Workforce housing unwanted? Legislator: Towns are keeping out affordable-home projects
Thursday, January 31, 2008
NORMA LOVE and Sarah Palermo
Associated Press and Sentinel Staff
CONCORD - Towns are using delaying tactics to prevent developers from building moderate-priced housing for workers, witnesses told a Senate committee this week.
And one local housing advocate says the high price of land and overly restrictive planning and zoning laws in the Monadnock Region dissuade developers from even starting the process here.
Workforce housing - often a euphemism for low- to moderate-income housing - has the unearned reputation of degrading the appearance of its neighborhood, said Susan R. Thielen of the Keene-based Heading for Home Coalition on Wednesday.
“It’s a difficult term for most people to understand. … The sentiment is often ‘we don’t want those people,’ but they are … normal working people with families,” she said.
The coalition, run by local members of the business community, is trying to increase affordable work-force housing in the region.
On Tuesday, Senate President Sylvia Larsen testified “firefighters, bank tellers, any number of contributing workers … are having difficulty finding housing.”
Larsen acknowledged housing prices have dropped recently, but said workers still are having trouble finding places to live near their jobs.
She spoke for two bills that would create an expedited appeals process and take away some local discretion over development of multifamily structures.
Sen. Martha Fuller Clark, the prime sponsor of both bills, asked the Senate Public and Municipal Affairs Committee to amend both to add definitions of “affordable” based on household income. She said she wanted the law to focus on making units available for families, not those age 55 and older.
“We are trying to make sure that everyone who lives here has a chance for decent housing,” she said.
Other witnesses said a 1991 state Supreme Court decision requires towns to provide reasonable opportunities for construction of so-called “work-force housing” but some communities set up so many hurdles that developers can’t afford lengthy court battles to go ahead with the projects. They said the delays increase the projects’ costs so they no longer would be affordable.
Michael LaFontaine of the N.H. Community Loan Fund and N.H. Nonprofit Housing Network said builders bypass those towns rather than waste money in court.
“If we want affordable housing, the option of allowing communities to say, ‘No, we don’t want it here,’ has to be taken off the table,” LaFontaine told the committee.
Obtaining money to build the projects isn’t as hard as finding suitable sites, LaFontaine said. The federal government, which provides much of their construction money, balks when problems arise with sites, he said.
“We simply don’t build in those towns,” he said.
According to Thielen of the local work-force housing coalition, many towns in the Monadnock Region are being bypassed in just such a way.
Because of the high price of land in the area, developers cannot build housing and sell it at a low enough price to be considered work-force housing - between $134,000 and $225,000 a unit, according to Thielen.
“If you look at the real estate ads around here, there is very little available in that level. … The housing market has dropped, but that doesn’t solve the problem. The prices don’t drop enough, and rents are very high here, too,” she said.
Even if developers were interested in building work-force housing in the area, planning and zoning regulations in many Monadnock Region towns are very restrictive and would allow residents and towns to delay the process, she said.
“If I decided I didn’t want work-force housing in my neighborhood, I could keep going back to my planning board with questions and issues,” Thielen said.
She added questions “should be raised - when they are relevant - but many times they are used as a weapon to keep work-force housing out of the neighborhood.”
Towns obeying the spirit of the law then question why builders concentrate on them, LaFontaine said.
Larsen said delays can cost builders the option to buy the land.
Ignatius MacLellan of the New England Housing Investment Fund said developers have to take into account the risk of a project. By expediting the appeals process, they have a fairer chance of breaking through local roadblocks, he said.
Elliott Berry said in his 32 years at N.H. Legal Assistance there have been three lawsuits over the issue. He said the small number is because the cost makes the projects unaffordable.
“If a town doesn’t want to host work-force housing, there is no reason in the world for them not to say, ‘Go ahead, sue us,’” Berry said.
Judy Silva of the N.H. Municipal Association said association members support the 1991 court ruling and putting its guidelines clearly in law. But she questioned whether the Senate bills go beyond that ruling.
Locally, current regulations seem to run against the grain of the original development of the region, Thielen said.
“This isn’t just about the fact that these people can’t afford a house: If we can’t have housing that’s affordable, we’re not going to have the medical people we need, and companies like Markem will not stay because they can’t find suitable housing for their people,” she said.
“If you tried to recreate a small town village, like Westmoreland or Chesterfield,” she said, “the laws we have on the books right now would not permit those uses. You couldn’t do it.”
Sarah Palermo can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or spalermo@keenesentinel.com.