The Impact of Rising Housing Costs in New Hampshire
How are rising housing costs affecting students, working families, and individuals across New Hampshire—and what can be done to expand affordability in our region and state? We had a timely conversation with Emmy Ham, Executive Director of the Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to community education and engagement to advance diverse, attainable housing options for the regional workforce. Together we:
- Reviewed the latest state and regional data on housing supply, demand, and affordability
- Explored recent policy and development efforts aimed at making homes more attainable for people who live and work in New Hampshire
- Identified ways for individuals, organizations, and municipalities to engage in this shared challenge that spans every sector and community
The discussion shed light on the growing expense of housing in the Granite State and highlighted practical strategies to ensure that everyone who studies and works here can also afford to call New Hampshire home.
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Slide Presentation: The Impact of Rising Housing Costs in New Hampshire
About the Speaker
Emmy Ham is the Executive Director of the Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast, where she leads efforts to expand affordable housing options for working families and individuals across New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She brings deep experience in housing policy and practice, community engagement, and partnership-building—particularly in working with business leaders and employers to advance housing solutions that strengthen local and regional economies. Emmy first discovered her passion for housing while at Avesta Housing, where she served as a primary liaison for French-speaking immigrants seeking affordable homes as they began their new lives in the United States. She developed her French language skills as a student of International Affairs and Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, and later earned a Master of Public Administration from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
What's behind the high prohibition rate on 5+ family units, and who typically opposes that kind of housing?
New Hampshire had a pretty profound period of growth in the mid 1900's, so zoning was originally used to manage that growth. Single-family zoning really became a tool to manage the speed at which communities could grow.
It's for the same reasons we see today; people are concerned about school enrollment and what sort of pressures that more housing may put on the infrastructure and on municipal services. What we're seeing today is that those concerns are a little overinflated. In some cases, school enrollments are actually in decline across the state and New Hampshire Housing has some great research on that I would point to. But it was a tool and continues to be a tool for sort of sifting growth in a lot of ways.
As far as opponents, there's a large range of folks who might be invested in this issue, and we hear from a lot of folks that they don't want the community character to change. All of these are really valid in a lot of ways, but those arguments are often overinflated, and there are reasons to believe that housing will have a net positive at the end of the day. It all really requires a community-level analysis of what's going on to understand what a community can and should accommodate in terms of new housing growth.
Are there examples of towns that have successfully increased density?
Some examples that come to mind are Portsmouth, Dover, Somersworth, Rochester, and Exeter have developed a little more density. But what I'll say is sometimes you can't actually see it; there are really creative ways of building more density into existing buildings or land that maybe look like a single-family home but are actually duplexes or triplexes.
So, it's maybe scary conceptually to think there would be more units and more buildings in a particular community, but with modern design and architecture, we can blend it into communities really well. You might be walking around a community, including Durham, that has more density than you even know, and a lot of these communities across the seacoast are working on that.
Is there anything to help single families or couples without children when it comes to affordable housing?
It's again a supply and demand issue. We really just want to see more supply so that we can meet the demand, and the prices come down. We hope that by bringing prices down, will help everyone across the board, regardless of your income level and whether or not you have children.
We at the Workforce Housing Coalition really seek to improve housing conditions for everyone. A part of that is increasing home ownership opportunities and making that more affordable for folks. New Hampshire Housing also has some great resources on that.
If you could make one policy change by snapping your fingers, what would it be?
It's an impossible question to answer because there's no silver bullet and all these things really need to be working. It's not a one-size-fits-all model. Each municipality really needs to be looking at what works for them.
There are some universally good policies like the ones I touched on, but they really need to be looked at carefully. Durham is a great example—where can we add some modest height to our downtown to create a little bit more space for housing? They're doing a really great job in thinking through that. I would say taking that customized approach and really working through a community-driven process is the way to go in every community.
What about the very expensive condos being built? Between the cost and condo fees, they aren't really an affordable option.
The density bonuses that we're seeing, a lot of them have not worked the way they were intended to work, so they're not actually incentivizing developers to include more affordable units in their developments. Municipalities really need to be looking at how those density bonuses are constructed, and they also need ot be looking at other finance tools.
It really requires municipalities to look carefully at the resources they have available and the land they have available and what might work to incentivize more affordable units while not deterring development, because we don't want to do that either.
