Add The New York Post on Google He asked the Atlantic for five years. So far, the Atlantic has kept its end of the bargain.
Massachusetts car dealer Charles Fotopoulos and his wife, Miglena, snapped up 93 Baxter Road, a 1951 cottage clinging to the edge of Nantucket’s storied Sconset Bluff, for $899,000 in September 2021.
On an island where eight-figure price tags barely raise an eyebrow, it was one of the rare deals that year to come in under seven figures.
Five years later, the house is still up there. Barely.
Just a few feet of ground now separate the back of the home from a 40-foot plunge to the sand. When it was built, the ocean sat hundreds of yards away. Over the decades, the retreating bluff has swallowed a string of the neighbors.
The Fotopouloses, who run dealerships in Lowell and Westwood, went in with their eyes wide open.
“It was cheap and I said ‘hey, I’ll buy it’,” Charles told the Nantucket Current back when the deal closed. “The foundation is structurally sound, and with the geotubes there, unless we have a killer storm, I think we’re safe. A lot of people think I’m crazy, but if I get five years out of it, I think I’m good. I’ll take that any day.”
From the living room, there is nothing to see but open water.
“It’s both a great view, and a scary view,” he said.
The sellers took a beating. Steven and Erin Freeman paid $1.53 million for the place in 2007, when a comfortable 50 to 70 feet of land still stood between the house and the drop. They walked away roughly $631,000 poorer.
Their broker, Jamie Howarth, said nobody was fooled.
“They knew the risks going in,” Howarth said in 2021. “I was clear with him and we were clear with him that there was serious risk.”
The Freemans didn’t surrender quietly. In 2010 they hauled the house back toward Baxter Road, and in 2017 they took a DIY approach to shoring up the top of the bluff, work the island’s Conservation Commission never approved and slapped them with an enforcement order over. The couple were also active in the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund, the well-heeled homeowner group bankrolling the geotubes.
Howarth figured the Freemans probably clawed back their loss and then some through summer rentals, with peak weeks fetching up to $10,000.
The new owners may have tried a similar play. Listing records show the home was advertised as a rental in September 2025 at $10,000 a month, and this past summer, it rented for $29,500 per month.
Fotopoulos, for his part, insisted the numbers penciled out.
“It is what it is. It’s a hole in the ocean on Nantucket. It’s really worth $8 million if you really think about it. The next comp down the street is $8.4 million,” he said at the time.
Today, similar comps on the island with oceanfront views have homes listed between $11.5 million to $29 million.
His safety net was the geotubes, massive fabric sacks packed with sand and parked at the base of the bluff to absorb the surf. They have slowed the erosion along that stretch. They have also become the most bitterly contested pile of sand on the island.
The Conservation Commission voted in 2021 to rip them out. The preservation group simply ignored that order.
This year has been brutal for the barrier. After fresh collapses left big sections stripped bare, the commission’s chair warned in March that the project could be nearing “complete failure.” A winter storm packing gusts above 80 mph scoured away even more sand.
The fight over expanding the wall has zigzagged ever since. Voters at the Town Meeting narrowly shot down the expansion this spring, a vote that blocks the 3,000-foot extension no matter what happens in court or at the state level.
A Superior Court judge nonetheless sided with the expansion permit in August, and the commission has signaled it may let the group patch a section damaged in what officials called suspected vandalism back in January. Then state environmental regulators fired off an Aug. 31 letter flagging a dozen unresolved problems with the proposal, and the Select Board has so far refused to promise voters a second crack at it.
The stakes reach beyond one cottage. Opponents argue that old homes like 93 Baxter are precisely what keeps the whole armoring project legally alive.
“The presence of that pre-1978 house is what provides the legal justification, in part, for the permitting of hard armoring,” Nantucket Coastal Conservancy’s D. Anne Atherton said at the time of the sale.
The Fotopouloses have no ties to the preservation group.
For now, the cottage still has its view, and its owner still has his five years. What comes next is anyone’s guess, including his.
“How long does it last? You and I don’t know that,” Fotopoulos said.
