Sweeping strokes of graffiti covered white plaster walls inside an abandoned parsonage in Aquinnah in 2023. Three years later, the property is now a renovated affordable duplex where a family from the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah (Gay Head) and another tribal member live year-round.
The project, completed by affordable housing developer Island Housing Trust (IHT), is one example of a tool housing officials call “adaptive reuse”: a process where abandoned or unused properties are renovated into liveable housing units. It’s touted by local officials as one apparatus in a toolbox to address a looming lack of affordable homes for Islanders.
The tool, along with a few concrete local examples of adaptive reuse projects, were all highlighted in a new guidebook, called “What Is Adaptive Reuse? Practical Solutions for the Cape and Islands,” released on June 15 and authored by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) in partnership with housing officials. BSA is a membership organization of architects that inform the community about housing solutions, or as stated in the guidebook, “help make complex spatial issues more legible, actionable, and connected to practice.”
“We’re all clear we can’t build our way out of this,” Laura Silber, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) housing planner, told The Times in reference to the Island’s housing crisis. “It makes a lot of sense to utilize the existing built environment for solutions.”
While much of the country suffers from an acute housing crisis as home prices outpace living wages, the Island experiences the phenomenon even more profoundly. Here, the issue is compounded by finite land, an estimated 30 percent increase in construction costs (nicknamed the “Island Factor” by builders) compared to the mainland, and the reality that more than half of the homes on the Island are lived in for two months or less by many who don’t contribute to the economy or workforce year-round. Plus, wastewater capacity and concerns over nitrogen loads complicate housing even further.
On an island surrounded by water, building more can have unintended consequences, and building better for the environment can be expensive.
The BSA approached IHT and the MVC a few months ago and offered their support with adaptive reuse education and outreach on the Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Cape. Both Island organizations said a guidebook would be the most helpful for a broader local understanding of the housing tool and could motivate property owners and towns to participate.
“There was a gap in education — both at the legislative level and at the community level — around how this strategy could be successfully implemented in small towns and rural areas,” Silber said.
A more cost-effective and environmentally-safe way to grow the housing stock is front of mind for those involved in housing solutions on the Island. And because adaptive reuse reutilizes existing properties that already have a carbon footprint, renovated units use less resources and minimize added burdens on the surrounding land, water, and energy systems in a region.
Adaptive reuse is seen as a win-win by housing officials and environmentalists but not a cure-all.
While it is a helpful tool for the Island in small ways, such as a single-family home made into multiple units, Island officials know there isn’t a lot of potential to scale up. There are a lot of houses that sit unused for the majority of the year — more than half of the Island’s housing stock — but they aren’t abandoned, they’re seasonal.
Unlike other parts of the state, such as the Cape and Boston, where reuse makes way for an abundance of units through abandoned schools, hospitals, and hotels, on the Island, there also aren’t enough large, abandoned properties to make a significant dent in a year-round, affordable housing stock.
“Housing is so complicated because there never quite is a silver bullet,” Wandy Pascoal, program manager at the BSA, said in an interview.
Still, in a crisis, any new units are helpful, and single-family home renovation through adaptive reuse could be made even more effective by a newly proposed law in the state for duplexes by-right, which, similar to by-right accessory dwelling unit laws in Massachusetts passed last year, means developers, homebuyers, and existing property owners could increase capacity in homes, either through building from the ground up or added renovation.
Duplexes are two-family homes and are a common housing type in Boston and other Massachusetts towns. Through adaptive reuse, the pending duplex by-right law, which is included in the state House and Senate versions of the Mass Wins Act, could turn a single-family home into two. The Mass Wins Act still has to be reconciled in conference committees before landing on Gov. Maura Healey’s desk to be signed into law.
The law to allow duplexes by-right would overrule local zoning, which currently favor single-family homes, mostly because of wastewater capacity. According to a National Zoning Atlas, a nonprofit that was founded by Sara Bronin to demystify zoning across the country, duplexes are already allowed across more than half of the Island. But the minimum lot sizes needed to build them are larger than single-family homes as a means to reduce density and maintain character.
“You have to have a pretty big lot, but that’s maybe why you don’t see a lot of duplexes being built because they are subject to these other extra rules,” Bronin told The Times. She said she refers to instances like that as “zoning by a thousand cuts,” and added that in many places, there’s “all of these like hidden rules that actually make housing infeasible.”
The proposed duplex by-right law would cut through some of those restrictions, although municipalities would have a hand in shaping the law to work in their area.
The guidebook also pointed to the restoration potential in adaptive reuse. The BSA found that there are more than 2,000 homes on the Vineyard that are more than 100 years old and face natural decline over time, including eventual demolition. As homes become dilapidated, especially rarely-used ones that aren’t properly maintained, adaptive reuse could help homeowners keep the structural and historic elements of their home while adapting it for future generations.
Two adapted properties by IHT were used as case studies in the guidebook to show the efficacy of small-scale adaptive reuse of historic and religious properties and single-family homes. The parsonage in Aquinnah was built in 1856 and had deep roots for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), for instance. A single-family home on Daggett Avenue in Vineyard Haven was adapted into housing for income-qualified families by building a guest house for the owner, where he downsized and still lives full-time.
IHT also completed another adaptive reuse project: Hanover House on Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road was an inn-turned-workplace housing for Martha’s Vineyard Hospital nurses and doctors.
Pascoal and Miranda D’Oleo, the building advocacy lab manager at BSA, said they learned about the specific challenges facing the Vineyard community through the creation of the guidebook. They said the severity of housing seasonality, environmental considerations, and small-scale examples were the reasons BSA chose the IHT properties as case studies.
D’Oleo described adaptive reuse as “that sweet spot of bringing together historic preservation, environmental preservation as well as just using undervalued land.”
In the case of the Aquinnah parsonage, the church clergy and minister reached out to IHT to adapt the unused property, and an anonymous donation made the building process possible. In 2024, the sweeping spraypainted sketches were stripped to the structural shell, the exterior was re-shingled, and the history of the place was preserved in the new build. More than 70 percent of the original exterior building design was kept or replicated.
“It was actually really helpful for us to look at objects that would create one, two, three apartments for folks — not to say that the numbers are exactly what we’re looking into — but this is a strategy that, piece-by-piece, you can get to the numbers that you need in order to offer housing opportunities for year-round residents,” Pascoal said.
As the shortage of affordable units reaches a dire point for year-rounders, initiatives to bring forth a funding source for solutions like adaptive reuse failed to pass muster in Beacon Hill. A proposed legislative act for a transfer fee on real estate sales more than $1 million to create a “housing bank” had local support but failed to make it into the comprehensive economic and housing bond bill, the Mass Wins Act, this July. Adaptive reuse was a top priority for the advocates pushing for the transfer fee.
But Jordi said there is still an opportunity for the Island community, towns, and regional organizations to get more aggressive when looking at tools like adaptive reuse. “I think a real effort to survey an inventory would be good if we’re really serious about it, including our main streets,” he said.
The issue is that many of the buildings that could work on a grander scale are privately owned. Some larger properties, however, have been abandoned for long enough that municipalities have stepped in. The Island Theatre on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs, for instance, was left dilapidated for years, and was acquired by the town through eminent domain in April after voters approved the measure at the annual town meeting. It’s unknown what the plan is for the property.
On the Cape, larger properties are adapted often. “There are a lot of empty storefronts, abandoned motels, and decommissioned municipal buildings across Cape Cod, so the opportunities exist. Redeveloping these properties into year-round apartments is an important regional initiative,” Silber said.
The budding Massachusetts legislation, such as the duplex by-right law in the Mass Wins Act., could introduce flexibility in housing types on the Island.
And federal initiatives are underway as well. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, who visited the Island last Friday to hear from locals about the state of housing, was the co-sponsor of a new law called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. Adaptive reuse is a part of the law through a grant program that seeks to fund large projects across the country, but the Vineyard doesn’t qualify as the grants are for federally designated economically distressed areas.
Still, housing advocates are pushing for the kind of zoning and financial support that could streamline new units, no matter how small-scale.
“We’re doing a lot of things here on the Island that are working, and I think the towns are realizing that they have some control over this by zoning for the kind of housing that they want to see,” Silber said.
This is the first in an ongoing series by housing and health reporter Sarah Shaw Dawson on proposed housing solutions for the Island community in the face of a housing crisis related to affordability, supply, policy, and the environment.
