Growing Pains: Housing New Hampshire’s Work Force
BIA - Business & Industry Association of NH
12 North Main Street, Concord, NH 03301
www.nhbia.org
OPINION/EDITORIAL – May 18, 2006
By Jim Roche
Think about this: In New Hampshire, a family earning the state’s median income can’t afford a home selling for the state’s median sale price. Put another way, if your family income is at or below the state’s median income of $68,000, it’s still not enough to afford the median price of a home, now at more than $250,000. To buy that home, you’d need a family income of at least $77,900.
This gap between the availability of affordable work force housing and family income reflects an alarming trend. If not reversed, this trend will affect New Hampshire’s economic future, the ability of our towns to thrive and our businesses to prosper, and the likelihood that our children will live, grow and start families of their own in our state. It’s a trend about which the state’s business community is concerned.
Last summer, the BIA met with business and opinion leaders throughout the state to discuss issues that impact the health of their companies. The lack of work force housing was a top priority in nearly all 14 business roundtable discussions we held and emerged as a top priority for the BIA’s 2006 legislative agenda. Work force housing is defined as housing that is affordable to families earning 80 percent or less of the state’s median income.
New Hampshire’s work force housing shortage has been well documented by the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority and by a recent special legislative commission established to investigate regulatory barriers to work force housing in New Hampshire. Their conclusions? During the last 10 years, New Hampshire’s robust economy has generated strong demand for housing that the market has been unable to meet. The result is well-documented rising home prices, record-breaking low vacancy rates and higher rents.
Municipalities in the Granite State are obligated to allow reasonable opportunities for the development of work force housing. New Hampshire court decisions such as Britton v. Chester, 134 N.H. 492 (1991) are clear on this point. Yet low-cost, high-density housing is often held up at the city and town levels by concerns that too much housing leads to too many schoolchildren and that rapid growth strains local infrastructure. According to the U.S. Census, however, the typical occupied New Hampshire dwelling results in only 0.45 public school students, not the two to three students assumed to be the case. Furthermore, by not allowing work force housing to maintain pace with our economic growth, we are in danger of slowing and perhaps killing the state’s economic engine.
So what’s being done to address this issue? Last winter, the BIA authored an op/ed piece on the lack of available and affordable housing for New Hampshire’s work force. In that article, subtitled “Fiddling While Rome Burns,” we noted that past legislative efforts have failed and that the New Hampshire Legislature has been unwilling to tackle a problem characterized as being a local issue. Here we are six months later and the legislative landscape has not changed.
The House soundly defeated a modest legislative measure to require towns to consider adequate housing stock as a part of the economic development section of their master plans. The Senate killed a measure to codify into state law what is already case law in New Hampshire. And don’t even begin to think about dramatic changes such as state input in local zoning decisions or an expedited appeals process to help work force housing developers who are stonewalled at the local level.
The only thing the Legislature was willing to do this session was pass a study bill to look at housing issues. If this sounds familiar, it should. The Legislature also studied the issue several years ago.
While the Legislature seems unwilling to address this critical business and economic issue in any meaningful way, some towns are rushing to provide age-restricted housing. Given such activity, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that New Hampshire is fast losing its young workers. In fact, according to Peter Francese, a nationally recognized demographer and director of demographic forecasts for the New England Economic Partnership, virtually all of New Hampshire’s recent population growth is in the 55-and-older age range.
All of which leaves us with an unanswered question. How can we as a state continue along a path that encourages rapid growth in our elder population while ignoring situations that inevitably lead our work force, especially our young adults, to relocate to other, more affordable states?
There is no question this is a challenging issue. The causes leading to housing shortages are often complex, and the solutions may require scarce state resources. But the voice of the business community is clear. Without adequate work force housing, businesses large and small can’t hire and retain the workers needed to expand and prosper in New Hampshire; the same is also true for municipal and state employers. If we care about New Hampshire, we need to make sure our work force has a place to call home.
Jim Roche is president and CEO of the Business and Industry Association, New Hampshire’s state chamber of commerce.