Concord officials beamed with pride last year at being named by the state as a “Housing Champion.”
By implementing housing incentive policies, the city became one of 18 municipalities eligible for grant funding from the state that it could use to help bring new development to bear.
The Housing Champions program is how Concord officials want the state to handle housing. City leaders have been vocal in their opposition to statewide changes to housing regulations, saying it takes away their decision-making authority over local projects.
Even as they have adopted many of the individual changes lawmakers pursued, they bemoaned that many of their neighboring communities were not doing the same.
“We would like to encourage our neighbors to create as much affordable housing as we do,” Mayor Byron Champlin said in an interview after his State of the City remarks in April. “However, imposing requirements on a municipality, we already have enough of that by the state.”
Carrots, as the saying goes, are better than sticks. That approach, however, has two obstacles.
First, not every municipality is willing to welcome new types of housing.
Facing loud resident opposition, Warner officials opted out of even applying for the Housing Champions designation. The Lakes Region city of Laconia also took a pass.
Even in Concord, which set its sights on 3,000 new units of housing has seen incremental progress toward that goal and openly opposed some of the larger projects because city leaders believed they were in the wrong part of the city or required too much public investment.
As a prominent developer of workforce housing in southern New Hampshire, Dick Anagnost has faced local opposition firsthand. He said the carrot-over-stick method is too soft on towns that aren’t interested in widespread housing growth.
“You have to give incentive to the town, but you also have to have something that forces the town to hold true to it,” he said. “You can pass all the laws you want with incentives that say, ‘We’ll give you extra this, we’ll give you extra that, if you put the housing in.’ If they don’t want the housing, they just don’t put in the housing, and they don’t accept the carrot. They don’t need it.”
The second obstacle to the incentives approach is that Republican leaders often frown on that kind of spending.
Two years ago, a coalition of lawmakers backed by Gov. Chris Sununu set aside $5 million each year for Housing Champions grants. This year, Republican legislators canceled the program entirely, opting for their cut-the-red-tape approach alone.
To some Concord leaders, therein lies the problem.
New housing means new residents, who need police officers and firefighters, water, schools and roads, all funded overwhelmingly by local property taxes. When smaller towns don’t do their fair share, demand increasingly falls to the cities. The Housing Champions program was meant to soften that spike.
“They’re telling communities, ‘you’ve got to do these things,’” Deputy City Manager for Development Matt Walsh said in an interview. “But they’re not offering financial assistance in order for communities to tackle some of the infrastructure issues that need to be tackled in order for development to occur.”
Concord has so far put nearly $1 million in Housing Champion grants towards sewer improvements and cleanup of one of its largest homeless encampments. Until and unless the program is revived, however, that is all it will get.
Being a Housing Champion doesn’t mean Concord champions all housing proposals, either. In the last few years, the city has fallen short of the pace needed to meet demand.
In Penacook, 83 condos at the Townhomes at Capital Pointe are under construction. The project was introduced with designs to create more than 200 apartments – plans that were shot down by neighborhood critique and by city code, which didn’t allow that much density on the lot. The zoning board denied the needed variance.
Mayor Byron Champlin has since said that he thinks forcing that project to downsize was a mistake. However he stands by another move by the city in recent years that denied housing growth.
What had once been a proposal to build about 1,000 homes and apartments in Penacook – by far the largest project proposed in the city and representing nearly a third of the “in the pipeline” units city leaders celebrated as a sign of progress – was winnowed to only about 200 units on land near the Wheelabrator trash-burning power plant and then stalled. The land was zoned for industrial uses, and in a split decision, the zoning board declined to give the project a pass.
“I don’t think we can have too much housing,” zoning board member Laura Spector-Morgan said in January. “But I don’t think we need it here.”
City leaders, including Champlin, opposed allowing housing on that piece of property, even as the developer said no one wanted to put an industrial project in that part of Penacook.
Concord developer Jonathan Chorlian keenly tracked housing bills moving through the statehouse this year. Not only because of the relevance to its work but because, he said, it was thrilling. He isn’t as wholeheartedly behind the housing bills that passed this year as some of his peers.
Overriding local control on such issues, Chorlian noted, has a better ring to it when it’s the in a neighboring town, rather than your own.
“I trust our local officials,” he said. “Having their authority diminished is, I think, a little scary.”
Many of the changes put into place by lawmakers will weigh on cities most acutely.
Take the parking requirements, which Chorlian faced head-on in Concord. His most recent project – a retrofit of a former church in to 30 apartments downtown in partnership with Ben Kelley – was held up for months.
Before the new law, city code called for 1,200 parking spaces to support 600 apartments at the proposed redevelopment of the former Steeplegate Mall to include more than 1,200 parking spaces on top of the roughly 2,000 needed to support retail uses. The difference translates to around four acres of land.
While Concord officials signed off on exemptions to the parking rules both at First Church and at the mall – decisions that were both challenged in lawsuits – those arrangements would now be allowed by-right.
As Concord has contemplated short-term changes to its zoning rules, awaiting a far larger master plan update in the coming years, business leaders pleaded that a loosening of parking rules be fast tracked.
Before the city followed through, lawmakers did it for them.
Despite some apprehensions, Chorlian sees a net positive in the bipartisan attempt by lawmakers to address the housing crisis in their state.
“I do wish that some were less broad or left more room for local control,” he said in an email to the Monitor. “But as a ‘take it or leave it’ package, I’d say my concern about lack of affordable housing supply would tip me to ‘take it.’”
The state, Champlin said in a recent interview, shouldn’t get all the credit.
He goes to Church with Jane Broadrick, who has Concord’s first tiny home under the new accessory dwelling unit law being built in her backyard. He applauds it.
“Ever since I was on the planning board, I felt that detached accessory dwelling units were a good thing to do, so I’m glad to see that we’re moving in that direction, and that the state got religion and decided that it was something we should do,” Champlin said. “I would just point out, we were working on it.”
