The cost and availability of housing continues to be one of the top issues for people in New Hampshire.
Some communities across the state are turning to housing navigators for help. Housing navigators serve as liaisons between the community and local officials to find new solutions to the housing crisis.
Renee Theall is a housing navigator with the Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission. She was previously part of a statewide housing navigator program that ended this fall, but is continuing her work in the region. Theall spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa about her work.
Transcript
So in the communities you work with, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges to building more housing?
There's a lot of factors that come into play. The ones that stick out as challenges are some of the zoning [policies], if it's not as conducive to create more units. Then also, sometimes [it’s] misinformation or people misunderstanding what the goals are.
What does some of that misinformation look like?
Sometimes we hear growth and it's a scary word. We're used to the way our town is or our community is. I often try to remind folks [that] all of our towns are growing. We're all kind of growing in some fashion, hopefully, in a way. But the fears are like, ‘Oh, well, I saw this five story apartment building go in a few towns over and I don't want that here in our town. It doesn't fit.’
And part of the community engagement that's really important is to help inform what these policy changes would potentially create in the future for the town. Sometimes when you talk about multifamily units, people think of those five or six story buildings. But oftentimes it can be as simple as an old colonial with an attached barn turned into four or five units, and you don't notice it in your town character.
When it comes to community engagement and outreach, I understand you've been out in the community, like at the transfer station.
Yeah, I have. Oftentimes at town meetings [or] planning board meetings, folks who are available can attend and be there as public participants. But when you're changing things or proposing or talking about what your town is going to look like in the future, you really want to have all voices involved. And in a town where there isn't—oftentimes the rural communities don't have a central hub, a coffee shop, things like that [and] not as much businesses, it’s hard to find those voices. And so [the] transfer station was it in a couple of communities. [I] had some great conversations there with folks who otherwise wouldn't have given their input and been able to be a part of the conversation.
There have been some changes in housing policy in some of the communities you work with. What are some of the policies residents are interested in having or have pushed for?
Actually, [during] the transfer station outreach, one thing that came up was folks aren't always aware of what the zoning policies are.
So one of them was minimum acreage requirements. A lot of folks were like, ‘Yeah, I'd be open to changing that.’ So the town planning board is looking at reducing the minimum acreage requirements, which could sometimes be prohibiting growth. There also at the same time was a sentiment of wanting to protect and preserve land in their town.
So one tool that they are utilizing and drafting is a conservation subdivision ordinance. And what that does is it puts a percentage of a tract of land into conservation and it remains open space or green space. Then the remainder is able to densely kind of push the houses on one side of an area and to ease up on the acreage requirement. They're currently drafting and writing that, [and] hope to [get that to] ballot in the spring.
And which town was this?
So this is Wilmot. [It] doesn't have a lot of commercial in there, and so it's a very quiet, lovely community.
