A new report from New Hampshire Housing shows how communities across the state are using grant money to address the housing crunch.
Nearly $6 million have been allocated to town and city governments to hire consultants for municipal planning and zoning as part of the Housing Opportunity Planning Grant Program. That money comes from the $100 million InvestNH initiative, which is funded by the American Rescue Plan Act.
Sarah Wrightsman is the Community Engagement and Education manager at New Hampshire Housing. She joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about the report and what actions some communities have taken to address the housing crisis.
Transcript
There were around 70 communities across New Hampshire who received these Housing Opportunity [Planning] (HOP) grants, starting back in 2022. New Hampshire Housing chose 11 of those communities to study. How did your organization select which municipalities to include?
We chose these 11 because we wanted to highlight communities that did a great job engaging the community around the work that they were doing, and [also] communities where they had already passed regulatory change. So the bulk of the communities that have HOP grants are still very much in progress. So we anticipate that there will be sort of an addition to these case studies to highlight more of the successes as communities finish their work.
So as these communities come up with their individualized plans, are there trends that you saw, similarities between them, of the issues they wanted to address?
One of the most interesting things about this grant program is, when we initially set out and created this program, we anticipated the funds going to the larger communities, the cities [like] Manchester, Concord. Some of the larger communities in New Hampshire did take advantage of this grant program. But what really was interesting about this, and what we’re really proud of, is the number of small communities who jumped in. A lot of communities are using this money to take those baby steps to look at, what does this mean for our rural small community? Because we recognize those rural small communities also play a part in solving the housing crisis the same way that Manchester and Concord do. They’ve been looking at things like accessory dwelling units, like looking at how we protect our community character. A couple communities, two of the case studies did a cluster housing ordinance. So there are these kinds of trends that are coming through in our case studies and the other grantees.
Could you touch a little bit more on the cluster housing? What’s that all about?
So both Canterbury and Keene, which are like two completely different communities, decided to do this sort of cluster housing ordinance. And this is a great way to increase density while also creating smaller starter homes and protecting land for conservation.
So we’ve got Keene, which is a city, population [of] 20,000, a little over and then Canterbury, sort of a small, more rural community, population probably closer to between 1,000 and 2,000. Both [are] using the same tool to increase housing in their community, which I think is really cool and really telling. At least in Keene, they’ve already seen interest from developers.
It’s premature to count how many housing units have happened as a result of this project, but we know that zoning reform helps. We know that it works. It increases housing, which will help to bring prices down. But it’s also slow. We always have to balance this urgent need of, we need more housing right now, we’re short on housing, but we also are setting ourselves up for long-term success by doing these zoning reform projects that take a long time.
Some of these communities, I’m thinking Bethlehem and Sandwich, were able to pass all of the housing warrant articles that they sent to last year’s town meetings. You talked earlier about community engagement and outreach. How were they able to gain the support for these housing amendments from residents?
It’s hard to figure out exactly what the secret sauce is to a community being ready. When I talked to the consultant for Bethlehem, they were like, the community was just ready. It was just exactly the right time for this program. And I was like, how are they ready? What did they do to get ready? It’s hard to say exactly.
Community engagement is really important to us. So you get a grant from us, we’re giving you some money to do community engagement work, because we know that that’s important to getting things passed at the local level. And we’re going to train you on what that means and what that looks like. So we pulled together these Housing Academy sessions and we taught them about what good community engagement looks like. How do you do it? We didn’t so much talk about housing solutions, but rather, here’s how you engage your community so that you can get together when you get home and you can figure out collaboratively what your shared vision is, and what solutions are compatible with that shared vision. So you can get there on your own.
What does that look like on the ground? Is that neighbors going over to somebody’s house and talking to their neighbors? Is it hosting a meeting at the community center? What does that community engagement look like?
Ideally, all of the above. We do this sort of combination, not to get to sort of academic, but of thick and thin engagement strategies. So thin engagement strategies are like when you’re going to the community, you send out a survey, you put a dot poster voting board at the town hall, you table at the farmers market or you table at the playground, wherever you know people are going to be.
Thick engagement is more like what we think of when we think about community engagement. The traditional ways, like you have a meeting at the town hall and you invite the community to come to that meeting.
I was just telling someone that I, as a parent of a young kid, am probably not going to go to that public hearing that’s at the same time as my kid’s bedtime at the town hall. But I will fill out a survey. And so, every different sort of engagement strategy can reach different parts of the community depending on how diverse your community engagement strategy is.
For other New Hampshire towns or cities that want to take action against the housing crunch but maybe don’t know where to start, what should they keep in mind?
One is remembering to let the community lead. If you go in and you lead with housing solutions, it’s going to scare people. I always say that when you’re doing community engagement, if it’s around a specific development, that’s much harder, it’s more challenging, and it’s scarier for people than when you’re talking more in the abstract. So engaging the community around possible policy ideas, around housing solutions, but really letting the community bring those solutions and get to that solution together.
And then another thing, and this is something that we struggle with, is remembering to celebrate incremental successes. So a community like Sandwich is a great example. They allow duplexes in most, if not everywhere where single family housing is allowed. Now that’s great. Is it going to solve the housing crisis overnight? Probably not, right? Like we are not looking at the small and rural communities to solve the housing crisis, but just to do their little part of it and celebrate those sort of incremental successes, because they’re important.