Affordable housing critical to future of Keene
By Jessica Arriens
Sentinel Staff
Published: Saturday, November 07, 2009
Picture a middle school dance. Boys on one side of the room, girls on the other, everyone too shy to make the first move onto the gym-turned-dance floor.
In a sense, the relationship between young professionals and their elder counterparts can be thought of the same way.
Either side may want to participate in community initiatives, but their involvement won’t happen without a first step. Or: until somebody walks across that room, nobody dances.
Talk of how to take those first steps — and why they are important — happened Friday morning in Keene, at an annual Business Leaders Breakfast sponsored by Heading for Home, the Monadnock Region’s housing coalition.
Though the discussion hinged on the economic necessity of young professionals, much of it also centered on the necessity of their having affordable housing — something a community needs for a vibrant workforce to flourish in the first place, event participants said.
Affordable housing — defined as housing people in low- and middle-income brackets can afford — is something “everyone in the community has to take notice of,” said Keith F. Thibault, chief development officer for Southwestern Community Services.
Lately many communities have. The state Legislature passed a workforce housing law last year that requires towns to provide for their fair share of affordable housing. Southwestern is hoping to break ground in spring 2010 on a 24-unit affordable housing complex off Water Street in Keene.
And the link between affordable housing and economic vitality was fortified this summer, thanks to the final report of the Governor’s Task Force on the Retention of Young Workers.
The group — a varied crew including members from state colleges and labor organizations — was charged with devising a plan to recruit and retain young workers, essentially combating what’s been called “brain drain.”
Half of the state’s college students vacate New Hampshire post-graduation, said Stephen J. Reno, former chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire and another speaker at Friday’s event.
The national average is 18 percent.
Most of New Hampshire’s workforce is also closer to retirement than entry-level age, he said. That means a dip in the state’s labor pool is coming once those workers officially leave. And the decrease will probably be severe, since it will be accompanied by workers who held off retirement to survive the recession, he said.
“We are a graying workforce,” Reno said.
If the state doesn’t do something about it, New Hampshire will not be attractive to businesses, he said.
The governor’s task force issued a list of recommendations, and among them was something affordable housing advocates have been promoting for years: Continue supporting increased opportunities for workforce housing.
There is certainly a local shortage. In the past seven years, the amount of workforce housing in the Monadnock Region decreased by more than 55 percent, according to a report written by students in Keene State College’s geography department, in collaboration with Heading for Home, and published in April.
Finding an affordable place to live was a big challenge for Neil Giarratana, president of Keene software company Lucidus Corp., and another speaker at Friday’s breakfast (and generator of the young professional-middle school dance metaphor).
Giarratana and his wife searched and searched for a place to rent. Once they found a rental home, they were beat out in the application process, and eventually had to buy a place of their own.
The struggle almost prevented him from moving to Keene, said Giarratana, who is also chairman of the city’s Young Professionals Network. But he’s glad his family did.
“Once we looked we fell in love with this town,” he said.
“(Keene) continues to look at who it is as a culture and what it wants to be when it grows up,” through initiatives like Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth Hitchcock Keene’s Vision 2020 and the city’s master plan revision process.
And discussions like those are crucial to solving the problem of young worker retention — and, in turn, affordable housing — event participants said.
“It really does take a community putting its heads together,” Reno said, to figure out how to create a more hospitable environment.
Jessica Arriens can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1433, or jarriens@keenesentinel.com