Many more people in New Hampshire say they support allowing homes on small lots in parts of their community, according to a survey done by St. Anselm College. This indicates increasing concern about the effect that a lack of affordable homes is having on the state.
The annual survey from the school’s Initiative for Housing Policy and Practice found 74% of respondents saying they support “having parts of every town where single family homes can be built on smaller lots” — a whopping 15 percentage points higher than in 2025.
“Support for starter homes jumped off the pages of this year’s survey,” said Elissa Margolin, director of the Initiative for Housing Policy and Practice at Saint Anselm College, in a statement last week. “One of the benefits of conducting this survey annually is the ability to track shifts in voter attitudes as Granite Staters navigate the tight housing market.”
Several other questions also showed an increased interest in allowing housing to be built. Notably, 63% said towns should “change their zoning to allow more housing to be built” — a huge increase from just six years ago. Only 29% agreed with that statement in 2020.
And 60% of people disagreed with the statement that “New Hampshire should do more to prevent housing development and keep the state the way it is.”
However, the survey also showed signs of why new housing is often hard to build: People like the idea in theory more than they do in practice.
For example, 74% chose the statement “my community needs more affordable housing to be built.” But when “community” was changed to “neighborhood,” implying that new housing would be close by, support fell to 61%.
Like many places in the U.S., New Hampshire has seen prices of single-family homes and condominiums soar in recent years, with homes topping a median of $450,000 in much of the state. Combined with high interest rates that make mortgage payments expensive, this has kept out many younger people from buying homes, contributing to the state’s demographic imbalance and making it harder for some fields to find workers.
The number of homes being built in the state has been rising for years but from a very low level.
In 2025, communities gave permits for more than 5,800 homes to be built, the most in two decades. But that is still far below the level of 8,000 to 9,000 a year that the state saw through the early years of the century. Officials say this former level is needed to bring prices down.
State lawmakers passed several laws this year designed to encourage more homes and multi-family housing, often limiting towns’ ability to reject developments.
The poll included answers from 1,293 registered New Hampshire voters, conducted by Saint Anselm College’s Survey Center from August 25-28. The survey has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.7% with a confidence interval of 95%.
The full survey can be seen at www.anselm.edu
