations for Nourish Nantucket. “On Nantucket, you can make six figures and still be food insecure,” Browers recently told N Magazine. “The judgment that comes along with it, that if you’re working as a bartender or a landscaper or a house cleaner, you may very well be making more than $150,000 a year, and someone might think, how on earth could you possibly need pantry services or any other food-security program? But what people don’t understand is that you have to work five full-time jobs to be able to afford a home here. The cost of living on Nantucket is so extreme that a lot of seasonal residents cannot comprehend the budgeting magic that has to happen to make living here possible.”

To that end, fundraising is a key part of Nourish Nantucket’s mission. “Our fundraising goals for the summer are designed to generate enough funding to increase the capacity of existing food programs,” says Mohr, who serves as board president of the initiative, “so we can begin to clear the waiting lists” for some of these programs. The good news is that the organization has received several grants, including $250,000 from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and another quarter-million-dollar matching grant from the Nantucket Golf Club.

One of those local organizations that could use some financial help is Fresh Connect, a program that provides $100 prepaid debit cards each month to Nantucketers in need, to be used at the two island Stop & Shops, according to N Magazine. Administered by Nantucket Food, Fuel, and Rental Assistance, it currently has a 400-person waitlist.

Another is the Pip Send It Box program. Run by Pip & Anchor, a boutique grocery store that sells locally sourced produce—never grown farther than 350 miles away from Nantucket—the program is providing 80 local families in need with a free box of fruit and vegetables each week, to the tune of 310,000 pounds of local produce since 2022. Wallace, the post office clerk, is one of the lucky recipients who receives a box, but a hefty waiting list of more than 140 needy families remains. “We have the ability to almost double the program,” says Chris Sleeper, cocreator of the Pip Send It Box program and co-owner of Pip & Anchor. “But only if we have funding.”

Raising money and continuing to feed people in need is essential not just for the health and well-being of Nantucket’s year-round residents, but for everyone, even the wealthy who live on the island just a few months a year. “We’re all better off if we build a community where everyone has the food they need,” says Matt Haffenreffer, founder and principal of Process First, a social-impact consulting firm. “If people on Nantucket are unable to get the food they need, I think it’s the decision point at which a lot of people say, ‘Maybe this isn’t for us,’ and they decide to leave. This could be teachers, first responders, multigeneration family-business operators who just say it’s too hard to make it, and we should find another place to build a life.” And with so many people on waiting lists and federal funding disappearing, that decision point may be coming sooner than anyone wants to admit.

This article was first published in the print edition of the August 2025 issue with the headline: “Hunger in Paradise.”