Christopher Carr doesn’t mind the duplexes on Spruce Street. After all, he lives in one.
Built in 1890, his South End home is like so many others in Concord’s old neighborhoods: built in the late 1800s or early 1900s and later cut into multiple units.
Carr grew up just a short walk away, on South Street, but he’s lived all around the city, from the Heights to Penacook. A lot of what he loves about Spruce comes down to its friendly, quaint feel. On a weekend afternoon, people are eating an early dinner on their patio or planting flowers.
“It’s just nice,” Carr said. “It’s just a nice family neighborhood.”
Carr grew worried about a proposed change that would relax rules for duplexes city-wide. By reducing lot size and width minimums for properties with two-unit buildings, Carr fears the new standard would open the door to dense development, jarring the feel of historic neighborhoods like his.
His concerns weren’t hypothetical.
A local developer planned to build a duplex on what was once the large side-yard for a neighboring home, just a few doors down from Carr. Currently, duplexes must have one-and-a-half times more street frontage and total lot size than a single-family home on the same property.
While the lot is actually one of the largest on Spruce Street, it’s still not quite big enough to allow a duplex under the current rules. So the developer, William Young, went to the zoning board for a variance. The neighborhood came out against it.
Young, who recently added an office for his property management company in Penacook and whose paving business is based in Chichester, bought the land in February.
Young described his plan for two, three-bedroom units side-by-side as the type of development the City of Concord says it’s looking for. While the building might seem large, he said he went for three bedrooms because that’s what’s desirable for most families. He opted for a duplex since there are already other ones on the street, and it would mean more units in total.
“I’m looking at the crunch that Concord claims they have for no housing,” Young said in an interview. “I’m trying to help the no-housing cause and get two families a home versus just one.”
Concord, named a “Housing Champion” community by the state, has been working on short-term adjustments to its zoning, as both the city and regulations have been criticized by developers – including Young – for being thorny and bureaucratic.
South-end case study
With a major zoning overhaul still years away, City Hall sought small-scale adjustments that could help smooth the pathway for new housing projects and businesses.
The Concord City Council considered a wave of those tweaks this month – including one that would have removed the lot size rule for duplexes.
With that reform hanging in the balance, the zoning board punted its decision on Young’s project. If the city council approved the rule change, the zoning board review would be unnecessary.
Young said he wasn’t aware that the rule change was under consideration when he went to the zoning board to get permission for his plan. If he had known, he said, he would have waited until the council review was complete and saved his money in legal fees.
Instead, pleas from Carr and other neighbors convinced the City Council to pump the brakes on the change. They voted to keep the rule in place, for now, to allow further study.
“I do appreciate the neighbors coming out and speaking in such a heartfelt way for our great city and the great South End,” Jim Schlosser, the city councilor representing this area, said at the meeting.
The handful of Spruce Street residents who showed up framed their concerns as different from “not-in-my-backyard” opposition. They already have duplexes on their street, and many of them said they would be fine with another one. Young’s design, however, wasn’t acceptable to them.
The new duplex would’ve been wider than the existing ones on the street, with its garage and driveway front-facing. Most of the homes on the street have car storage tucked off to the side and have a narrower facade.
They described his plan as too wide and too big, contrasting with the front yards that define the cozy feel of their short street. As they see it, there’s no difference to the housing stock between a duplex that fits in with the neighborhood and one that doesn’t – it’s two units either way.
Young said he looked into what the neighbors are proposing, and found that a duplex with that layout couldn’t happen without running afoul of other city zoning rules on the property, like setback requirements.
“If that was possible to do, believe me, we would have done that,” he said.
As the city looks to welcome more housing, Spruce Street residents want some assurance that development that comes into long-established neighborhoods like theirs will maintain the feel and community that they love.
The 1.5 area and width requirement is a hurdle to new duplex construction in many of Concord’s more developed neighborhoods, where housing lots are old small, and irregularly shaped.
Concord allows single-family homes to be converted into duplexes without needing a bigger property. So the 1.5 rule is seen as protective because it places barriers in front of new construction, while conversions – at least from a zoning standpoint – are easier.
The existing duplexes on his street aren’t a rub to Carr because they are woven into the fabric of the neighborhood. He and his wife rent the other side of their duplex out to a younger couple, he said.
Conversions, similarly, would add density without altering the feel of their street. New construction could be different.
“It would be a real tragedy if this was passed and then developers buy up these lots and bulldoze 100-year-old, nice family homes to put up giant duplexes that barely fit,” Carr said at the council meeting. “And you just have buildings on buildings on buildings and no community.”
Asked about whether his designed duplex could be made to fit the “vibe” of the neighborhood, Young questioned the feasibility.
“You’re talking about houses that are over 100 years old,” he said. “What brand new house is going to fit in that neighborhood?”
The ‘missing middle’
The city’s current rules determine whether a new duplex can be built on this lot at all, not how big it might be or what it could look like.
“We’ve traditionally granted these kind of variances for substandard lots for duplexes throughout the city throughout the years, and this is no different,” said Nick Wallner, a member of the zoning board, as he weighed the project. “I do hear what the neighbors are saying, that their concern is the design, and unfortunately, I don’t think we have any control over that.”
To Young, if the old zoning rule is frequently exempted, getting rid of it simplifies the process and saves everyone money.
Even on Spruce Street, many of the homes, and especially the duplexes, don’t align with current rules because the lots are narrower or smaller than they’re supposed to be – or both.
As one member of the zoning board put it, the new duplex would actually be the closest of all the ones on Spruce Street to following city zoning rules.
Duplexes are often eyed as a “missing middle” type of housing that can be entry-level for buyers and renters alike. They gradually add density in already-developed places, bringing growth without as much need to expand city infrastructure.
Concord’s elimination of the lot-size rule was supposed to streamline the approval process, especially since many duplex proposals on these kinds of lots get a green light anyway from the zoning board.
The longtime chair of the zoning board, Chris Carley, told the city council he supported the full slate of interim zoning updates on the table.
“In general,” Carley told the council, “anything that simplifies the zoning ordinance, and makes it clearer, and reduces the number of, for lack of a better term, nuisance requirements that inhibit development, particularly development of residential properties in the city, will receive my endorsement any time.”
Also motivating the change was an inconsistency in how Concord regulates similar types of housing.
State law now allows the construction of accessory dwellings on single-family lots by right. Those granny-flat-style units can be large, functionally creating detached duplexes in single-family neighborhoods.
City rules don’t treat houses with in-law apartments much differently than single-family homes, a report to the city council notes, and therefore “it is the opinion of staff that continuing to require extra lot area and frontage requirements for duplexes is no longer appropriate.”
Carr and his neighbors aren’t as worried about granny flats. They expect those will largely be built beside existing homes and, while it’s not required, that the owners will live there.
“If people live in the community, they care about it,” Carr said. “That’s different than a duplex.”
‘A feel for the neighborhood’
This is just one of a string of regulations Concord has looked at easing, but city leaders face a tough balancing act.
They’ve spotlighted more development and housing as top priorities, and the zoning amendments are among the first changes they point to as progress toward those goals. Pulling back, especially with a specific project on the line, could send the wrong message.
Mayor Byron Champlin voiced this directly.
How can the city boost housing, he asked Valerie Murphy, a local landlord who spoke out against the rule changes, without relaxing these kinds of rules?
“It shouldn’t be an intrusion to create homes,” Murphy responded. “There has to be a feel for the neighborhood.”
Heather Shank, the director of planning and community development for the State of New Hampshire, was the city planner for Concord for nearly a decade.
Coincidentally, she lives on Spruce Street.
Like some others on her street, Shank supports a duplex going in on the empty lot if it fits in better with what’s already there.
One way to regulate for that kind of harmonious density is what’s called form-based zoning. Traditional zoning bases restrictions on how a property is used: like whether there can be multifamily or only single-family housing in a neighborhood. Form-based zoning controls the physical format of a proposal, focusing more on how to interweave a project with the surrounding area rather than strictly controlling its function.
Concord looked into form-based zoning several years ago, while Shank was planner, in an initiative called ConcordNEXT. It ran into delays and was quietly abandoned.
“I proposed this five years ago, very specifically to protect neighborhoods like mine,” Shank said to the zoning board. “So this is irony to the highest degree.”
Until that kind of protective regulation could be implemented, she said, the city should keep the 1.5 rule for just the more dense and historic neighborhoods like hers, opening the door for duplex development in more open areas.
Since few empty lots exist in those zones, Shank argued, opportunity still exists for development in built-up areas through conversions, as the 1.5 rule only applies to new construction.
“There’s quite a lot of capacity there,” she said. “If you’re going to allow every single one of those single family residentials to convert to a duplex without increasing their lot size or frontage, you’re basically doubling the population of downtown Concord.”
But city leaders saw it as too big of an adjustment to make on the fly. The city council ended up keeping the 1.5 requirement citywide, at least for now, and city planning staff will give the regulation a second look.
The council’s hesitation put the question of the Spruce Street development back on the doorstep of the zoning board, which could take it up in June.
Young could wait on the zoning board’s decision – a duplex might still get that variance, as others have. He could build a house with a granny flat alongside – something he considered from the get-go, he said, and in the current market might even be more profitable.
Or he could just build a single-family home.
“If it was a single family home,” as Carr, the neighbor, put it, “he’d have the right to do it and nobody could stop him.”
Given the neighborhood response and the undecided zoning question, that’s what Young has decided to do.
