How much more can the Island handle?

A 1.5-mile drive on Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road took 40 minutes. It felt impossible to send a text or get a call through. Parking at State Beach was haphazard and unattainable. Want a quick cup of coffee? Forget it. These inconveniences and disruptions didn’t overshadow the patriotic spirit of the annual parades or obscure the bursts of fireworks in the night skies, but they did make it much more challenging to enjoy them. 

The chaos that came from the big crowds, a heat wave, and torrential rain in the past week also ushered in a tide of concern, forecast by local environmentalists at the Vineyard Conservation Society’s (VCS) annual meeting last Tuesday. They said that at the current rate of development, and based on land still available, the Island could become busier and even see a 50 percent population increase.

That’s how much the land can host, but even now, the water quality in the Island’s coastal ponds is dismal, an exorbitant amount of organic waste is shipped off-Island, and money is continuously spent to upgrade facilities to meet an ever-increasing demand. And as the tangible geographic limits of the Island remain the same, more year-round residents, despite efforts otherwise, still struggle to find affordable housing.

It all raises the question: How much more can the Island handle, or in more scientific terms, what is the Island’s carrying capacity?

“There are absolutely no easy decisions, no easy answers that lie ahead for our Island community. We are experiencing unprecedented demands on our infrastructure, which has been neglected for generations … We are going to have to make tough decisions,” Ewell Hopkins, board president for VCS, said to the audience at Stillpoint in West Tisbury.

The annual meeting, moderated by host of WCAI’s “The Point” Mindy Todd, titled “Islands Under Pressure: A Conversation About Our Land, Water, and Future” included a panel between Samantha Look, VCS executive director, and Emily Molden, director of the Nantucket Land and Water Council, who compared and contrasted efforts on the two islands to be sustainable.

In 1970, the Dukes County Planning and Economic Development Commission estimated that the seasonal population was 40,000, while only 6,000 people lived on the Island year-round. After 2000, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) estimated that between June and August, 75,000 to 89,000 people came to the Island. In 2024, in a report by the MVC, they calculated that the peak seasonal population was 94,650, 4.6 times the year-round population, on a given day in August including day-trippers. In 2025, the Steamship Authority reports that 2.4 million passengers and 550,000 vehicles passed through the Woods Hole terminal.

While the number of people on the Island has increased, the Island’s boundaries remain fixed. Martha’s Vineyard is about 55,000 acres, and while Look said that 43 percent of the Island is considered in conservation, there remain 13,500 acres, or about a quarter of the Island, that are either developable or potentially developable (i.e., a piece of property that has a home but has extra acreage, and could be further subdivided).

“Think for a minute of what you experience as you drive, hike, swim, experience the Island,” Look said to the audience. “Imagine a quarter more developed.” She added that based on historical trends, 80 percent of that land probably gets developed, while 20 percent is conserved.

There are currently 19,000 homes on the Island, but Look said 10,800 more acres of development would mean 11,000 more homes. And with more homes come more people, and added stress to the Island’s resources, such as the availability of water, an issue that’s been scrutinized as sprawling housing projects get approved.

Nantucket, on the other hand, is 50 percent permanently protected, but has less land still able to be conserved, Molden said. Because some of the other island’s zoning districts allow for tertiary dwellings, their most recent build-out analysis estimates that there’s still subdivision potential for 1,500 more lots, and a maximum build-out would allow for 17,000 more units.

“It’s hard for me, honestly, to imagine where they would all go, but it’s remarkable what folks are able to do with very little space and smaller lots, so we still have a lot of work to do, as well as far as trying to figure out and look toward capacity infrastructure, and how we can continue to protect, especially things like our drinking water and resources, as we move forward in the face of the continued pressure,” Molden said.

Molden said Nantucket officials want to fund a study that would look at the various build-out scenarios, analyze how they would impact the island’s resources and infrastructure, and present options to residents to ask, “Where do you all want to live? What scenario do you want to live under?”

The MVC tried to do what’s called a carrying-capacity study as early as 2020. Look said VCS was both excited and nervous about the results of that study: “Do we have four-lane roads? Do we have three-lane or two-lane rotaries? Do we have six more rotaries?”

Ben Robinson, commissioner at the MVC, and chairman of the Tisbury planning board, said carrying capacity is really understood in the natural world — animals and their food supplies and habitat — but in a human-built world, that is much harder, because limitations can be overcome through infrastructure and technology. Limited land can be solved through taller structures, and too much traffic can be aided through additional lanes and traffic lights. But to understand capacity in a rural place, like the Island, where there are self-imposed limits such as height maximums and general aesthetic dislike of traffic lights, that’s even harder.

While the MVC initially funded the study, which they worked on with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, through private donors and a state grant, cuts from the current federal administration dried that well up, and not much has been done in the past two years. And while Robinson said the MVC still tries to do some work on the issue, carrying capacity is hard to calculate, and initial reports told him that “unless you understand what you want as a community, as an Island, you’ll really struggle with what’s the right solution.”

So what is considered the “community” on the Island?

There are different audiences — year-rounders, second-homeowners and seasonal residents, weekend visitors — who hold different perspectives. Thresholds for quality of life and service, and even aesthetics and character, are subjective.

It’s clear for VCS that Martha’s Vineyard is an Island and has limits. “I don’t think that the Vineyard needs to sacrifice its well-being because of some sense we have — which might not even be correct — of what the tourism population wants of this Island,” Look said.

She added that to develop “without respect for the limits of an Island hurts our community, hurts the natural environment, and ultimately, hurts tourism and the economy it drives.”

And even so, should there eventually be a better sense of what the Island could handle, who holds the political backing to make those decisions?

There’s a desire, Look said, to have the towns remain distinct and preserve their own character, but that does create “a huge speed bump to things happening as efficiently as they could.” It means that one law or regulation needs to be approved by six different governments instead of one.

There are six select boards and six planning boards that make small and large decisions daily that produce outcomes that “as a collective are what we’re experiencing,” she said.

Meanwhile, the MVC can make decisions based on large-scale housing projects, not more frequent, small-scale ones, and Robinson said the other regional authority, the Dukes County Commissioners, focuses mostly on human services.

But when Hopkins said “we” have to make tough decisions to a crowd of mostly older Islanders, he didn’t really mean elected officials. He meant that as individuals and as a collective, the Island should modify behavior so that municipal systems don’t need to be built to meet peak requirements, which occur in the summer months.

Hopkins is less discouraged by the reality of six governments, though he said even when a law is passed, towns still fight among themselves over aspects like enforcement, and doesn’t think the Island can legislate a way out of these problems: “We’re talking about people looking at the challenge and assuming responsibility like never before. And if we don’t get people to that point of thinking, I don’t care how many laws you create, it’s not going to change people’s carbon footprint.”

There’s free transportation on the Island, Hopkins said, but people still won’t take the bus to lessen their environmental impact. Water departments constantly chase demand through more supply, Hopkins said. (Oak Bluffs recently passed a 30-year endeavor to upgrade the town’s wastewater capacity, expected to cost $105 million.) But a “wise environmental strategy” is to see, first, if demand can be reduced. He referenced when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked his constituents to set their thermostats to 78° over the holiday weekend to conserve energy. He wanted people to “be willing to be a little warmer inside their houses,” Hopkins said.

“We’re not getting that kind of leadership here locally,” Hopkins said, but he wants VCS to play a bigger role in that, and “flatten out those peak requirements.”

“Someone’s going to be upset; that’s why it’s a tough decision,” Hopkins said. The options are to either build to meet demand, he said, or force people modify their behavior to meet demand, so that supply is sufficient.