In the 1860s, ornate resort hotels were constructed in downtown Oak Bluffs to accommodate an influx of summer visitors. The Vineyard was a budding attraction: Early sightseers promenaded in billowing gowns and sharp suits while attending religious camp meetings, and took in the beauty of the Island as a vacation hot spot. One of the first hotels built to house this new wave of tourism was called the Island House.
Over 160 years later, the Island House still exists, but serves a totally different purpose. Just as the needs of the Martha’s Vineyard community have changed, so has the building itself, which now serves as workforce housing for surging summer crowds.
Since 2012, many international students who travel to work here for the summer season secure lodging through their jobs at this former hotel. Located at 11 Circuit Ave., the building is now a far cry from the towering, decorated structure that once housed 19th century vacationers.
Last summer, an estimated 80 to 100 international workers slept on bunk beds in the 18 small rooms from May through August, the busiest months of the year. And their presence, according to the many businesses that employ them, is essential for the local summer economy to function.
The Island House is just one example of the many ways Vineyarders are responding to a crisis in housing and affordability, one that is raising new questions about the sustainability of the Island for those who live here. The tenants who lived at the property last summer were alarmed by the conditions. Still, the owners said they’re doing everything possible to provide clean and safe housing for workers during an Island-wide shortage.
Crowded living in busy summer months is something that Islanders have become accustomed to over the past few decades. The situation has degraded to a point of real concern for employees, business owners, and local and state officials in recent years, and prompted the state delegation to sound an alarm.
“As our housing crisis has worsened, the reality is that we are dependent, more and more, on a seasonal workforce,” State Sen. Julian Cyr told The Times. “Unless you have extreme wealth, housing is decreasing at the margins for everyone, including people who are an essential part of our community and our workforce.”
For much of the season, the tenants at the Island House, who were typically ages 19 to 28, didn’t have access to hot water for showers.
They were kept awake until the early hours of the morning by loud music from the bars on Circuit Avenue. They didn’t have a kitchen, so they said they had to rely on staff meals from their restaurant jobs. Eventually, they said, they became disillusioned with their accommodations, and for some, the Island as a whole.
These tenants are often referred to by the visa categorization they travel under: J-1s.
Over the past 11 months, The Times conducted a series of interviews with the J-1 tenants and the landlords of the Island House, the previous owner of the building, board of health and building officials who monitor complaints, Cape Cod town officials, visa sponsorship agencies, and local business owners, as well as looked through historic books and records and analyzed decades of reports on the property.
This is what we found
- A history of harsh complaints about the Island House spans decades.
- There are no avenues that the J-1 students were aware of for non-police-related complaints.
- Many workplace housing owners see themselves as cogs in a larger machine of low affordable availability for workers. But the machine has a lack of resources, and accommodation has barely improved.
From July to September 2025, six J-1 students spoke to The Times about their rooms at the Island House, which they said were overcrowded and lacked basic amenities. One of them invited The Times to tour the property in August.
This J-1 student, a 24-year-old Serbian man, waved a reporter through a door with a placard that said “Island House” hanging on the chipped yellow paint.
A short walk up a set of stairs inside revealed a maze of bedroom doors and communal bathrooms. Dozens of shoes were lined up outside of each one. “We put our shoes outside since we don’t have space,” said the J-1 student with a shrug; he asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from his employers, who provided him with accommodation at Island House.
He repeatedly apologized for the mess as he meandered ahead. “We don’t have anywhere to put our clothes,” he explained. The rooms, about 10 by 10 square feet each, contained one to two bunk beds, mattresses (some stained), one small refrigerator, and, in some rooms, one shelf.
The “communal kitchen” was actually a microwave in the hallway. And it was broken for much of the summer, he said. Without dressers, the floors ended up covered with clothes, and the students’ suitcases were open and sprawling, leaving little walking access. “We come back just to sleep. We all work all day,” the J-1 student, who held two jobs at local restaurants, said.
There were two to six students per room, paying $225 a week each. Each room of four pulled in around $3,500 for monthly rent, higher than the Island average of $3,000 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment for an individual, per data from the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s Housing Needs Assessment in 2024.
For the J-1 students, the opportunity to come to the Island is a travel experience as well as financially beneficial. They can make well over $10,000 in just a few summer months, which some said was a whole year’s salary in their home country. In Croatia, for example, a typical annual salary is around $17,000.
The J-1 visa holders who spoke to The Times said they want to work here and participate in the community. Local businesses said they need their help to stay operational, and the cultural exchange is considered to be a valuable asset for Islanders and visitors alike.
The system, however, demands balance in order to keep working. And stable accommodation is the biggest factor for seasonal workers. Once on the Island, thousands of miles from home, many J-1s said they’re not sure where to turn if they live somewhere unsafe or unsanitary.
“I just really want to save all the students that will pick Martha’s Vineyard. They don’t deserve that accommodation. They don’t deserve to be treated like that,” 28-year-old Borna Biljak, who came to the Island from Croatia, said to The Times in August. Biljak lived in Island House in 2025, but moved out in July after his many complaints about the accommodation didn’t yield the changes he wanted.
But while those interviewed from the Island House had issues with their lodging, they also described housing where their friends lived in other locations on the Island: basements with dozens of mattresses covering the floor, and uninsulated buildings with sheets strung up as makeshift walls.
The Times reached out to some of those tenants, but they were too afraid to come forward because they didn’t want to risk their housing in a foreign country.
Island House stands as a symbol of a complex problem
As far back as 2003, the Island House was described to be in significant disrepair in records and interviews. For nearly two decades, it was operated with neglect to the structure and indifference to the running complaints of its tenants.
Health officials said they were surprised by the state of the housing.
“When I first came into this department and I did my inspection [at Island House], I was kind of floored by the condition … It was one of those things … How do I let this go? But it’s been operating like this for all this time,” Alexa Arieta, the O.B. health agent, told The Times. Arieta became the health agent in 2018.
In 2023, the building was sold to Mavis and Ralston Francis, who are the current owners. Ralston, who himself came to the Island as a J-1 visa holder from Jamaica, brought a different spirit to the management. But as the couple quickly learned, changing the reality of affordable housing is another matter altogether.
“Every time you put up a screen, when the kids come, they burst it open to smoke,” Ralston said.
He added that the lack of hot water was from the students leaving water running for long periods of time. The couple fixed multiple instances of flooding throughout the summer, which also caused damage to their restaurant, Eleven Circuit, which is on the first level of the building.
The high rent is one way the Francises said they mitigate the cost burden on themselves. And they have worked with the town to ensure the property is safe for students to live there. Lorna Welch, the assistant health agent for the town of Oak Bluffs, said the Francises have done work on the property that aligns with the town’s inquiries and inspections.
“He’s improved it a lot,” Welch said of Ralston.
Inspections by the board of health continued under the Francises’ ownership. They were usually conducted in April, prior to anyone moving in, and listed dirty mattresses, missing screens on windows, and needed work on bathrooms, as well as some deficiencies in a few rooms. The property hasn’t yet been inspected this year, Welch said, as of Wednesday, May 13.
Through the Francises’ management of the building, complaints decreased in frequency. But, in 2024, a neighbor reached out to the board of health regarding the tenants of the property, and included photos of them smoking on the roof of the building. The town wrote a letter to Ralston and called the location “nontransient lodging.” They stated that 50 occupants lived there across 19 rooms in a subsequent report.
In 2025, the inspection of the property listed 18 rooms and 12½ baths, and said mattresses and window screens were an issue that needed addressing. The language looked nearly identical to inspections from the early 2000s. The report also said that bathrooms looked renovated and much improved.
The Island House is one of the few properties on the Island that is actually zoned to house a large group of residents. That said, officials at the Oak Bluffs board of health said only two tenants are allowed to live in most of the rooms, which is fewer than the number of students who actually lived there in 2025.
Zoning on Martha’s Vineyard allows for mainly single-family homes and low-density residential districts. Mixed-use housing, such as apartment buildings for seasonal workers, is rarely proposed by developers, due to the low payout from renting rooms affordably compared with the high cost of building.
The rising price of short-term Airbnb rentals takes up much of the market in the summer, and more affordable, longer-term rentals are few. When the Francises purchased the property at 11 Circuit Ave., they were asked by visa sponsorship agencies to continue housing students. They agreed.
“Once we got in, we started to fix what we could there,” Mavis said. “The housing is a lot better than what it used to be.”
J-1 interviews: Oak Bluffs accommodation lacked amenities and was overcrowded
“We can’t even speak to our parents about this because, honestly, they would just tell us not to come back,” one 22-year-old student, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her visa status, told The Times in an interview.
The student sat with three friends in Healey Square in Oak Bluffs on a sunny August afternoon. They all described the conditions they lived in on the condition of anonymity — a cramped room with four bunk beds and five people. “It wouldn’t be legal in Europe. I don’t know if it’s legal here,” she said.
All the J-1 students who were interviewed last summer said the housing on Circuit Ave. was mostly reserved for first-year J-1 students. More experienced J-1 workers described staying there as a rite of passage for new students on the Island.
Students who lived at Island House before eventually found more suitable housing in later years. They said that they felt that if they could just get through the summer, they’d find something new in the following years.
“If we didn’t have anyplace to stay besides Island House, we would not come back here,” a 23-year-old J-1 student told The Times.
The housing was described to the J-1 students by their landlords, the Francises, before the students arrived on the Vineyard in April and May. But the contents of those discussions are not totally clear. The students told The Times they were assured they’d have kitchen access, a bedroom, and a bathroom. But after they got off the ferry, they walked in to find rooms with used mattresses, no sheets, mold, doors that wouldn’t lock, and paper-thin walls.
However, the landlords, the Francises, countered that they were transparent about the modest accommodation. They said that the students were extremely messy, and even cost them thousands of dollars in damages. The J-1 students, the Francises said, were rarely at the apartments. They worked, went out on the town, and left messes, like trash in the hallways, for other people to see. The age of the tenants, they said, was a huge challenge, but they wanted to help.
“We’re young entrepreneurs, trying to help a cause,” Ralston said. “We didn’t have to do the housing. We continued with it. But then a lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s about the money.’ It’s not necessarily about the money, it’s about a cause … We’re trying to contribute to the Island. So we provide housing if there is not that housing.”
Below-standard conditions of the Island House go back to 2003
Complaints, town inspections, and board of health meeting minutes revealed a pattern of questionable conditions at 11 Circuit Ave., dating all the way back to 2003. The property was previously a motel, purchased as such in 2001 by Chandler (“Bill”) Datta and his brother, Harinder Datta.
“When I purchased it, the building was totally run down, and we renovated it,” Bill Datta told The Times. He said he replaced stained carpeting and walls and did costly work on the building. Then he opened it up to guests.
From 2003 to 2012, a variety of complaints came from hotel guests. They ranged from bugs crawling on the mattresses and walls to stains on the mattresses, no screens on the windows, and no hot water.
In 2006, following an especially scathing hotel guest complaint, the town’s board of health took action. They ordered Datta to stop housing people in the motel without alerting the board first in a public meeting. He agreed.
For the next few years, there was radio silence in regards to the property, and no one was supposed to be living there. Then, in 2012, yet another complaint was filed. It stated that Datta was “renting rooms upstairs” with “too many people,” and that it was “overcrowded.” This prompted the board of health to look into property again, and they found people living there without having been alerted.
Datta wrote a letter in 2012 to the Oak Bluffs Board of Health apologizing for renting out the space upstairs. But Datta also stated in the letter that he didn’t recall a meeting in 2007 when he was advised not to house anyone. He wrote that he was only allowing workers to live there. This year is when the property switched, according to town records, from a motel to workplace housing.
Datta told The Times that he knew of other housing for workers that didn’t have to undergo inspections by the town.
“My objection was, when other people on-Island, they rent their house on a monthly or weekly basis, to the students or to anybody … Nobody inspects those places. Then, why are they inspecting me? That was my question, because I’m not doing it as a hotel or a guest house. If I was doing that, I’ll be glad to comply,” Datta said.
For over a decade, Datta housed primarily J-1 students and seasonal employees at the Island House. Then, in 2023, the building was sold to the Francises.
The program for international workers has been operating for a while
There are three main types of nonimmigrant visas that essential workers travel under to the Vineyard: J-1, H1-B, and H2-B.
The general nonimmigrant visa for high school and university students is J-1. It was established in 1961 through the Fulbright-Hays Act. About 300,000 students every year travel to America as J-1s through BridgeUSA, the government-run umbrella organization that the J-1 program operates under. It was intended to be a cultural exchange program, offering learning and work opportunities for students in a safe, albeit distant, place to land. It doesn’t require employers, who international workers apply through, to provide employees with housing.
The opposite is true for H1-B and H2-B visas, which require employers to provide housing. There are also only a certain amount of spots allocated across the U.S. for each of the H1-B and H2-B visas.
This stricter cap, established in 1990, became a problem in 2017 when Donovan Clarke, who runs the outdoor bar called Donovan’s Reef at Nancy’s Restaurant in Oak Bluffs, was barred from the U.S. He’s from Jamaica and usually used an H2-B visa as a restaurant manager, but that year, he was unable to work on the Island.
As a result, J-1 students are more heavily relied on by local businesses to fill gaps in their seasonal workforce.
But still, housing isn’t guaranteed.
Often, the students are left to their own devices to find accommodation, hence the dozens of inquiries from workers in local Facebook groups for housing.
To get a J-1 visa, students apply with their consulate, pay fees, secure a job, and connect to a sponsor before their arrival.
A sponsor is an organization designated by the U.S. Department of State. These groups are like a liaison for students, and are their point of contact to assist with the legal side of the J-1 visa process. On the Island, the top sponsors for students are CIEE, Inc. and InterExchange, Inc. Sponsorship agencies aren’t required to secure housing either. So, the students just hope their jobs come with a room.
Without systems physically on the Vineyard to ensure these international workers are treated fairly, students almost solely rely on the State Department, consulates, embassies, as well as sponsorship agencies if they have qualms.
“While we require sponsors to be the primary point of contact for their visitors, the Department provides a direct line of oversight,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State said in a statement to The Times. They added that they have a 24/7 hotline available for J-1s. Consulates and embassies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Times heard from some agencies at a tourism conference on Cape Cod this spring. They spoke in a panel about the housing conditions for international workers.
“Ensuring their health, safety, and wellness is our top priority,” Amanda Gauthier, a regional account manager for Intrax, another top sponsorship agency for J-1 students on the Cape and Islands, said at the conference in March.
Representatives from three sponsorship agencies were present at this conference, primarily a networking and educational event for businesses in the area that was hosted by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. They all expressed concern about the housing that many students end up in, but ultimately said they have little control. The agencies declined to provide The Times with copies of the complaints from J-1 students on the Vineyard.
“I contacted them a lot of times,” Bilijak, the 28-year old J-1 student who lived in the Island House, said.
“For the first month, you have just one job. You paid a lot of money to come here, and you are staying on one of the most expensive islands,” Biljak said last August. “That’s the reason most students are quiet.”
The economic impact of J-1 students
International students are integral to the summer economy on the Island, a fact that was made even more clear during the COVID-19 pandemic when many were unable to travel for jobs they previously held. The Island lost hundreds of workers from countries like Croatia, South Africa, Serbia, and Jamaica. According to data provided directly to The Times from the State Department, only 33 J-1 students worked on the Island in 2020, compared to 836 the year before.
“The J-1 program is an important part of the Vineyard’s seasonal workforce,” Erica Ashton, executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce, said. “Our population and visitor numbers increase dramatically in the summer, and many hospitality, retail, and tourism businesses rely on seasonal staff to meet that demand. J-1 students help fill those critical roles.”
The halt in travel hampered an essential economic asset at the disposal of resort towns. Back then, restaurants, retail shops, and hotels got a taste of an Island without J-1s. Some small business owners said they couldn’t survive if it happened again.
“Our businesses aren’t running without J-1s there … We cannot run, and a lot of people don’t want to. We cannot run our businesses without these J-1 students. We will fold.” Celeste Elser, the co-owner of Biscuits, an eatery in Oak Bluffs, told The Times. Elser has housed employees at the Island House in past years.
The Times reached out to several other managers and owners of Island businesses who were mentioned in interviews with J-1 students, including the Atlantic Fish and Chop House, Nancy’s Restaurant, Sharky’s and Martha’s Vineyard Chowder Company, and the Harbor View Hotel, all of which didn’t respond to inquiries or declined to comment for this article.
Although the number of J-1 students on the Island has increased since 2020, and is now nearly back to pre-pandemic figures at 650 students in 2025, some of the challenges, such as housing, continue to go unaddressed. And in Massachusetts, there was a small decline of 3.4 percent in J-1 students in 2025. While low, any dip is of concern to town officials and businesses who rely on the students.
“If we can’t find a solution to housing, businesses like myself will not survive,” Elser said.
Massachusetts hosts one of the highest concentrations of these seasonal workers from abroad, with J-1s in resort areas, like the Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod, at record numbers. And they’re needed.
The issue is important enough that members of Congress from across the country have taken it up. Seventeen of them, including Massachusetts Rep. Bill Keating, sent a letter to Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, in March, requesting support for the work-travel programs ahead of what they said would be a high-volume summer. Federal travel restrictions and increased vetting for international students amid harsher immigration policies prompted the letter, which was intended to get ahead of the rush of J-1s and ensure they’d travel safely and quickly.
“The college students participating in the summer work-travel program play a vital role in sustaining seasonal businesses by filing job vacancies that would otherwise go unmet,” the letter stated.
After the pandemic, other resort towns, such as on the Cape, saw how much business struggled without J-1 students and took action to address the need for workplace housing. The Island, by design — through zoning ordinances and local governance — hasn’t gone in the same direction.
Housing initiatives instead focus on balancing land conservation with an acknowledgement of the difficulty for year-rounders to find affordable housing. As a result, some of the needs of seasonal workers have gone unaddressed.
Systems to protect J-1 students exist in other resort towns, why not here?
In another seasonal getaway that hosts a high influx of J-1 students in the summer, handbooks with information are handed to J-1 students upon their arrival.
Students who work on Cape Cod are guided to the regional chamber of commerce for information, complaints, and resources, such as bike sharing and housing initiatives. Town officials even started a program where J-1 students who don’t have housing through their jobs stay with local families.
“[J-1 students are] such an integral part of our workforce … many of them come back, and many of them become a part of our community,” Paul Niedzwiecki, from the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, told The Times.
“But there’s still not enough housing,” he added.
In 2020, Niedzwiecki said they went from hosting 5,000 J-1 students to very few, and they’ve since worked to improve conditions and get that number back up. In 2025, about 2,850 students worked on the Cape for the summer. Niedzwiecki said that the lapse was a wake-up call for town and tourism officials.
“Part of this is we have to be good neighbors,” Niedzwiecki told The Times. “We have responsibilities as regions that accept these students.”
Unlike students on the Cape, if a tenant on the Vineyard feels their housing is unsafe, they can only report a complaint to town health officials to prompt an inspection. A complaint could very well mean a loss of their accommodation, according to health agent Arieta. If a room is overcrowded in a basement with no exit, for example, health agents are required to evict the people for their own safety.
The reality is that housing availability is so low, and many can’t afford to make that call at all. So, the cycle continues.
On the Cape, work to mitigate unsafe and unsanitary conditions, according to officials, has resulted in less complaints. Niedzwiecki said they’ve seen a huge drop in the number of issues related to J-1 students in recent years.
At the tourism conference in Cape Cod, the focus was on bolstering accommodations so that J-1 students were more likely to choose the Cape.
“[J-1 work travel] is a free program for employers,” Patrick Bush, the regional sales host manager for the sponsorship agency CIEE, Inc., said at the conference. He said the number of J-1 students coming to the U.S. this year is dropping already “because of some border issues.”
Cape Cod officials said they are concerned about recent changes to federal regulations, including increased vetting procedures, like federal agencies checking 3-5 years worth of social media for prospective J-1 students.
If the students are able to make it to the U.S., the problem of housing, however, remains.
Cyr, who is a legislator for the Cape and the Islands, said a shortage of affordable housing units across the Commonwealth is leading to issues, especially seasonally. He said the exploitation of workers is occurring in some scenarios, and more discussion is being spurred because of it.
“We’re seeing our communities begin to really have this conversation … Our failure on housing is really affecting and compromising the values of what we think our community should be,” Cyr said. “This is why I’m all in on this housing crisis.”
This is part of a continuing series by Sarah Shaw Dawson, The Times’ Island Writer, whose reporting beat is housing, health, and education. A shorter version of this story was printed in the May 14 edition of the paper.