Mackinac Island, Michigan, attracts millions of tourists annually to its idyllic Lake Huron shores and quaint, historic downtown. People crowd the streets or take horses or horse-drawn carriages to get fudge and ice cream from local makers as if they’ve traveled back to Main Street, U.S.A., 1899.
And some of those visitors become so enchanted that they build their own homes on the island. Even the governor has a summer residence here.
But one of the key attractive qualities about Mackinac is its near-total ban on motor vehicles. Aside from select emergency uses, cars and trucks are forbidden, twisting an already difficult prospect — building a home on an island — into a Herculean labor.
'It's a nightmare of permits'
Scott Rausch of Rausch & Associates Realtors has been on every end of the homebuilding and buying process on the island for nearly 30 years. “I, too, know the trials and the tribulations, the good, the bad, everything about building on the island,” Rausch said. “It can be very challenging, but the reward can be great.”
Building a home on Mackinac Island is a committed endeavor that requires connections, patience, and more money than usual. The island poses three unique challenges for would-be homebuilders: getting materials to the island, moving materials around the island, and finding the right people to put those materials together.
Mackinac (pronounced MACK-in-awe) has been a destination for centuries. Deriving its name from the Ojibwe word for “Great Turtle,” the island was the site of a gathering ceremony for the Anishinaabe people.
Tony Grondin, a tribal elder of the local Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa, traces his roots to the expedition of Jean Nicolet, the first European thought to have seen the island. He returns to conduct annual ceremonies.
Grondin, 76, worked construction and contracting on the island for over four decades. Before you even tackle the physical challenges Mackinac presents, he said, you have to navigate the paperwork.
“It’s a nightmare of permits,” he said.
Dennis Dombroski, the city’s building inspector and engineer for 31 years (who wears a number of other civil service hats), said building permits on the island are the same as you would find anywhere.
It’s the vehicle permits that make the difference.
“Every vehicle on the island needs to be permitted,” he said. Vehicles are classified as anything that an operator can sit on and drive, from a riding lawn mower to a backhoe.
Vehicle permits are separated by length of time, with building sites able to arrange vehicle use for one to three days, three to seven days, or seven to 30 days. And depending on where you are on the island, the site might require permits from both the city and the state park.
What’s more, each site requires individual permits, “so if you’re a contractor who has lined up four or five locations, you have to get four or five permits for all of your vehicles,” Dombroski said.
Grondin said this is where a contractor’s relationships on the island start to matter: “[Contractors] had family members or friends who lived on the island” who would help navigate the process.
Some contractors never learn — and never return
After a contractor secures the necessary permits, they can begin the daunting logistics of obtaining materials from the mainland. Rausch, Grondin and Dombroski agree that this step is the steepest climb.
You have to ship your supplies to St. Ignace or Mackinaw City on the mainland and then arrange for travel with a freight company because “it all has to go over on a barge,” Rausch said.
In the early days, at least into the 1970s, some contractors would bring materials with teams of horses across the ice bridge that would form in the winter, Grondin said.
“When we had the ice bridge, I spent quite a bit of time over there,” said Grondin, who lives in St. Ignace. “It’s rare that we get an ice bridge now. The climate has warmed up.”
Planning ahead is critical.
Many contractors learn this lesson the hard way, and some never return after a failure, Dombroski said. “If you’re missing one two-by-four, you can’t just hop in the truck to Home Depot."
Labor crews are in demand — and mostly on the mainland
Part of the cost of building on Mackinac is ferrying your workers. The island has only about 500 year-round residents. Labor crews, which are in high demand, mostly come from the mainland, with many from the native tribes, according to Rausch.
“You have to pay for their parking and their passage to the island,” he said.
And if you need vehicles to come in through the main port during the summer, you're out of luck: The law does not allow vehicles to even pass through the city during tourist season, which means you’ll likely be building in the cold, Rausch said.
Not many of the construction workers like to work in the snow, he said. “They do add on a little percentage for that.”
Grondin said equipment is often sent to British Landing on the other side of the island to avoid having to go through town, but that means getting permits from the state park authority.
'OK, Molly.' 'OK, Charlie.'
After you jump through the bureaucratic hoops and everything you need to build a home has been offloaded at the docks, it's time to turn to the real workhorses of Mackinac: the horses themselves.
In the same way tourists explore the island, contractors and their equipment travel by horse. “You have to get hold of a dray company,” Grondin said.
A dray is a type of flatbed sled or wagon that a horse or team pulls. Grondin said workers get pretty familiar with the horses they see all the time, which become just like other workers on the site.
“They’ll say, ‘OK, Molly,’ or, ‘OK, Charlie.’ It’s just like talking to a human,” he said. “They know their names, and they’ll go.”
The home can be built the same way it would on any mainland site, except for one last hurdle. When construction reaches the plumbing stage, where do you find a plumber?
“There are none on the island,” Rausch said. The same goes for electricians and a number of specialists you need to finish a property.
Grondin’s son-in-law owns a plumbing company that Grondin said does much of the work on the island. “Not very many independent contractors will go over there,” he said. “Once you establish yourself, you’re in.”
All of these steps raise the cost of building.
Rausch estimates that homebuilding costs roughly three times what it would for a comparable home on the mainland.
And the asking prices reflect that and the island's desirability.
As of July 7, single-family listings on the island ranged from a five-bedroom, three-bathroom log cabin for $875,000 to a six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath brick home with 80 feet of private waterfront for $3.4 million.
Across the water in St. Ignace, the listings ranged from a three-bedroom, one-bathroom dormered Cape for $120,000 to a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath log home on a bluff for $1.15 million.
After visiting for years, Rausch bought his island home on his birthday in 1996. George Steinbrenner, the late owner of the New York Yankees, once owned it, he said.
“It’s a little tricky. You learn the ins and outs,” he said of living on the island. “It grows on you. It is a beautiful place.”