Posted by Susy Thielen on April 16th, 2009 — in Housing News, Monadnock Region Coalition
By Jessica Arriens
Sentinel Staff
Published: Thursday, April 16, 2009
It’s not often that a tax map is so shocking it makes people gasp.
But when those maps show that in six years more than half of Keene’s workforce housing — housing stock that employed people in low- and middle-income brackets can afford — simply disappeared, otherwise mundane tax maps become unbelievable.
Put simply, “It’s a pretty significant decrease,” said Torin Hjelmstad, one of three Keene State College geography students responsible for the map, one part of a workforce housing study titled “May the Force be with you: Workforce Housing in the Monadnock Region.”
Hjelmstad, along with students Sarah Forler and Elizabeth Kane, presented the report to the public Wednesday night at Bentley Commons in Keene. Read the rest of this page »
No Comments »
Posted by Susy Thielen on April 6th, 2009 — in Housing News, Monadnock Region Coalition
On April 15, 2009, Heading for Home and the Keene State Department of Geography presented the report, “May the Force be with You: Workforce Housing in the Monadnock Region,” an original study comparing the changes in workforce housing availability in the Monadnock Region in 2001 and 2008.
No Comments »
Posted by Susy Thielen on April 6th, 2009 — in Housing News, Monadnock Region Coalition
By Jessica Arriens
Sentinel Staff
Published: Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Susan R. Thielen has heard the myths.
When people hear “workforce housing,” they picture derelict trailers, imagine an influx of children and cry out that such a move will cost them more in property tax dollars.
It’s all part of what Thielen, coordinator of Keene’s workforce housing coalition Heading for Home, calls workforce housing’s “image problem.”
“(People) want the younger people, they want the workforce, they want the viable tax base,” she said. “But they just don’t want their neighborhood to change.”
Whether towns like it or not, that change has come, in the form of a new workforce housing law, passed last year and set to take effect this July. Read the rest of this page »
No Comments »
