This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it as a partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Concord’s first groundbreaking after a slate of new state housing laws took effect to spur housing development isn’t a big downtown apartment complex or shiny new townhouses tucked along a cul-de-sac.
It’s in 83-year-old Jane Broadrick’s backyard.
Broadrick’s daughter, Tricia Hunt, has always promised her mom that she could “age in place.” But Broadrick’s ranch-style South End home wasn’t big enough for them to share. Hunt lives in Gilmanton with her husband, but Broadrick didn’t want to move away from the small-city hustle and bustle that Concord has to offer.
“I said to her one day,” Broadrick recalled, “‘I wonder if I could put a little house in my backyard.'”
A tiny home for Broadrick to move into would solve everything, they figured. Broadrick would still be able to tend the bountiful gardens she’s nurtured over the last 13 years on South Street, and she could watch the hummingbirds at the feeder on the porch. Her daughter, a weaver, would work on her craft from the main house’s deck a few feet away.
Broadrick found Kinstruct, a Pembroke-based company that builds custom tiny homes for multigenerational living.
However, as Broadrick learned, she could not simply put a little house in her backyard. Not in Concord, at least.
The city didn’t allow detached accessory dwelling units. She’d have to go to the zoning board for special permission, something she figured would “cost a lot of money and a lot of time.”
A bill going through the state house at the time, though, would change that.
As Broadrick held her breath, the bill had an uncertain fate, as such legislative efforts in New Hampshire faced mixed success in recent years.
When Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed the bill in mid-July, the Kinstruct crew called Concord’s planning office within days to obtain the necessary permits. Though they no longer needed a special exception, building a home, however tiny, still requires approval from the city on everything from the setback distance from the property line to water and sewer hookups.
Kinstruct dealt with city officials to figure out the new process. Days into the new law’s enactment, Broadrick’s request pulled Concord into uncharted territory.
“They didn’t know what they didn’t know,” she said.
Getting her permits took a little over a month — a snippet of time in the grand scheme of things, but to Broadrick, it “seemed like forever.”
Late last month, an excavator started digging a trench that would one day be the foundation of her new, 600-square-foot home.
“I don’t see my life changing a whole lot, except I’m going to have my daughter here,” she said. “I would love to think that I could be in there by Christmas.”
Removing obstacles to housing
New Hampshire lawmakers have long held a reverence for the judgments of each town and city to make decisions for themselves rather than obeying statewide edicts. That principle, “local control,” has been a key force that wilted previous housing legislation. While not every housing bill reached the governor’s desk, lawmakers and observers alike agree: something changed in the legislature this year.
Fed up with local restrictions impeding the growth of housing stock, lawmakers rallied around a raft of new laws creating more relaxed standards for housing statewide. Among other changes, towns can’t require as many parking spaces per unit as they once did. Residences can now be built in commercial areas without special permission. And detached apartments or in-law units, like Broadrick’s, are now allowed by right.
What made the difference? An affordability crisis became too big to ignore, lawmakers grew tired of waiting for towns to open the door for new construction, and Republicans in the “live free or die” state began to wield state power with a heavier hand.
The change has come as a relief to developers frustrated with the preferences of keep-things-they-way-they-are local decision makers.
“Years gone by, it was the developer saying there’s a problem, and the general public wasn’t a hundred percent sold on the fact,” said Dick Anagnost, a well-known Manchester developer.
The housing shortage has become common knowledge, but that hasn’t necessarily made it any easier to get projects approved.
“How many times have I gone before a board and they wanted me to reduce the density of a project because they thought there were too many people in the town?” Anagost said. “Yet it’s their children coming to me to rent the apartment, and I don’t have enough of them.”
‘Housing is just unavailable’
By most indicators, New Hampshire’s housing landscape is getting worse, not better.
Home prices keep creeping up, recently hitting an all-time median high of $565,000 for single-family homes.
Residents view housing as far and away the most important issue facing New Hampshire, according to UNH’s Granite State Poll. More than a quarter of people taking part in a recent survey listed housing as their top concern. Only 8% saw the economy, education or jobs with the same urgency.
Housing was also the problem that state lawmakers heard the most about on the campaign trail, kicking them into gear.
“We listened to the voters,” said Rep. Joe Alexander, a Republican from Goffstown, who chairs the House of Representatives’ newly formed Housing Committee. “Consistently, across the whole ideological spectrum, the number one polled issue was housing, and it’s been something that was at the forefront of discussions when I was knocking doors.”
In a partisan political world fueled by national headwinds, housing has served as a conduit for bipartisanship between lawmakers who agree on little else, from education to healthcare to the arts.
“People can’t move out of big houses into other arrangements when they don’t need the space because there’s no place for them to go. Young folks not only can’t find a house to buy that’s affordable, but they can’t even find a house to rent because the vacancy rate is so low,” said state Sen. Tara Reardon, a Concord Democrat. “Housing is just unavailable in the state of New Hampshire.”
She doubts the policy changes she helped pass this year will drive immediate, large-scale results, but they could start to move the needle. The accessory dwelling unit law and situations like Broadrick’s are case-in-point.
“I think accessory dwelling units, either detached or attached, aren’t necessarily a huge panacea for the housing industry,” Reardon said, “but it’s going to solve the problem for lots of individual families.”
Broadrick request to put her little house in her backyard could easily have been denied if these bills hadn’t gained significant support.
Ayotte spent no small amount of time advocating for development-friendly policies that remove bureaucratic red tape and help developers build quickly and easily. She has since trimmed the state’s permitting process by reducing the number of agencies involved and giving them a 60-day deadline for all approvals.
She also made a point to support legislation that housing advocates deemed as the two big-ticket items from this session: Manchester Rep. Alissandra Murray’s bill to allow multi-family residences in commercial areas, and Alexander’s bill to loosen restrictions on accessory dwelling units like Broadrick’s.
“We need more affordable housing for workforce, for our young people, for our seniors, pretty much everybody,” Ayotte said, “and I am proud of what we accomplished this legislative session.”
The battle for local control
Not everyone is cheering the changes.
For towns that have historically opposed new development, these laws represent the long, encroaching arm of Concord. State mandates that limit the authority of local planning and zoning boards chip away New Hampshire’s prized local control.
Consider a February exchange between two Republican senators, Keith Murphy, of Manchester, and Denise Ricciardi, of neighboring Bedford.
The bill before Ricciardi and the Commerce Committee was about parking – specifically, Murphy wanted to prevent towns from requiring more than one parking space per unit of new housing.
In a place like Manchester, he argued, this makes sense: not everyone has or needs a car, and so requiring two parking spaces per unit is a de facto cap on population density. In places like Bedford, where most people use cars, consumer demand would ensure new homes provide enough parking.
Housing advocates agreed with him. His Republican colleague did not.
“Is this a mandate to the towns?” Riccardi asked. “Shouldn’t it be decided by each town what works for them?”
Murphy pushed back on the local-control argument, saying it’s more myth than rule.
“The towns exist because we say they do. We give them the power to do whatever we choose as a legislature to allow them to do and not do,” Murphy said. “In some cases, it’s up to us to put restrictions on powers that we allow them to exercise.”
Other statewide policies coming out of Concord, and supported broadly by Republicans, include bans on cell phones in schools, diversity and equity programs, and sanctuary policies for immigrants.
The New Hampshire Municipal Association, a non-partisan group that lobbies for towns and cities in the statehouse, was among only a handful of opponents to the parking bill. The organization is a staunch defender of local control.
Margaret Byrnes, its executive director, said voters should have a more direct say in how their communities develop and shift over time instead of blanket, statewide rules.
“Local governments know their communities best,” Byrnes said. “Communities are unique. They have different needs, they have different natural resources, and those things should be taken into account when making changes or adopting zoning ordinances.”
Joe Alexander, however, has a new take on the state’s local-control roots.
He doesn’t see these laws as imposing statewide requirements; he views them as lifting local ones. After all, he said, property owners’ rights are the ultimate local control. A government, no matter how large or small, shouldn’t encroach on that.
“We gave them permission 100 years ago to zone,” Alexander said, “and they’ve taken that and completely become tyrannical with some of the regulations they’re imposing.”
In the Republican Party, this line of thinking has exposed ideological rifts between more traditional New Hampshire conservatives and factions further to the right, including some lawmakers affiliated with the Free State movement.
But on the issue of housing, these initiatives were supported by state Democrats, including progressives. In fact, it’s one of the rare issues with footholds across the political spectrum.
Even when legislators were at odds over which bills to approve, the division wasn’t by party. In some cases, like the parking bill, Republicans split almost exactly in half.
“The need is equal across not only parties, but all areas of the economy and all ages,” said Reardon, one of eight Democrat state senators. “It’s something that’s impacting almost everybody in the state of New Hampshire.”
She and Alexander are set to lead a commission this year to review the Zoning Enabling Act, the state’s 100-year-old manifesto that serves as the foundation of local control. They’ll look at potential changes to the law, which could lead to the state taking back some of the zoning rights it gave to municipalities a century ago.
Will it make a difference?
How much progress will come from these laws depends on whom you ask.
Anagnost, the Manchester developer, saw some major coups this year – and some tough losses.
Allowing housing in commercial zones pries a crack in the door for projects to redevelop unused office buildings, he said, like one proposed for the former Cigna building in Hooksett, which had been held up in court.
At the same time, an effort to lower the ceiling for lot sizes, and therefore increase housing density, didn’t make it out of the house.
On the whole, though, Anagnost saw positive change.
“It’s a big deal because it shows people becoming proactive to address the problem,” he said. “What we’ve done for decades is we’ve just swept the problem under the rug. Now it’s in the forefront, and now somebody’s actually taken action.”
New Hampshire has a ways to go if it wants to return to a balanced housing market – one where the number of available units roughly matches the number of people looking to buy. The last time that happened was 2016.
Advocates say it’s a long road, and while incremental progress may not look like much, if the Legislature keeps tweaking these laws, they’ll start to compound.
Nick Taylor, director of advocacy group Housing Action NH, emphasized that the work doesn’t stop when the legislative process does.
“Just because it was signed by the governor doesn’t mean that we’ve solved our housing crisis,” Taylor said. “We need to implement these, and people need to be able to actually build the homes that we desperately need.”
Kinstruct is ready and eager to take the first steps, said Darcy LeBlanc, the company’s director of operations. The southern New Hampshire-based company has doubled the number of projects it’s taken on this year to about ten. She expects they will double it again next year.
“You could do it before,” she said. “But it was just too hard.”
