Editor’s note: This piece is part of a collaboration with potter Victoria Wolf and her show “Show Me the Way to Go Home” opening at the Workshop in Vineyard Haven. Over the coming weeks, we are sharing the stories of Islanders and their struggles with housing, which will be highlighted at the gallery.
A house isn’t the only factor when building a home. For artists Nettie Kent and Colin Ruel, community has been the central value they hold and have imparted to their family: home means closeness, compassion, and Martha’s Vineyard.
Although much of their lives have been spent moving from place to place, it became clear years ago that they want to raise their family on the Island they were born and raised on. But stable housing has been a near-constant hurdle.
“I love it here. I grew up here; It’s home,” Kent said. “[But] I think it’s difficult for other generations to understand what we’re going through, because ten or twenty years ago you could work really hard and buy something. But now you really can’t.”
With home prices soaring since the COVID pandemic in 2020, the median home price on the Island is over $1.55 million, while the median household income is $93,225. The affordability gap has been documented by recent Housing Production Plan Drafts: For a person earning $168,615 a year, or 150 percent of area median income (AMI), it ranges from $391,000 in Tisbury to over $1.1 million in Aquinnah. In other words, there is a nearly-million-dollar difference between what a person makes and how much they can afford to spend on a home purchase.
Even with a higher-than-average income, buying a property in the millions is a far off concept for many young Island families who are not only working to afford high food prices, child care, and other expenses, but who are also working to establish a stable foundation for the future. The issue is exacerbated by the thriving short-term rental market, prevalent seasonality of the Island, and the 25 percent year-round population increase to the Vineyard from 2012 to 2022.
In a recent interview with the Times at the Ruel Gallery in Menemsha, which they own and operate, Kent and Ruel discussed their experience with housing on the Island. The gallery is nestled in the small fishing village, with a stone path leading to the door and creeping vines on the fences behind it. Kent said she’s been urging the vines to grow, watching their ascendence towards their building as the years have passed.
Kent and Ruel met through friends on Vineyard shores in 2008, and married in Menemsha in 2014. They bounced between New York City and home, before finally settling on-Island full-time in 2017. Now, the pair have two young boys — Razmus (8) and Wyld (6) — and live in a rental house in Chilmark.
“I wanted to move back here so bad,” Ruel said. A generational Islander with roots back hundreds of years, Ruel felt a drive to create a life on the land he connected with the most. He’s a musician and self-taught painter whose work has been featured in multiple local galleries. His paintings depict the many peaks and valleys of local life — from fishing and ocean views to the roadside cleanup of a deer that was hit by a car — the ethereal energy he captures has skyrocketed his popularity on the Vineyard.
Kent is an artist with generational local ties as well. She sells her homemade jewelry at the Ruel Gallery, in a glass case on the front desk, and is an accomplished metal sculptor and painter. Her pieces are silver and gold, gleaming on the counter. She was trained in New York before bringing her skills back to the Island, along with the perspective she gained living in the city and pursuing art on a larger scale.
When they first re-entered the local scene in 2017, Ruel found a far more difficult housing landscape than he left. They went through a years-long movement from temporary location, to camp, to yurt, to mold-infested rental, to rental again. The threat of displacement was an ever-present part of their adult lives.
“I think a lot of people truly don’t know there’s a housing crisis,” Ruel said as he sat behind the front desk of his gallery, watching people stroll outside. He’s seen a change in the past few years, when many previously seasonal visitors moved to the Island full-time in 2020, and bought up a lot of real estate. Home prices have skyrocketed since, and supply has severely dwindled, leaving many long-time locals to suffer the realities of navigating a cycle of transitional homes.
“The system has kind of perpetuated itself and now we’re stuck in it,” he added.
Kent said she’s seen a similar switch — she witnessed an Island-wide affordable unit shortage that has been rising in the past decade, with a sharp increase during the pandemic.
But her perspective on the shuffle is a bit different. She spent her childhood moving around, until she was about eleven years old. Her father, Doug Kent, built what she described as a summer camp, and they lived there in-season. There was no electricity at the camp, and it was not a tenable place to live in the winters, so they had to move elsewhere for the off-season.
“Home is such an important thing for me, because, you know, for those first ten/eleven years of my life, we didn’t know which was ‘home.’ The camp in the summer was my home, but then moving around so much — I just don’t want my kids to have that at all. And when you rent, there’s always that insecurity that you will have that,” Kent said.
After living in a summer rental camp in Menemsha in 2017 when they first moved back to the Island, Ruel and Kent moved into a yurt on Kent’s mother’s property. They had just had Razmus, their oldest son. In the yurt, the couple and their new baby had power, a skylight on the ceiling to view the starry skies and glowing moon, and they described the beauty of living that way. But the yurt wasn’t winterized.
“Then it was fall and we were like ‘Where are we gonna go?’” Kent said. “It just felt so daunting.”
They found a winter rental through a friend, but every time the owners visited, Ruel and Kent had to move all of their belongings out, and stay in the yurt or with family. They had their youngest son, Wyld, and packing up everything they owned multiple times a year got even more difficult with two babies to care for. At the time, they were also fixing up the Ruel Gallery in Menemsha. It was 2019, and their plan was to finish the business, then buy a house.
As the pair was putting the finishing touches on the gallery, the pandemic hit. After they opened, Kent was house searching online, flagging properties she and Ruel loved and consulting their savings as they visualized the possibility of owning a home. Many of the homes she saved were about seven-hundred-thousand dollars and above. But those prices didn’t last for long.
“I just remember when we opened, everyone came in and said they just bought a house. A
$700,000 house that I saved for was sold for $1.8 million,” Kent said. “I started to panic a little bit. I just saw all the houses were gone.”
Kent described a sinking feeling of realizing their dream of home ownership was farther off than they hoped. It was painfully ironic that, as the owners of a gallery, Ruel’s paintings were being bought by the new homeowners who moved to the Island, decorating the walls of the homes the couple had once “favorited” on a local real estate website.
Kent’s experience with constant movement translated into a deep desire for permanent housing for her family, but the options available now are limited: buy a home for less that requires a lot of work, and is a riskier investment; save up to purchase a home in an ever-changing market for millions of dollars; or wait with bated breath until the playing field levels. In the meantime, their children are growing older, they are spending monthly funds to rent, and they are putting significant effort into a home that is not their own.
“I think about my dad coming here in the 60s and buying a lot with a handshake deal,” Kent said. “Twenty years ago it was not the same housing crisis that we have now — we still had land [to build on] twenty years ago. Something’s gotta give.”
Her love for the Island and concern for the community motivated Kent to join the town board that assists with affordable housing in Chilmark, and work to bring more options to the table for families and individuals who are housing insecure. She and Ruel have still watched locals suffer the consequences of a housing crisis that has little end in sight, but their confidence in the community to rise to the challenge has prevailed.
“I watched so many friends and acquaintances who grew up here have to move off-Island and leave this community, and I felt this insane urgency. And I was like ‘Why isn’t everyone else feeling this right now?’” Kent said.
“I think the only way is to get involved,” Ruel said, referencing the need for more outreach, and more young Islanders joining local zoning, housing, and planning boards. “We have to take some power back or we’re gonna lose. Generational relationships and generational ties make a culture of a place and the soul of a place. [We’re] so tied to this place.”
“Show Me the Way to Go Home” will begin with an opening reception at the Workshop from 5 pm to 9 pm on Friday, Sept. 12, and will be exhibited until Sept. 30. This article, and three additional pieces that highlight the experience of Islanders with housing, will be displayed in the exhibit, but will all be released in the MVTimes online and in print throughout the month of September.