“The lack of housing affordable to a wide range of working households is having a direct, immediate and serious negative impact on the ability of many communities to host new business or to expand existing businesses … and placing severe burdens on many municipalities in the form of rising costs for emergency housing assistance.” 

Report of the Interim Study Committee on Funding for Affordable Housing. October 19, 2000. 

No, that’s not a typo. The issue of New Hampshire’s housing shortage has persisted since the mid-1990s, and it’s not an issue unique to the Granite State. There are many complex factors that contribute to the acute shortage of housing, and, in particular, affordable housing. We’ve heard a number of legislators speak to the need to address the shortage in recent months, and housing is certain to be a primary focus of the 2023 legislative session.  In fact, in this week’s calendar, the Speaker of the House announced the appointment of a Special Committee on Housing this year, and we anticipate that a fair number of housing-related bills will be headed there. The committee members are as follows:

NHMA recognizes the need for diverse and affordable housing in New Hampshire and the responsibility of each municipality to afford reasonable opportunities for the development of diverse and affordable housing. We believe that municipalities should have discretion in determining how to increase affordable housing. To that end, NHMA supports legislation which promotes a collaborative approach between the state, municipalities, and other key stakeholders to address the state’s housing shortage and supports legislation that enables municipalities to find innovative ways to ensure an adequate supply of housing. Conversely, NHMA opposes legislation that detracts from existing local authority and that erodes local control over land use decisions. 

One bill that we are particularly interested in seeing come to fruition is LSR 2023-1045. Although the language has not-yet-been publicly released, nor has it been given an official bill number, we were fortunate to work with the sponsor, co-sponsors, and a number of interested parties to get an early glimpse at its language. The bill, as drafted, would provide municipalities access to new water, wastewater, and other infrastructure funding in exchange for voluntary changes to local zoning ordinances that promote the building of more housing.  

The bill seeks to address some of the largest costs associated with housing. Developers will build the type of dwelling units that the market demands, and what the market demands varies based on where a unit will be located in the state. Urban, urban-adjacent, suburban, and rural areas all have unique characteristics, which makes it impossible to create a one-size-fits-all solution. However, all of these areas do share a few characteristics, namely the infrastructure that does or could connect them. That infrastructure is very expensive to install and maintain, but the existence of some of that infrastructure does have tangible costs that could translate to lower home prices—specifically, water and sewer infrastructure. 

Water lines currently cost between $1.5 and $2 million per mile, and basic wastewater infrastructure upgrades cost between $20 and $40 million. While that’s a significant amount of money – usually too much to justify an extension or capacity upgrade to existing lines – access to those types of infrastructure make housing cheaper to build because the cost of a couple of pipes from a home to a street is significantly less than drilling a well, testing the water, installing whatever contaminant mitigation devices are necessary, and installing a septic system including leach field. The exact same house can cost up to $50,000 less to build if it has access to that public water and sewer infrastructure as one that must install a well and septic system. 

When there’s access to public water and sewer infrastructure, concerns related to well radii and sufficient land to install a replacement septic system diminish. Therefore, it would be possible to increase the density of building across a variety of dwelling unit types without impacting public health or safety. 

LSR 2023-1045 combines these two ideas into one package labeled the “Housing Champions Program.” It is a voluntary program that would grant municipalities access to funds for local infrastructure in exchange for changes to local zoning codes that promote the building of more housing. The program would be administered by the Bureau of Economic Affairs (BEA) and the Housing Champions Designation would occur on a 3-year rolling basis. Rulemaking would occur in advance of the launch of the program to allow the BEA to fill in the details about what sorts of zoning code changes would be necessary to adopt for designation as a “Housing Champion” and how the additional money would be allocated. The bill has yet to go through the legislative process, but we are hopeful that, at least, the initial allocation of $25 million would be made available for disbursement by BEA. 

We hope to see this type of approach on housing embraced.

 Scan to stay informed on legislation affecting cities and towns! 

As we wrote about last week, NHMA has launched a new feature on our website: a live bill tracker. This tracker, run by the software platform FastDemocracy, will enable visitors to our website to see what bills NHMA is following. It also allows visitors to subscribe to daily or weekly (published Fridays) updates on either all the bills that we’re tracking or specific bill topics. We have organized the bills into topics based on our member-adopted Legislative Policies and Principles. Visitors can also choose to subscribe to individual bills. Subscribers will get updates as things happen – e.g. bills are scheduled for committee hearings, votes, etc. – and updates only on the bills which move forward. Visitors will also notice that we will be adding publicly facing notes explaining what the bill does; indicating NHMA’s applicable legislative policy; and stating our position. Some of the information we’ve traditionally published in the Bulletin will now be available through our live bill tracker. The benefit of the bill tracker is that members can always have real-time information on bill activity: With a 4-minute delay and automatic updates, the bill tracker will ensure that you know if and when something changes with the bills that interest you.