Have you heard that New Hampshire has a housing shortage?
Have you heard that the median price of a single-family home in New Hampshire is $530,000?
Have you heard that housing prices are up nearly 60% over the last four years and have increased 275% over the past 25 years?
This doesn’t bode well for a state where 27% of the workforce is 55 and older.
We are in a deep, dark hole that we need to start digging our way out of, and soon.
It’s going to take a long time, and New Hampshire’s economy depends upon it.
Housing has dominated the headlines in New Hampshire for more than a decade, but the pace has accelerated over the last few years as the state’s housing stock continues to decline.
A trio of events this month will focus on the issue, including two of which I’ll play a role.
New Hampshire Housing hosts its annual Homeownership Conference on March 18, a half-day event at the Grappone Center in Concord from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It will feature expert insight on the housing market, policy updates and economic trends shaping homeownership.
Julie Jussif, chief program officer of New Hampshire Housing, will be one of three panelists on a March 20 webinar hosted by NH Business Review. The 11 a.m. discussion, Residential Real Estate Trends for 2025, will include Matthew Le, first vice president and retail lending director of Kennebunk Savings, and Bob Quinn, CEO of New Hampshire Realtors.
I’ll be paying close attention to Bob Quinn, who was keynote speaker at last year’s annual breakfast for Neighborworks Southern New Hampshire. This year, that duty falls to me for a talk titled Homeward Bound: Housing — and Lots of it — is Key to NH’s Future. The March 27 event takes place from 7:30 to 9 a.m. at the Manchester Country Club in Bedford.
Advocating for housing reform
More than 50 bills that address housing are pending before the Legislature. They will be closely followed by a new business group that includes Realtors, state and local chambers of commerce and industry trade groups.
Representatives of the New Hampshire Housing Supply Coalition gathered March 4 in Concord to announce its mission to advocate for land-use reform, regulatory and permitting reform, and program and funding support.
During a press conference, Corinne Benfield, executive director of Stay Work Play NH, shared an anecdote about a colleague who has trouble making ends meet despite having a good job, a graduate degree and a side hustle.
If the housing shortage is causing an economic pinch for young professionals with good incomes, what about the state’s blue-collar workforce?
“Our housing supply challenge runs the gamut of the housing market,” said Mike Skelton, president and CEO of the Business and Industry Association. “Whether we’re talking about apartments, condos, townhouses, single-family starter homes, median-priced homes, even what some might consider higher-end homes … We just haven’t had the same supply historically that we’ve had.”
It’s a top concern among the BIA’s membership, Skelton said.
“When I am traveling the state, talking with business owners, manufacturing executives, the No. 1 challenge they want to talk to me about is workforce availability, and the issue that most directly syncs up with that challenge that they hear directly from their workforce is housing availability.”
Struggling in the margins
I recently saw an apartment listed for rent in the three-story multifamily on the West Side of Manchester where my mom raised four children for eight years. Back in the ‘70s, she paid $100 a month, an amount that never changed while we lived there. The landlord was her cousin and a kind man.
That $100, adjusted for inflation, would be about $800 now for the third-floor apartment, a 1,200-square-foot unit with three bedrooms and one bath. The listing I saw for the first-floor unit included only two bedrooms but noted a “double living room.”
Half of that double living room in our third-floor apartment was my mom’s bedroom, which was behind a pair of French doors and shielded from view with curtains.
The current rent for the first-floor apartment is $1,250, about 56% more than my mom was paying in 1970s dollars. Back then, we were barely scraping by, and I don’t see how my mom would have been able to afford it. We likely would have had to move in with my grandmother a couple of blocks away.
When I think about the housing crisis, it reminds me of the people living on the margins. Our story had a happy ending: My mom remarried, and we moved to a duplex in a nicer neighborhood. My mom and step-dad eventually bought a townhouse in Manchester and became first-time homeowners.
Much of the attention on the housing shortage has been focused on how low inventories have been driving up prices, making it difficult for young people with college degrees and good jobs to become homebuyers and keeping older homebuyers on the sidelines, reluctant to give up low mortgage rates they locked in years ago. In between are working families who already were living paycheck to paycheck.
“Affordable housing” encompasses a much greater universe these days, affecting a much wider demographic. The stakes have never been higher.
