State can’t afford to keep losing its youth
Concord Monitor Staff
August 09. 2006 8:00AM
Because homes in New Hampshire are unaffordable, the young couples who need them are fleeing.
Over the last five years, 11,500 women of childbearing age abandoned New Hampshire, according to Exeter demographer Peter Francese. The state also saw the loss of 10,000 children between 5 and 14 between 2000 and 2005.
The dramatic outflow of young people means that in the future there may not be enough workers to meet the health-care needs of an aged population. It means that the workforce needed to keep employers here and the economy growing won’t exist. It means, in short, big trouble if New Hampshire continues on its path toward becoming The Geezer State.
Reversing this dangerous demographic trend requires a reconsideration of state and local policies on growth, housing and taxation. Doing so has become a hard sell in a society that accepts as gospel the idea that children mean not continued prosperity but bigger property tax bills.
Affordable housing means homes that can be purchased with the salaries earned by a non-professional two-income couple in their 20s or 30s. The belief that each such home translates into two children to educate is mistaken. According to the state Housing Finance Authority, new single-family dwellings these days average half a child each.
State and local tax policies have made New Hampshire highly attractive to people in late middle age and to senior citizens. Not only is there no income tax, but most towns offer the elderly property tax exemptions that increase with age. Exemptions are now well into six figures in some places. Concord, for example, exempts the first $187,152 in property value when taxing a qualifying homeowner age 80 or older. Such tax exemptions raise the bills paid by everyone else and make home ownership more difficult for the young.
Tax exemptions could be based on income, not age. That would still help the elderly who really need it but would also assist young low-income homeowners as well.
Concord’s property tax bills, save for the owners of starter homes which, because no one is building them are, have escalated drastically in value, have risen only modestly. Unfortunately, incomes, once adjusted for inflation, for most people are flat or declining. That makes the bills harder to pay.
In their attempt to grow without adding schoolchildren, most communities are bending over backward to welcome over-55 housing. That effort would better be directed toward first-time homeowners, because it will benefit the state and because discrimination in housing policy is wrong.
It’s also time for local officials to rethink all the growth caps and other control measures that make homes larger and less affordable. Developers are not going to put $200,000 homes on two-acre lots.
To save open space, to concentrate population where services already exist and to lower housing costs, the rules should favor clustered housing proposals. When appropriate, when city or state government purchases land for conservation, a portion should be considered for affordable housing.
Senior citizens do make enormous contributions to their communities. But New Hampshire will not be a happy, economically thriving place if it becomes a land of geriatric villages.