Is your Gloucester street public or private? 573 private roads, 80 miles, and what Eastern Point does that the rest of the city does not

Four out of every ten miles of road in Gloucester are private, and by count it is more than half of the city's named streets, because private ways tend to be short. The city does not own them, cannot repave them, and under state law cannot spend tax money on them beyond plowing and filling potholes. The people who own the houses along them, the abutters in the city's language, own the road, usually to the center line, whether they know it or not.

That is 573 roads by the city's count and 63.8 of the city's 167 road miles by the state's, 38 percent, the fourth highest share of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts and the seventh most miles. Statewide the share is 8 percent. Only three Cape Cod towns, Brewster, Eastham and Chatham, have a higher share; only Plymouth, Yarmouth, Falmouth, Brewster, Worcester and Barnstable have more miles. Rockport's share is 16 percent, Manchester's 18, Essex's 8.

Some of those private roads are in good shape. The streets of Eastern Point have been kept up for more than 60 years by an association the residents run. Many others are not, and the city's public works director told the council in 2018 that "many are in poor condition" and that few had been fully repaved since the city surveyed every road in 2013.

This story explains how a road ends up private, what the city can and cannot do, the four ways a private road gets fixed, how Eastern Point does it, how other towns with the same problem handle it, and the plain tradeoffs of a neighborhood association. Start by looking up your street.

Look up your street

The city by the numbers

Every one of Gloucester's 878 streets, with its status, crashes, complaints and paving on record, is in a table you can filter, sort and download at capeanncurrent.com/roads/lookup. Each street has its own link you can send to a neighbor.

How a road ends up private

Massachusetts has three kinds of roads. A public way is one the city has formally accepted, usually by a City Council vote. The city owns it, fixes it and is liable for it. A true private way is a driveway or a road the public has no right to use. In between is the kind Gloucester is full of: the statutory private way. The public may drive on it, the mail comes down it, the trash truck uses it, but the abutters own it and the city has no duty to fix it.

Many of these roads are older than the city. A 1726 town meeting laid out "particular ways" for farmers to reach their land, and the courts have said the origin of some is "so ancient as to be unknown." Others were laid out by developers in the 1900s and never accepted. Nothing makes a road public except a council vote. Plowing it does not. Filling its potholes does not. Letting the public use it for a century does not. Residents of Stillington Drive learned that this year: they argued the 1726 minutes made their road public, the city's lawyers said no, and the council's finance committee voted 0 to 3 in March against accepting it.

The reason the city cannot simply pay is the state constitution, as the Supreme Judicial Court has read it since the 1800s: tax money can be spent only for public purposes, and fixing a private road is a private benefit. The Legislature carved out two exceptions. A city may plow private ways that are open to the public, and under Chapter 40, Section 6N, it may make temporary repairs such as filling potholes, if it adopts an ordinance saying how. Gloucester's ordinance, Chapter 21, Sections 21-80 to 21-86, is that ordinance.

What the city spends on the roads it does own

For scale: the city's main paving account, R&M Paving in the public works budget (repairs and maintenance, the city's own money as opposed to state aid), spent $53,850 in fiscal 2020 and $81,323 in fiscal 2021. It jumped to $673,340 in fiscal 2022, when the council moved money in during the year, and the budget itself was raised to $350,000 in fiscal 2023, where it has stayed through fiscal 2026. On top of that the council has sent free cash to paving each spring: $356,792 in 2024, $285,834 in 2025 and $401,286 in 2026. The state's Chapter 90 program adds about $1 million a year and paid the full $1,017,200 to repave Bass Avenue in 2026. None of that money can touch a private way. Against a paving backlog the public works director put at about $30 million in May, the 285 public streets compete for roughly $1.7 million a year, and the 573 private ones compete for nothing. The full budget history is in our Gloucester road safety report.

What the city will and will not do on a private road

Here is Gloucester's ordinance in plain words.

The city will plow and sand a private way that is open to the public, under a council vote that dates to the late 1940s.

The city will fill potholes and patch the surface on a private way that has four or more abutters and has been open to the public for at least six years, when the public works director decides the road is unsafe and a temporary fix will cure it. Ask through SeeClickFix. If the director decides patching would be futile because the road needs rebuilding, the city stops there.

The city will not regrade, resurface, repave, dig, fix drainage or culverts, or widen a private way at public expense. The city is not liable for anyone hurt on a private way; the abutters are.

The city will, if the abutters ask and pay, organize and build a full repaving through a betterment, which means the city does the work and bills the owners back on their tax bills over several years. That is option 3 below.

The four ways a private road gets fixed

1. The neighbors pay a contractor. The abutters agree among themselves, get bids and pay. The city's own advice is to get several bids and share the cost. Nothing has to go through City Hall. The weakness is that there is no way to make a holdout pay, which is why the working group the mayor set up in 2022 found that the "absence of a neighborhood or street association" is the biggest obstacle on most private roads.

2. The neighbors form an association. A road or neighborhood association collects money, hires the contractor and keeps a schedule. If the deeds carry covenants that require every owner to pay, the association can enforce them; Eastern Point's does. If the deeds do not, the association works only as long as everyone agrees to chip in. The next section weighs this.

3. A betterment through the city. The abutters petition, the city builds, and the abutters repay on their tax bills. The road stays private. Step by step: get the form from the City Clerk; have DPW engineering certify the abutter list and the length; collect signatures from at least 75 percent of the abutting owners; pay $1 a foot, capped at $500; DPW estimates the job; the petitioners call a meeting of all abutters by certified mail with seven days' notice; at least 75 percent must attend in person or by proxy and two thirds must vote yes; the mayor decides whether to send it on; the council holds a hearing and needs a two thirds vote; the city borrows, builds and divides the actual cost equally by parcel, never above the estimate. Each parcel owner pays in full within 30 days or over five years if the share is under $3,000 and up to ten years if it is more, at 5 percent interest or up to 2 points over the city's own borrowing rate. If the vote fails, the road waits two years to try again. Since 2024 the council has approved two: $115,000 for parts of Harriet Road and Grapevine Road in February 2025, and $100,000 for 181 to 188 Hesperus Avenue in June 2025, both 9 to 0.

4. The city accepts the road as public. The abutters petition the council to lay the road out as a public way. The council weighs ten criteria the working group wrote into the ordinance: whether the road connects public roads or public places, carries through traffic, is the fastest route for fire trucks, can hold public utilities, is wide enough, and whether the abutters all agree. Acceptance is a taking, so the city may need to widen the road and can take land along it; the mayor noted in 2025 that some private road residents do not want that because their walls and fences sit close to the road. The council also knows that a road accepted in poor condition is a new bill, and that Chapter 90 money arrives by the mile at a rate that takes about 65 years to repay the cost of accepting a road like Riverview Road, by the public works director's estimate. In 2015 DPW proposed 15 private ways for acceptance; Grapevine Road was one and never moved. Deacon Farm Lane's petition is before the council now, continued to Nov. 24.

Here are the same options side by side, with who decides, who pays and what each one costs you.

There is a fifth path in the works. On Aug. 26, 2025, the council voted 9 to 0 to ask the Legislature for a special act that would let Gloucester spend public money on private roads that pass five tests: at least ten tax paying homes, a connector between two public roads, a route to a public place, no developer or covenant already responsible for it, and mostly through traffic. The mayor said it would allow permanent repairs, not curb to curb repaving, and that a list of the worst roads would decide the order. A statewide bill pending at the time would have set the bar at 100 homes. The special act had not passed as of this writing.

What has come before the council since 2025

The record shows how each path plays out in practice.

• Betterments that passed. Harriet Road, 3 to 6, and Grapevine Road, 59 to 64: a $115,000 loan order for permanent repairs with paving and drainage, Feb. 25, 2025, 9 to 0. Hesperus Avenue, 181 to 188: $100,000, June 2025, 9 to 0. Each parcel repays its equal share over up to ten years.
• Acceptance turned down. Stillington Drive residents petitioned to have their road accepted and argued that 1726 town meeting minutes had already made it public. The city's lawyers said no, a private way stays private until the council accepts it, and the Budget and Finance Committee voted 0 to 3 against on March 5, 2026. Waterside Lane, by contrast, had been recognized earlier.
• Acceptance pending. Deacon Farm Lane's petition was continued to Nov. 24, 2026.
• Who may park. On Rackliffe Street, a deeded private road, the council was told in September 2026 that the owners may park in front of their own homes. A no parking rule on a private way needs signatures from 60 percent of its residents, under the council's rules (council packet, Oct. 13, 2026, page 124).
• The special act. The council's Aug. 26, 2025 vote, 9 to 0, asked the Legislature to let the city spend public money on private roads that meet five tests. It had not passed as of this writing.

How Eastern Point does it

Eastern Point Boulevard is two roads. From Eastern Point Road to the stone pillars it is a city street, and the city's own list says so. From the pillars to the end, where the lighthouse and Mass Audubon's sanctuary are, the city's list says private. So is nearly every street that branches off it: Aileen Terrace, Daventry Lane, Fort Hill Avenue, Toronto Avenue, Niles Pond Road, St. Louis Avenue, Bemo Avenue and more.

What is different about Eastern Point is not that its roads are private. It is who holds them. On Dec. 28, 1962, the company that had developed the point, Eastern Point Community, Inc., deeded its remaining land, including Brace Cove beach and the private roads, to the Association of Eastern Point Residents, a nonprofit the residents run. The same deed gave the association the power to enforce, waive or suspend the restrictions written into every lot's deed, which run until 2054. A Land Court judge described the result in 1989 as "private roads administered by the Association."

That structure does three things a loose group of neighbors cannot, and they are the whole model: a deed, a budget and a board.

Mass Audubon lists the sanctuary's address as "Eastern Point Boulevard (private way)" and charges a vehicle fee at its own gate; the public can still drive the road to reach it. This story does not report who lives there or what the houses are worth, because the model does not depend on that. The association's own budget is private, as any association's is; what is public is the deed that created it and the roads it has kept.

Could other private roads do the same?

Three versions exist, from lightest to heaviest.

A street association with no covenants is the easiest to start and the weakest. Neighbors agree to a yearly amount and a plan. It works until someone sells to a buyer who will not pay. The city's realtor partnership, started in 2023, now tells buyers when a listing is on a private road, which helps the next owner know what they are joining.

A road association with recorded covenants is Eastern Point's model. Every owner signs an agreement that runs with the land, recorded at the Registry of Deeds, so it binds future buyers. Getting every current owner to sign is the hard part; the city's betterment rules need 75 percent, but a covenant needs everyone whose land it touches. Massachusetts, unlike Maine, has no statute that lets a majority of owners on a private road bind the holdouts. Maine's road association law does exactly that, and it is the model most often pointed to in New England.

Rockport, next door, took a third route in September 2025. Its special town meeting approved $400,000 by a two thirds hand vote to repair High View Road and Briny Way, the whole cost to be assessed on the owners as betterments, as the first step toward the town accepting both roads as public ways. The town administrator told voters the neighbors had worked it out with the public works department, that other private roads had chosen to make their own repairs, and others had chosen to do nothing. Rockport also plows private ways whose residents apply by Nov. 1 and pass a public works inspection by Dec. 1. We found no private road repair program in the Essex or Manchester minutes we hold.

A citywide approach would treat private roads as a program rather than one petition at a time. Barnstable borrows up to $15 million under a special act for temporary repairs on private roads and bills the abutters back over up to 20 years, with a 51 percent petition instead of 75, and its select board can cut a road's bill in half where through traffic is heavy. Plymouth pays 70 percent of a rebuild if the town accepts the road afterward and nothing if it does not. Brewster takes the road and assesses the abutters over 20 years. Gloucester's own working group recommended a middle course: simplify the betterment, publish past projects with their costs so neighbors can see what others paid, set criteria for which roads the city will accept, and put 5 percent of free cash into road repair each year. The council adopted the acceptance criteria and the betterment clean up in 2023 and 2024. The free cash idea became the 10 percent paving fund the city now feeds each year.

Pick any towns below to compare how each one handles a private road, side by side.

Why not just accept them all? The three big questions, for and against

Readers will ask the obvious question: why does the city not simply accept every private way as a public street, the way it would seem most places do? The short answer is that no city or town in Massachusetts does that, because acceptance is a taking, not a signature. To accept a road the city must survey and lay it out, take the land by eminent domain and pay any owner who claims damages, usually widen it and add drainage to meet its own standard, and then own the repair bill forever. In 2018 the public works director told the council that Chapter 90 aid, which arrives by the mile, would take about 65 years to repay the cost of accepting one road like Riverview Road. The backlog on the 285 streets the city already owns is about $30 million. Adding 80 miles, most in worse shape, roughly doubles that with no new money. And some abutters say no, because their walls, fences and parking sit inside the layout the city would take.

That does not settle it. The same facts cut the other way: the trash truck, the mail and the fire engine already use these roads, and a street that no one can organize will never improve on its own. Here are the three questions the city keeps circling, with the reasons on each side and the root of each one. Beyond Eastern Point, the on record examples of residents paying to rebuild a whole street are the 2025 betterments on Harriet Road, Grapevine Road and Hesperus Avenue, and Rockport's High View Road and Briny Way; we found no record in any of the four towns' minutes of residents building a sidewalk on a private way.

Has any town just accepted them all?

We looked and found no city or town in Massachusetts that has. Two tried something close, and the oldest rule in the book explains why it is so hard. Then the question that matters here: is any private street in Gloucester being upgraded today, and if not, what are we waiting for?

Four questions readers will ask: tolls, tickets and speed traps

The rules sound strange enough that people ask what else a private road could do. Here are the four questions we hear most, answered from the statutes and the case law.

What an association means for you, both sides

Homeowners associations have a bad name in much of the country, and the complaints are real: boards that fine owners, rules about paint colors and parked boats, and liens on homes over unpaid dues. Most of that comes from subdivision associations in states with large HOA laws. A road association is narrower, and Massachusetts has no HOA statute at all, which cuts both ways.

What you gain. The road gets paved on a schedule instead of when it fails. The cost is shared by everyone who uses it, not by whoever gives up first. One contract for several streets costs less. The city will deal with one board instead of forty households. If the deeds carry covenants, the obligation passes to the next owner, so the plan survives a sale.

What you give up. Dues are not optional once a covenant is recorded, and an association can put a lien on a home for unpaid dues, the same way the city does for an unpaid betterment. Decisions are made by a board or a majority vote, so you can be outvoted on when to pave and what to spend. Disputes between neighbors go to court, because no state agency oversees road associations. Recording covenants takes a lawyer and the signature of every owner, and a covenant can be hard to undo. An association that owns the road also carries the liability that comes with it, which means insurance.

What stays the same either way. The road stays private. The city still plows it and fills potholes if it qualifies. You can still use the betterment process, and an association makes the 75 percent signature drive far easier. And the four options above are not exclusive: a street can hire a contractor this year, form an association next year, and petition for acceptance later.

If you are weighing it, three questions decide most of it. Do the deeds on your street already carry a maintenance covenant? The Registry of Deeds in Salem has the answer. Is your road one the city might accept, because it connects public roads or carries through traffic? Then a petition for acceptance may be the better long game, and the city's new criteria tell you how it will be judged. And what did the last paving of a street like yours cost? Tell us when your street was last paved in the lookup above, and we will build that record street by street.

Your turn

Words used in this story

What we are still asking for

The Current is asking the city, through a public records request, for a list of every street it paved since 2015, how much of the city's roads were paved each year, and its pavement condition ratings by street, and separately whether the public works department keeps any record of paving on private ways. MassDOT's inventory records a "year last improved" for only 13 of Gloucester's 878 streets, so the lookup above asks readers to fill the gap; every report is checked before it is shown.

This story is part of the Current's road safety series. See where Gloucester's crashes happen and the Roads Library for every study the city has done on its roads.