Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands - Part 17

There are few places in the world like Nantucket, where sandy paths lead past vast seagrass landscapes and nesting birds. It is one of the country's premier vacation destinations. But the island, like much of the region, is struggling to hold itself together in the face of a housing crises. Of the 10,000 year-round residents, nearly 500 are on waiting lists for rental or homeownership programs. Countless others pack up and move their belongings and families with the change of seasons.

It's been happening for years. The workers arrive every weekday morning, often still sleepy and typically quiet after their commute. Some wear i.d. badges on their belts or carry lunch boxes at their sides, as they file off the airplanes and ferry boats to go to work on Nantucket.

Just how many depends upon the time of year, but there's always a few hundred, and on some days, it's estimated there could be as many as a thousand people crossing Nantucket Sound for a job. On a recent Monday morning, Nathan Porter got off the Steamship Authority's fast ferry and walked the two blocks to his office at town hall. Porter works as Nantucket's Geographic Information Systems specialist; he does mapping work for the town. His commute from Falmouth by way of Hyannis costs just under $300 a week.

Nathan Porter: "I get to tell people I take a boat to work every day."

Porter has been in the job since January, and with the median home price on island now at $1.6 million dollars, he has no hope that he'll ever be able to live where he works.

Nathan Porter: "I went online and the cheapest place I was able to find going to various sites was a one bedroom apartment on top of a garage for half a million dollars."

Not far up the road from Porter's office is the bakery and sandwich shop, Something Natural, owned by Nantucket native Matt Fee. On this day, the shop is kind of quiet because about a dozen road workers -- all commuters themselves -- are digging up the street in front of the business's driveway. Fee says that he and just about every businessman and woman on the island has to be involved in their employee's housing situations.

Matt Fee: "I wouldn't have a business. I hire in the summertime, peak season, I hire between forty and sixty employees, and I house about half of those. If I didn't have housing, I wouldn't have employees. I house three or four people above the shop we're at now, and I have two other buildings out on Fairgrounds Road."

The housing crisis now squeezing Cape Cod first struck here about fifteen years ago, and it's only become worse since then. Today, about 80 percent of the housing stock is owned by off-islanders who use it as seasonal vacation homes and investment rentals.

Leedara Zola is the executive director of the Nantucket Housing Office. She says a working island family would need to earn $300,000 a year to afford mortgage payments on an island median-priced home, an impossible task.

Leedara Zola: "I think once you start talking about median home prices of 1.6 million, people's eyes begin to open. And then when you sort of go further and talk about, it's not just expensive rents, it's unavailable rentals. It's not just oh, it's going to cost me a little bit more to rent something and I'll stay on island and pay more rent, you can't find something year-round. It's that difficult."

The commuters help fill the employment voids, but with a high price, Zola says. Transient workers typically don't have a stake in the community. They don't volunteer in the schools, or become involved with church groups or nonprofits. And then there's the fact that with some jobs, commuters just won't do.

Bob and Becky Earl live near the airport with their two sons. Becky is an administrative assistant in the school system, and Bob, who grew up on Nantucket, works for the town water company -- it's a job where he has to live on island. Together the young couple earns a good wage, but the housing market has forced them to live in impoverished conditions. The Earls' last apartment, for example, was the only one they could find that they could afford, and it was awful.

Becky Earl: "All near the shower was rotten under the floor, so it felt like it may drop thorough the floor at any time. It was a little scary. And the bedrooms were very, very tiny. We had a bed and a bureau in our bedroom, and the bureau had to be in front of the closet, so you couldn't access the closet other than one half of it. There was no attic, no basement, so we had no storage. We kept a lot in the back of our car. We had one vehicle at the time, so my husband had all his carpentry tools in the back of the car."

Because they make less than $67,300 a year, the Earls' now live in an affordable, two-bedroom rental managed by the Nantucket Housing Authority. It's small, but it's clean and sunny. But the couple's income will soon top the program's limits. That's a problem, because it's nearly impossible to find any home, even a fixer-upper, under $800,000 here. And it's not like Bob and Becky are looking to live in a mansion.

In response to the housing dilemma, both Nantucket Hospital and the schools have built housing for their employees. Town Meeting recently agreed to spend $15.5 million to purchase twenty acres of vacant land where affordable units will be built, and there's a remarkable program that recycles and relocates old island homes that otherwise would have been razed