In Manchester, the 19th-century mill buildings, the affordable housing of their day, have become upscale apartments. A two-bedroom unit in a building far from the city’s downtown is offered at $1,350 per month. Apartments in mill buildings downtown rent for much more than that.
Most of New Hampshire and the nation is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. One in four renters, and one in three low-income renters, pay more than one-third of their income in rent. Home ownership is at its lowest level in two decades. Most millennials, burdened as they are with student loans, can’t afford homes or would rather rent than own.
The situation is severe in Concord, where the rental vacancy rate is under 2 percent, the lowest of any city in the state. That affects not just the availability of housing for the homeless, but nearly everyone, including the young people the city wants to keep or attract and the employers who want to hire them. The shortage is a drag on the economy.
Last week, Monitor reporter David Brooks wrote about a legislative change that, in a small way, could help.
The law, which goes into effect on June 1, 2017, gives homeowners the right, despite local ordinances to the contrary, to add accessory housing units to their home. No longer do the unit’s residents have to be relatives. They will be open to anyone.
Last year, the Center for New Hampshire Public Policy Studies found a fundamental mismatch between the state’s housing stock and what the market wants.
The state and Concord are chock-full of big, old homes, or big suburban homes, but today’s buyers want to rent or buy small starter homes and apartments, preferably in the center city.
Almost no one – given the cost of land, the expense of permitting and local impact fees, and objections of neighbors – is building low-income or affordable housing. But any new rental housing helps when the market is so tight.
In Concord, for example, the former Vegas building, now known as Remi’s Block, is being turned into market-rate apartments. Some of the people who rent them will probably come from lower-end apartments that will be freed up when they move.
Given the shortage, a few cities and towns have increased density limits for workforce housing and made other permitting and zoning changes to encourage construction. That helps.
Another trend, the “tiny house” movement, also holds promise.
More and more communities, especially in the South and Northwest, are allowing people to build and live in units that by some definitions can be no bigger than 500 square feet.
Concord native and NBA forward Matt Bonner of the San Antonio Spurs and his family recently built a house of just under 300 square feet. Their experience was aired on the TV show Tiny House Nation and can be viewed online.
Tiny houses, in some cases clustered around a communal dining hall, showers and social service offices, are being used by some communities to shelter the chronically homeless. It is an experiment Concord should try.
More should be done to encourage affordable housing by lowering impact and permit fees and changing zoning restrictions. But to address the kind of rental shortage Concord and many of the nation’s cities and towns are suffering will take more than that. It will take pumping life into the moribund federal effort to subsidize low-income housing construction and rental assistance.
That could be paid for by doing something Congress should have done long ago: reduce or eliminate the mortgage interest deduction that primarily benefits the upper middle class and wealthy.