Towns confused over requirements
By Jessica Arriens
Sentinel Staff
Published: Monday, February 02, 2009
New Hampshire’s workforce housing law, passed this summer, has a grand goal: To fight the state’s affordable-housing shortage, and in turn create a productive, thriving workforce that can afford to live where it works.
Despite this lofty goal, the law — set to take effect in July — has caused communities across New Hampshire to struggle with meeting its web of new requirements.
“The law is difficult for communities to understand and comply with,” said Bruce D. Simpson, chairman of Dublin’s planning board.
To give these communities time to figure out what to do, state Rep. Peter R. Leishman recently helped sponsor a bill to delay the law for a year, until July 2010.
The Peterborough Democrat said he decided to introduce the bill after receiving a call from town officials in Sharon.
“They were totally overwhelmed by the (workforce housing law) due to their size and lack of resources,” he said.
“(They) didn’t feel they could get things together before July of this year.”
The law requires towns to ensure that land-use ordinances and regulations “provide reasonable and realistic opportunities for the development of workforce housing.”
All towns are required to allow developers to build workforce housing in more than half of their residential areas. Towns must also allow for “reasonable and realistic” opportunities to develop multi-family housing, which is a building with at least five dwelling units.
The law describes workforce housing as being affordable to a household with an average income for the region.
Affordable housing is defined as housing that costs, at most, 30 percent of a household’s gross annual income.
The mean income for a family of four in New Hampshire is $72,606, according to 2004 data from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
That means that for housing to be considered affordable in New Hampshire, families making that amount must spend no more than $21,781 a year on housing — be it in a combination of rent and utilities, or a mortgage, property taxes and insurance.
Delaying the start date won’t wipe out the workforce housing law, Leishman said.
It will simply “give people a little more time to implement it.”
For small towns like Sharon, which have no full-time planning and zoning staff, it is a challenge to decipher what needs to change, or doesn’t, to meet the law’s requirements, Leishman said.
“The towns are concerned that they can’t put ordinances in effect quick enough,” said Lisa J. Murphy, senior planner at the Southwest Regional Planning Commission.
And while the law doesn’t impose penalties on towns that fail to meet its requirements, it does open the door to potential litigation.
If a developer is denied a building permit on a workforce housing application — or if a permit is approved with “adverse” conditions or restrictions — the developer can appeal the town’s decision directly to superior court, according to the law.
The law doesn’t state what “adverse” conditions might be.
Towns “need that first lawsuit to come forward” to understand just how workforce housing litigation will play out in the state, said Murphy.
Waiting to be sued, however, is not exactly appealing.
“Nobody wants to be that first guinea pig,” she said.
The law, as it is written now, is also vague, Murphy said.
For example, towns are required to provide their fair share of workforce housing in their region, she said, but the law doesn’t define what “fair share” is.
To help navigate the legislation, towns could commission a study to cull all information about available and desired housing in town.
But thost studies are “quite costly and would take some time to do,” Murphy said.
Paying for a land-use consultant is also an expense towns might not be willing to take on now.
“All the towns are struggling, just like families,” Murphy said.
The poor economy has also stalled the nation’s building market, Murphy said.
Combine this stagnant building market with the confusion in the law, and both Murphy and Leishman said there are enough reasons to delay it.
There are still changes towns can make in the interim, Murphy said, such as revising zoning ordinances to allow buildings to have accessory apartments, which would boost the town’s housing stock, and therefore help towns meet the new requirements.
In Dublin’s village district, 1-acre zoning already provides a reasonable opportunity for more affordable housing, said Simpson.
The smaller lot sizes means more housing, and more affordable housing, can be built in downtown Dublin.
The town has also considered expanding the size of the village district, and Simpson said he plans to discuss the workforce housing law with the planning board in the coming months.
Rindge is also working on trying to “get our arms around what (the law) means,” said Town Administrator Carlotta Lilback Pini.
The town already has a jump-start on complying with the law, she said, thanks to the creation of a workforce housing committee and a $6,000 grant, which the town used to hire a housing consultant.
Rindge is also considering building workforce housing on town-owned property at Cromwell Drive.
“It’s an economic development issue,” Pini said of the need for workforce housing in Rindge, and the rest of New Hampshire.
Without workforce housing, a town won’t have a viable pool of employees to draw from, she said. This makes it harder for a town’s government and businesses to remain viable.
Simpson agreed that the lack of workforce housing in New Hampshire is a problem.
“The Legislature had a good intent,” he said, but something got lost in translation.
“No one knows exactly what they’re supposed to do to comply with (the law),” he said.
Jessica Arriens can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1433, or jarriens@keenesentinel.com