DURHAM, N.H. — A new report analyzing New Hampshire’s changing population said the trend of fewer people moving to the state will have serious implications if it continues.

The Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire used U.S. Census data and other information. It says New Hampshire’s population growth over the last 10 years was the slowest in five decades, though it was still the fastest growing state in the Northeast. But the dynamics behind that growth have changed. From 1970 to 2000, people moving into the state produced much of the increase. In the last decade, that migration has sharply decreased. The report says the decrease has significant implications because the state has long benefited from the social, economic and intellectual capital that migrants bring to the state.

The percentage of Americans who own their homes dropped a full percentage point over the past 12 months to 65.4% during the first three months of 2012, according to the latest Census Bureau data. That’s the lowest rate since 1997 and down from the peak of 69.2% reached in 2004.

“As foreclosures grew over the last six years, many homeowners became renters,” said Alex Villacorte, director of analytics for Clear Capital, a real estate valuation company.

The rental vacancy rate dropped to 8.8% during the first quarter, down from 9.7% a year earlier and from 9.4% in the last quarter of 2011, according to Census.

The growing demand has put pressure on the rental markets, said Villacorte. In many depressed housing markets, investors have been buying up distressed properties — foreclosures and short sales — fixing them up and renting them out.

The median asking rent last quarter was $721, up 5.6% from 12 months ago, according to Census.

Rents are highest in the Northeast, where the median is $932, followed by the West ($845), the South ($660) and the Midwest ($607). The median in Cheshire County NH is $1032.

Meanwhile, median home prices continue to fall. During the first quarter 2012, the median asking sales price for vacant units was $133,700. That’s down from $143,700 during the first quarter of 2011, according to Census.

Homeownership has fallen for all age groups, races and regions since the housing boom, Census reported.

It is lowest in the West, where it has dropped one percentage point over the past 12 months to 59.9%. The Midwest has the highest homeownership rate at 69.5%, down 0.9 point year-over-year; the South is second at 67.5% (down 0.9 point) and the Northeast is third at 62.5 (down 1.4 point).

Keene Shopper News Feb. 29-Mar. 6, 2012
The Keene Public Library will host a free Weatherization
Workshop on Tuesday, March 6 at 7 p.m. The
workshop will be held in the library’s Trustees’ Room.
The library is located on Winter Street. Attendees will
learn how hundreds of families are saving up to 40
percent on their annual household energy bills.
Next Step Living, an outreach partner for Public
Service of New Hampshire (PSNH), will provide the
workshop to help people lower their energy bills, live
in healthier, more comfortable homes, and reduce
their carbon footprint by accessing PSNH utility rebates
of 50 percent up to $4000 in instant incentives
through the NH Home Performance with Energy
Star Program.
Attendees will walk away with a plan for how they
can reduce energy use through simple do-it-yourself
projects. Others will walk away with an understanding
of whether their homes qualify for up to $4000 in
approved weatherization rebates through PSNH.
The NHSaves.com Heating Home Index Analyzer
will be available at the workshop. Bring your last
12 months of heating usage and see if your home
qualifies for up to $4000 in utility weatherization
rebates.

By JAKE BERRY The Telegraph of Nashua

Posted: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:15 pm | Updated: 11:19 am, Tue Feb 14, 2012.

CONCORD — The economic recession and dwindling state aid are causing New Hampshire taxpayers to fund a larger portion of their municipal and school budgets through local property taxes, according to a study released this week.

Officials said the drop in financial support from Concord has forced them to make difficult decisions about spending at the local level.

“Everybody’s in the same boat,” said Charlotte Schweiss, chairwomen of the Hudson Budget Committee. The town has used general fund savings to offset the state cuts. “We’re not getting what we’re owed as far as state-mandated programs.”

The Financing New Hampshire Cities and Towns report, released Monday by the N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies, found that in 2010, local property taxes made up on average 60 percent of city, town and school spending.

By comparison, in 2001, property taxes collected at the city and town level accounted for 56 percent of spending. Around New Hampshire, decreasing state aid has left budget planners struggling to contain costs.

“It’s becoming problematic. … Towns are doing everything they can to cut back expenditures,” said Dennis Delay, an economist with the public policy center that helped author the study.

The study also found that while local property taxes are being relied on more for municipal spending, some towns are relying on it far more than others. While Milford funded 55 percent of its 2010 budget through property taxes, Hollis property taxes made up 82 percent of the town’s budget spending.

Early in the 2000s, it wasn’t state cuts that led to the greater dependency on property taxes. Rather, high property values left cities, towns and school districts flush with money to fund additional programs and services, Delay said.

“There were some pretty significant increases in spending which, frankly, were pretty easy to fund as long as property values were rising,” he said Monday.

Recently, the economic recession has slowed revenues coming in from the state government, leaving municipal and school officials to make up the difference themselves.

In 2010, state officials eliminated the $25 million shared revenue program, which divided money among New Hampshire cities and towns. In 2011, funding was cut to the state retirement program, first down from 30 percent to 25 percent, and then eliminated.

This left local budget planners to replace hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. While these actions fell outside the timeline of the public policy center’s study, it could be an indicator that the reliance on local property taxes may become even more lopsided.

Some local cities and towns have managed to survive in the face of the increased costs. In Nashua, local property taxes made up 64 percent of the budget spending in 2010 — down from 69 percent in 2001, according to the study. Other towns, like Hudson, have used other revenue sources, such as increased motor-vehicle registrations, to offset some of the losses to state aid, officials said.

“I don’t think state funding has been the biggest factor (influencing our spending),” said Shawn Jasper, chairman of the Hudson Board of Selectmen, who is also deputy majority leader in the state House of Representatives.

Still, other towns have been forced to look to layoffs and service cuts to offset the losses and maintain a stable tax rate.

In the Litchfield School District, for instance, administrators eliminated more than 20 positions last year, according to business administrator Steve Martin. In Merrimack, officials have cut more than 20 school positions, as well as two firefighters, among other spots, to maintain a stable tax rate.

“It’s affected the schools, the fire department, the police department, everywhere,” said Paul Micali, the town’s finance director. “It’s been really hard.”

Moving forward, some economists are hopeful that, as the recession comes to an end, state officials will restore portions of the state funding.

“I really believe the worst is probably over for the state,” said Delay, of the public policy center.

Others are less optimistic, fearing that state officials won’t restore prior funding levels, leaving city, town and school officials to fend for themselves.

“My personal feeling, quite frankly, is you’re going to continue to see both the state and the federal government try to cut funding as much as possible,” said Martin, of the Litchfield School District. “They both just have too much money that they need to spend and not enough revenue to offset it.”

By Jim Gallagher St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS — Last summer, Marie Davis was living in an 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment and not liking it. A single woman of 27, she wanted bigger and better.

“I thought, ‘I’m handing money away in rent, and I’ll never see a return on it,’ ” she said.

The housing depression harrowed the building business. “The common theme is that they went long on land at the peak of the market,” said builder Ken Stricker of Consort Homes in Chesterfield, Mo. Builders borrowed to buy big tracts, and were stuck with it when buyers disappeared.

But Consort and others kept building through the downturn, though at a vastly reduced rate. They are leaner firms today living on narrowed profit margins.

Back in the good old days, around about 2006, Gene Stumpf would build 25 to 30 homes a year. They were four- and five-bedroom mansions, covering up to 4,000 square feet and selling for $500,000 or so.

That market has virtually disappeared, unfortunately, says Stumpf, who founded Stumpf Homes in 1985.

Unemployment is part of the reason, but that’s less of an issue for affluent people who buy big houses.

The real problem is the sick market for existing homes: People who might want a bigger house can’t sell the one they now own for an acceptable price.

So builders find themselves building more for people who don’t have homes to sell.

“The market that did best for us is the first-time home buyer,” said Mark Fulford, of Fulford homes in O’Fallon, Ill.

The best sellers are ranch houses, with three bedrooms covering about 1,700 square feet and selling in the $180,000 to $190,000 range, he said.

In some ways, it’s a throwback to the modest developments that sprang up locally in the 1960s and 1970s. But the newer models have extras — double vanities in the bathroom, walk-in closets, and full basements.

Those amenities, plus the newness, is the edge that lures buyers away from existing homes.

Changes in taste, in family size and personal finance are also driving the trend toward smaller homes. Americans no longer see a house as an investment, so there’s less incentive to buy big.

More customers are older couples. “They don’t need 3,400 square feet. Their kids have moved on,” says Stricker.

Kim Hibbs is a custom home builder. His customers are affluent people who want a home designed for them.

Even Hibbs’ buyers are thinking smaller. There’s less call for large family rooms and formal dining rooms, with customers asking for more open floor plans.

They make up for the smaller size with upgrades, creating “jewel box” homes with heated floors in bathrooms, granite in bedrooms.

In the boom times, developers would start a subdivision, build some model houses and wait for the orders to role in.

“Often, somebody would come in over the weekend and I’d have a contract on my desk Monday morning,” said Stumpf.

Usually, builders wouldn’t start construction until an order was in hand. Buyers would wait to sell their existing homes until the hammers were banging, confident of a rapid sale.

That’s changed. These days, move-up buyers don’t sign deals until they have a contract for the old one in hand, and they can’t wait for construction.

So, builders are putting up more “spec” houses — houses built on speculation that a buyer will show up.

“Those are the ones that sell,” says Stumpf.

A spec home strategy requires a friendly bank, and builders say their bankers are getting a bit friendlier.

The custom business has another problem: appraisals. Appraisers drew criticism for overestimating values during the housing boom, and they’ve become conservative in response.

They sometimes have trouble putting a value on a unique custom house, says Hibbs.

Without a high enough appraisal, borrowers can’t get loans, and builders lose the work.

Falling property values in Cheshire County are directly attributable to the recession-fueled national housing bubble, not local affordable housing issues, a state economist said.

“This is not your fault,” said Dennis Delay, an economist with the N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies and the New England Economic Partnership. But you still have to deal with it, he added.

Delay said workforce housing, defined as affordable housing for people who work, as opposed to subsidized housing for the unemployed, is not responsible for driving property values down in Cheshire County. It’s not a case of declining values because of declining neighborhoods.

Rather, he said, the recession caused by the sub-prime meltdown, which peaked in 2008, primarily accounts for the record-high 3,900 foreclosures in New Hampshire last year, and more than 3,000 so far this year.

“Falling property values had nothing to do with workforce housing and everything to do with the (housing) bubble,” he said.

Delay spoke Friday at a business leaders breakfast at Keene State College’s Alumni Center. It was sponsored by Heading for Home, a Keene-based nonprofit housing coalition that is studying how to stimulate more workforce housing in the Monadnock Region.

Heading for Home organized a day-long, region-wide housing summit in June, and Delay’s presentation was an outgrowth of some of those findings. In what’s an ongoing process, the coalition has identified barriers that workforce housing advocates face in the region, and offered possible solutions to some of those barriers. Education — accumulating as much information as possible — is one of them.

“(Workforce housing) is critical to a vital community,” said Gordon Leversee, outgoing president of Heading for Home. “It’s a changing landscape both financially and in many other ways. But we’re small enough (in the Monadnock Region) to get our hands around these issues.”

For instance, Keene State College has added about 200 housing units in the past two years, and more housing is being built by private developers. That could free up some single- and multi-family homes that had been housing college students, a development the coalition is looking at closely.

Delay said that unlike many parts of the country and New Hampshire, data indicate the Cheshire County housing market has stabilized. He said the region has already rode up the housing bubble and back down the correlating market correction.

“You are unique relative to the rest of the state and world,” he said. “You’re very close to being through the housing bubble and correction, at least locally.”

But that doesn’t mean good times are ahead. The average price of a house in Cheshire County today, adjusted for inflation, is the same as in 2000, prompting Delay to call it “the lost decade.”

The N.H. Housing Finance Authority reports that the average cost today for new and existing homes is a little more than $150,000, compared to about $200,000 in 2008.

Because so many houses are in foreclosure nationwide, data suggest banks are withholding them from the market because the return would be so low, Delay said. That means existing inventory has to work its way through the correction, resulting in an unpredictable future.

“We don’t really know where this is going to go,” he said. “Everybody’s playing this waiting game.”

Hence, the title of his presentation: “Stuck in Neutral.”

Delay said his presentation is strictly data-driven and non-partisan. “We’re here to educate, not advocate,” he said.

Other points he made:

New Hampshire’s “Great Depression” actually came in the early 1990s when the state lost 10 percent of its jobs. He said whereas homeowners could count on their homes for 10 percent of their disposable income, it has since dropped to negative-3 percent. “You can no longer use your homes as ATM machines,” he said.

Home vacancy rates today are at what’s considered a normal 5 percent in Cheshire County, compared to 12 percent in the early 1990s.

Two-bedroom rental units are becoming available at a faster rate in Cheshire County than anywhere in the state.

Home ownership by young people continues to decline in Cheshire County. In 2000, 42 percent of residents 35 years old and under owned homes; today it’s 39 percent and dropping, according to the housing finance authority. For those over 35, the share is 70 percent.

The building of new houses statewide has dropped from a peak of about 20,000 per year in the late 1980s and 10,000 in 2005 to under 5,000 per year now.

You are invited to join us on Friday, December 2nd from 7:00 to 9:00 AM for Heading for Home’s 6th Annual Business Leaders Breakfast as we explore the the critical role housing plays in our region’s economic recovery.

The event will include:

• Report of findings and “next steps” from the region-wide Housing Summit held on June 1, 2011
• Presentation Topic: “The Current Housing Environment-what’s changed and where are we going.”
• Featured speaker: Dennis Delay, Economist with the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies and the New England Economic Partnership. a non-profit organization dedicated to providing objective economic analyses and forecasts
• Full, delicious breakfast.

The $10 registration fee covers the cost of breakfast

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

For questions about the event, contact Susy Thielen at <susyt@headingforhome.org> or 352-1449.

This event is made possible through the sponsorship of Savings Bank of Walpole and Hampshire First Bank, both local New Hampshire Banks.

]]> http://www.headingforhome.org/2011/11/22/dec-2-business-leaders-breakfast/feed/ http://www.headingforhome.org/2011/11/04/homeownership-is-a-real-positive/ http://www.headingforhome.org/2011/11/04/homeownership-is-a-real-positive/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:53:37 +0000 Susy Thielen http://www.headingforhome.org/?p=353 by Preeti Vissa

A big part of the American dream is in serious danger — danger fueled by misinformation campaigns that may well lead to terrible policies.

For a long time, owning your own home has been a key part of that dream: One little corner of the world that’s yours, a shelter that not only protects your family from the wind and rain, but also from financial storms. That little bundle of equity can make emergencies manageable and a graceful retirement feasible. And there is plenty of evidence that homeownership helps build stable communities.

But that dream is under attack. More and more media voices have joined a chorus saying that “homeownership isn’t for everyone,” not-too-subtly implying that it’s time to keep the riffraff out. They’ve falsely blamed the subprime mortgage meltdown and resulting recession on efforts to help ordinary, hard-working Americans become homeowners. That chorus grew louder in September 2008, when Fox News host Neil Cavuto infamously blamed the housing collapse on “lending to minorities and risky folks,” and has continued ever since.

In fact, research has shown that the problem is not and never was responsible efforts to expand homeownership, such as the federal Community Reinvestment Act. The problem was toxic, trick mortgages peddled by firms that preyed on the unsophisticated. These loans were filled with booby-traps like low teaser rates with payments that skyrocketed a few years later, negative amortization (meaning that the low early payments actually caused the loan principal and total debt to increase), high upfront fees and prepayment penalties.

Many of these bad loans were refinances, sold to longtime homeowners with equity in their homes who simply needed to make repairs or fix a leaky roof. And millions of borrowers got into trouble simply because of recession-induced job losses.

That’s what happened to Arlene (who asked me not to use her real name), a Los Angeles homeowner whose husband lost the job he’d had for 38 years. She and her husband struggled to get her loan modified for three and a half nightmarish years. Finally, after coming right to the edge of losing their home, they’re in a trial modification and just may pull through, but the experience has been devastating.

Misinformation about the housing crisis has become so widespread that doors to homeownership are closing. Mortgage lending is down, even for trustworthy borrowers. Banks have cut back, and a proposed federal rule could require securitized loans to have a 20 percent down payment — far more than is truly necessary to ensure responsible borrowing. The housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac _ imperfect but nevertheless playing a critical role in making homeownership possible for millions — could be closed and replaced with nothing.

In a report released in July, Morgan Stanley argued that we are heading toward a “rentership society,” in part because the drastic cutback in mortgage availability “is severely hindering homebuying.”

Attacks on lending to low and moderate income buyers have gone far beyond what’s needed to avoid the excesses of a few years ago. This overreaction threatens to close the door to homeownership for millions of hard-working, responsible families.

This is both unfair and unwise. It’s unfair because the people who suffered most during the foreclosure crisis never got bailed out, even as the banks got hundreds of billions of dollars in federal guarantees. Now, millions of hardworking families — who often had no connection with the meltdown, except perhaps for losing their jobs in its aftermath _ are finding it impossible to become homeowners.

And it’s unwise because it will only increase the schisms in a society already profoundly polarized between haves and have-nots. It will close off whole communities from the tangible benefits of homeownership.

If this dream dies, a big piece of America will die with it.

Preeti Vissa is community reinvestment director at The Greenlining Institute in Berkeley, Calif.

Keene Mayor Dale Pregent made a prediction last week: “Within the next 10 to 12 years, Ward 1 will be almost totally college students.”

That ward includes Marlboro Street, the neighborhood where I grew up and where Pregent still lives.

On the mayor’s 75th birthday Wednesday, the two of us sat down for coffee to talk about that area.

Marlboro Street has always been an odd mash-up of homes, businesses and industry. Forty years ago, when I was growing up in that neighborhood, big companies such as MPB, Kingsbury Corp. and Markem employed hundreds of people.

There was O.K. Fairbanks grocery store, several gas stations and a couple of car dealerships. Families went to Dog ’n’ Suds to grab lunch or an ice cream, and the only strong presence from Keene State College was a college fraternity house close to Main Street. Single-family homes lined each side of the street, interspersed with apartment buildings. It was a busy street and one of the major arteries into the city.

Today Marlboro Street is like looking at an old, broken-down car: The frame is still good, but there are missing parts, rusty parts and the whole thing needs a good cleaning.

Pregent’s prediction is likely not far off the mark. Students at Keene State are now required to spend the first two years living on campus. After that, they are free to rent in Keene, and it makes perfect sense that they want to live close to campus on streets like Marlboro Street.

Pregent has homes on each side of him that house students, in addition to the house across the street. He has had to go over and talk to them about loud parties, drinking and trash. He said he’s been lucky, because although they party, they aren’t regularly unruly.

And he points out that renting housing to college students is a big business. If a landlord owns a small cape, for example, that could house four students; he or she could earn $2,000 a month in rent. If the landlord has a mortgage of $1,500 a month, he or she stands to make $6,000 a year. If landlords own two of those type houses, they could make $12,000 a year. With housing prices the way they are, it’s not difficult to find a three-bedroom home at a reasonable price and turn it into a profitable rental.

Keene Assessor Laura Thibodeau says there are 42 single-family homes on Marlboro Street, the same as 10 years ago. There has been a shift in ownership; in 2001 seven of those single-family homes were owned by people who lived elsewhere; today 12 of those homes are occupied by people other than the owners.

But that’s just the single-family homes. There are 104 properties on the street, many of them apartment buildings. And the street has multiple personalities in terms of zoning: Parts are commercially zoned, parts are in a residential zone, and then there’s Wheelock School, an elementary school on the corner of Adams Street.

The city, of course, bought the former Supervalu building at 350 Marlboro Street, near Optical Avenue. Part of that massive warehouse, renovated inside and out, is now home to the Keene Police Department.

Kendall Lane, a Keene city councilor who is also running for mayor, said the time to act is now on the future of Marlboro Street.

“It’s the perfect area where the city can be proactive to determine what happens down there,” he said.

He’s referring to planning the redevelopment of Marlboro Street so that the interests of the residents, the businesses and the city are all in line.

He doesn’t have specifics as to what that might mean, but he brought up two issues: the plan for an extension for Victoria Street to end at Marlboro Street, and the fact that Marlboro is one of the widest streets in the city.

If Victoria Street were to be reconfigured so that it ended on Marlboro Street, it would only work if the traffic, which would include tractor-trailers, came out into a business or industrial zoned area on Marlboro. If that part of the street were strictly residential, there would be tractor-trailers rumbling through an area filled with homes.

So the vacant or almost vacant businesses — David Ford, for example — would play into that equation. If the buildings were demolished, what might go there instead? It could be housing, a park, a strip mall, a restaurant, a flea market. The city has the opportunity now to develop a plan for what that area, and the rest of the street, looks like.

The width of the street is a double-edged sword: It’s good in terms of development, because there is room to grow, but there is a school there, so it’s perhaps not the best move to pump too much more traffic onto the street.

The society of Marlboro Street has changed, Pregent said. “In a transient neighborhood,” he said, “you don’t know your neighbors.”

Marlboro Street is inhabited in part by students. There isn’t the nudge to mow your lawn from the lawn maniac next door. There isn’t the drive to keep the house painted, the trash out of sight. While he was talking about Marlboro Street, Pregent mentioned the way the street is “used,” rather than “lived on.”

Many of the homes still look nice, and certainly the businesses owners keep their businesses looking professional.

But there is a slightly tarnished look to the street. Like Pregent said, it is a street that is used, rather than a street where people live.

Sherry Hughes is a Sentinel columnist.

We are losing key professionals from the Monadnock Region.  Young professionals, nurses, teachers, emergency response personnel, accountants, small business owners and hard workers in many local businesses cannot afford to live in our region.

Young people are choosing to move to other states where significant investments have been made in housing that is reasonably priced. Heading for Home has been working toward making sure that these professionals that contribute so much to our community and our economy can live here at home.

We have identified the most significant barriers to moving forward on critical workforce housing projects and now we need you! It’s time to refine the strategies to breakthrough the existing barriers and move into an action phase that produces affordable workforce housing for these valued community members within the next three to four years.

Join us on June 1st. from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. as we work together on strategies to break down the existing barriers to these projects within the Monadnock Region.  Your experience and time will be critical to solving this challenge as we move forward.

The day will include:

* Speakers with experiences in local towns working toward implementing affordable housing
* Roundtable discussions with members from important economic sectors to resolve these issues
* Great food

The $20 registration fee covers the cost of breakfast, lunch and snacks.

Register Now!

For questions about the event or registration, please contact Heading for Home at the email or phone information below.

Thank you for your interest and support. We look forward to seeing you at the Housing Summit.

Sincerely,
Susan Newcomer, Heading for Home Board Member
Workforce Development Coordinator
Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce
HousingSummit2011@gmail.com
603-352-1303 x14

Platinum Sponsors: Public Service Company of New Hampshire
Sustaining Sponsors: New Hampshire Housing, Citizens Bank