The capital of Georgia — a city of more than 500,000 people nearly 1,200 miles away, where African-Americans outnumber their white counterparts — bears a striking similarity to New Hampshire’s capital.
In Atlanta, like in Concord and countless municipalities across the country, housing costs have far eclipsed what working people can afford.
Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, drew this parallel during an Oct. 15 forum, hosted by the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce and the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness. The nonfiction book illustrates the struggle of five Atlanta families to contend with rising costs and stagnating wages, navigate Byzantine and purposefully ineffectual government aid systems and ultimately secure reliable shelter.
“It’s in the richest, most rapidly developing cities that the threat of homelessness has become especially dire. It’s not just New York or San Francisco or L.A. It’s Dallas, and Phoenix, Denver, and Nashville, Charlotte, and Boston and Seattle,” Goldstone said during his keynote address at Arts Alley. “And we’re seeing a version of the same contradiction right here in New Hampshire, where housing costs have climbed further and further out of reach for many of the people who live and work here.”
The forum convened a cross-section of about 110 Concord-area businesspeople, nonprofit advocates and political figures to grapple with the reality of the state’s beleaguered real estate market, where scarcity and unaffordability define many Granite Staters’ search for housing.
During a panel following Goldstone’s address, leaders in New Hampshire’s housing and economic development landscape cited the state’s resident-owned manufactured housing communities as a promising avenue to ease housing supply strain, even as they pointed to exclusionary local zoning laws as roadblocks in that process. In the absence of immediate relief for cost-burdened families and those experiencing homelessness, panelists and event organizers emphasized the need for concerted advocacy at the local level.
“It’s really accurate when we say that people believe that ownership is out of reach. That is not only for the people in the margin — that’s for a lot of the young people here in the state of New Hampshire, and it’s something that makes them choose not to stay here,” said State Senator Tara Reardon, a Concord Democrat. “It is not out of reach if we have paths and programs that help people get there, and that’s exactly what the ROC program is.”
Rob Dapice, executive director and CEO of New Hampshire Housing, said policies at all levels of government impede ROCs — or resident-owned communities — which are affordable housing co-ops, and similar development projects.
“There are barriers at the federal level in the form of tariffs and regulatory burdens on federal funds, and there’s not a lot that those of us in this room can really do to change those things in the near term,” Dapice said.
Through hard work and perseverance, the state might make more progress.
“As practitioners, we can’t repeal tariffs; we can’t create housing units or housing vouchers out of nothing, but I think we can do more, and we need to do more,” Dapice said. “I’m very, very proud of the team at New Hampshire Housing, and in awe of the social workers and caseworkers, and everybody who’s in the trenches doing this work.”
Kait Gallagher, director of development and communication for the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, said that adequate housing is a concern relevant to every business owner.
“[If] you’re a small business owner, your employees have to live somewhere. If they can’t afford to live in the community that they’re working in, they’re either commuting from far outside, or they’re spending an inordinate amount of money on their housing that they then can’t put back into the community,” Gallagher said. “The more housing we develop for folks of all incomes, the more diverse a community we have, which benefits everybody.”
Reardon and Dapice were joined on the panel by Jessica Williams, senior policy analyst at New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute; Betsey Rhynhart, vice president of population health at Concord Hospital; and Nick Taylor, director of Housing Action NH, who moderated the conversation.