Where next for Concord’s downtown? Will it, after the success of the Main Street redesign and restoration project, develop willy-nilly or is there a plan to guide its future? It’s a question Concord resident and community activist Jayme Simões asked recently in a letter to the editor. Our answer? If there is one, we haven’t seen it.

As has happened in thriving towns and cities across America, downtown Concord is gentrifying. Young professionals compete with downsizing baby boomers for housing within walking distance of shops, restaurants and other amenities. Older homes with good bones have been and still are being converted to condominiums with price tags starting at about $300,000. Older housing stock, like the eight homes on Warren Street Simões referred to in his letter, are being demolished to make way for new housing units with higher rents.

The upscale redevelopment is a tribute to the success of the Main Street project and a good economy. It’s good for the tax base and puts people with money to spend downtown. We have been unable to find an accurate count but believe 200 to 300 affordable housing units have been replaced by market rate lodgings in recent years. Most of them, unlike downtown’s 354 subsidized housing units, were affordable by default. Their condition was perhaps less than desirable and, until recent years, so was their location. No longer. The website Apartments.com lists the newly renovated apartments above White Mountain Coffee on Pleasant Street as $1,535 to $1,560 per month for a one-bedroom loft and $1,785 for the two-bedroom unit. The website has pages of Concord apartment listings followed by the words “No Availability.”

Where did the low- to lower-middle-income tenants who once lived there go? The Concord Housing Authority and Concord Area Trust for Community Housing buy and rehabilitate as much property as they can to provide affordable housing, but the apartment vacancy rate in the city is somewhere around 1 percent. Rents have risen far faster than the incomes of most tenants and far faster than the incomes of the service industry workers that restaurants, retailers and health care facilities need to stay open. Businesses can’t expand and Concord can’t attract young people and their families unless there’s an increase in the stock of housing of all sorts – apartments, duplexes, condos and single-family homes.

Can more be done using incentives, zoning ordinances, deed restrictions that require that a home must, for decades, be sold only to a qualified low-income buyer, or other mechanisms to encourage the development of workforce housing? Probably. Will that effort be reflected in the new zoning ordinance that’s being created?

The master plan on the city’s website was drawn up in 2008. It calls upon the city to continue to provide a diversity of housing so that “people who work in Concord – professionals, business owners, police officers, state employees – are able to live in Concord.” Is that goal being met? Not for long, at least in Concord’s center city, and perhaps not at all.