As Manchester bus ridership collapsed in the last decade, city spending on bus service soared

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In the last decade, ridership on Manchester Transit Authority (MTA) buses fell by 38.6%, yet city taxpayer spending on the MTA increased by 38.2% above the rate of inflation, an analysis by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy shows.

As Mayor Jay Ruais and city aldermen search for savings in a stressed city budget, the MTA offers an agency that could be scrutinized for possible spending reductions.

From 2013–2022, data from the MTA reported to the Federal Transit Administration show that city bus ridership peaked in 2015 at 500,575.

Ridership fell each subsequent year, with the exception of 2021–2022, to 279,948 in 2022—a drop of 44.1% in just seven years. While this includes a steep 13.5% decline during the pandemic (2020–2022), the drop of 18.2% before the pandemic (2015–2019) was even larger. The decline over the entire decade was 38.6%. 

While ridership fell, the amount of money spent on Manchester public transportation only increased. From 2013–2022, MTA’s total operating expenses rose from $3,613,280 in 2013 to $5,219,813 in 2022, an increase of more than $1.6 million, or 44.5%, in nominal dollars. After adjusting for inflation,* the increase is still $940,802, or 22%. 

(*The inflation calculation uses Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) Indices from January 2013 and January 2022.)

This steep rise in spending includes a 62.4% increase, or a 37.1% inflation-adjusted increase, in funds from the federal government and a 63.6% increase, or a 38.2% inflation-adjusted increase, in local government spending. 

Meanwhile, Manchester public transportation has become less profitable, as fare revenues have dropped 23.9% since 2013. 

In 2013, MTA’s cost per rider was $7.93. The lowest point it reached was $7.51 in 2016. Since then, the cost per rider has skyrocketed, hitting a peak of $25.96 in 2021 before falling to $18.65 in 2022, still more than $10 more per rider than a decade earlier. All told, the last 10 years saw a jump of 135.1% in Manchester’s cost per rider. 

The huge increase in costs per rider was not just a matter of falling passenger numbers. As ridership fell during the past decade, the MTA aggressively increased service. 

Since 2013, MTA’s total miles driven have increased by 52.3%, going from 536,627 total miles in 2013 to 817,081 in 2022. Total hours driven have seen a similar increase as well, jumping 59.3% from 46,159 total hours in 2013 to 73,521 total hours in 2022. 

The MTA’s service area population and total square miles covered have expanded too. 

From 2013–2019, MTA served 135,366 residents and covered 63 square miles. Since the 2020 census, MTA has been serving 248,263 residents and covering 235 square miles, increases of 83.4% and 273%, respectively. 

The official 2023 MTA ridership and expenditure numbers won’t be publicly available until later this year. Although the city has figures showing 328,976 riders and $5,420,475 in total operating expenses for FY 2023 (cost per rider of $16.48), that time frame of measurement is different from what the Federal Transit Administration uses. Therefore, an apples-to-apples comparison can’t be made now between 2013 and 2023. The 2023 numbers won’t be added to this database until the official figures are released. 

The MTA plans to return to upwards of 400,000 annual passengers. But the current numbers and trends show a public service that yields a poor return on taxpayer spending. 

And the poor financial picture is not due solely to the COVID-19 pandemic, as the problems began years earlier. The pre-pandemic years of 2013–2019 saw MTA ridership plummet too. 

The numbers strongly suggest that MTA is hauling more taxpayer dollars than what is required for public transportation in the region. City leaders could find some budget savings by paring back MTA services to pre-pandemic levels, eliminating or curtailing underused routes, and seeking ways to enhance revenues. 



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How the big “HOMEnibus” housing bill would do more harm than good

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By Jason Sorens

The New Hampshire House of Representatives recently passed a couple of bills to make certain types of housing easier to build: single-family conversions to duplexes on lots with adequate sewer capacity, and detached accessory dwelling units. A more ambitious Senate bill comes up for a vote of the full chamber this Thursday, but unlike the cleaner, smaller House bills, this one has both pro-housing and anti-housing elements. 

As amended, this bill, dubbed the “HOMEnibus Act,” would do the following:

  1. Extend the existing Community Revitalization Tax Relief Incentive to cover conversions of office, industrial, and commercial uses to residential use. This is an optional program municipalities can choose to adopt. It makes it so that rehabilitation or conversion won’t incur additional property tax as a result of improvements that raise the value of a property. This incentive could result in more residential conversions, but it also reduces the property tax benefit a town receives from such conversions, which may make planning and zoning boards less likely to want to approve such developments in the first place. It’s hard to imagine that the incentive would make the housing shortage worse, but it also might not make it any better.
  2. Allow local governments that currently operate under direct democracy (towns without charters and village districts) plus Coos County to let their governing body–typically, the select board–adopt and amend zoning ordinances without a vote of the people. A vote of the people would be necessary to give the select board this power. The assumption seems to be that the people who show up on town election day are less pro-housing than select boards are. I’m unaware of direct evidence on this point. Based on evidence from Texas, Nolan Gray thinks voters are less pro-zoning than officials are. But my experience in New England suggests that the reverse might be true here, though it probably varies by town. Certainly, in places like Canaan and Dalton, the public vote requirement has stopped zoning from being adopted at all.
  3. Require planning boards to consider “alternative parking solutions” proposed by residential developers to meet on-site minimum parking requirements, and if the developer can demonstrate that these alternative solutions would meet parking demand, planning boards must accept them. Alternative solutions could include nearby off-site parking lots, agreements with ride-share companies, public transportation availability, or walkable infrastructure as designated in a master plan or zoning ordinance. This is a straightforwardly pro-housing, pro-property rights measure. It is also rather tepid, given that other states like Minnesota are proposing to abolish all on-site parking minimums statewide for all uses, but it’s better than nothing.
  4. Authorize mandatory inclusionary zoning (IZ) that would require up to 15 percent of new dwelling units be deed-restricted below-market housing provided the developer is granted a density bonus of at least 25% more units than what the base zoning allows. Unfortunately, this is an anti-housing measure, creating a type of rent control tax on new development, as Yale law professor Robert Ellickson pointed out  more than 40 years ago. Research in the Baltimore-Washington area finds that mandatory inclusionary zoning increases the cost of market-rate housing. Other peer-reviewed studies have consistently found a similar result: adopting mandatory IZ increases housing costs and distorts the market away from single-family development toward multifamily development. (However, one non-peer-reviewed study finds that moving away from mandatory to voluntary IZ does not reduce housing costs.)

The original version of the bill also had a major reform to minimum lot sizes that would have been pro-housing, but that was amended out. There is good reason to believe that the net effect of the current version of this bill would be to make housing less abundant and more costly.

Jason Sorens of Amherst is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.



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A zoning fix for child care can apply to education too

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Child care in New Hampshire is often hard to find and, when you do, expensive. A bipartisan group of legislators has offered families some relief in a surprising way: zoning reform.

Child care offered to small groups of children in a caregiver’s home was once a popular option for many families. But professionalization and regulation of the industry produced a shift toward large (and expensive) commercial day care centers. A lot of families looking for cheaper alternatives today wonder where the old-fashioned, home-based child care providers went.

Many municipalities, it turns out, have passed zoning regulations prohibiting or restricting them.

“Many state and local governments have considered home daycares a ‘problem use’ and have therefore used zoning restrictions to ban them. Such restrictions reduce the availability of childcare in the affected neighborhoods and further increase the price of childcare services,” the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne has found.

House Bill 1567 would fix that in New Hampshire by requiring local zoning regulations to allow family child care programs as an accessory use (by right) to any primary residential use. 

Such home-base child care programs would be allowed “as long as all requirements for such programs adopted in rules of the department of health and human services (He-C 4002) are met,” the bill states.

Child care is expensive for many reasons, some of them regulatory. It is particularly expensive in New Hampshire. 

According to Child Care Aware, child care in New Hampshire costs an average of $10,140 per year for an infant in family child care and $10,400 for a toddler in family child care. For an infant and toddler in center-based child care, New Hampshire families are spending an average of $15,340 and $14,235 per year, respectively. 

On the “low end,” then, family child care for an infant accounts for 21% of per capita income in New Hampshire and 11.2% of medium household income in the state, while center-based child care for a toddler represents 29.5% of per capita income and 15.7% of medium household income in New Hampshire.

For context, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers its benchmark for affordable child care to be 7% of income. 

HB 1567 would not solve this problem, but it would help lower costs by largely doing away with “problem use” restrictions in residential zoning districts. This change would open more of the state to home-based family child care, free up the supply of those services, and, in turn, help reduce prices. 

This is a smart and efficient way to help lower child care costs by removing an unnecessary regulatory barrier that prohibits the entry of low-cost competitors into the marketplace. 

Legislators could achieve similar results by applying this same approach to a similar service: education.

Since the COVID-19 school closures, interest in small-scale education alternatives has exploded. Many families would love to send their children to home-based education providers in their own neighborhoods. But as teachers and former teachers have begun offering these services, they’ve sometimes run into the same zoning problems troubling many would-be day care providers. 

Kerry McDonald, senior education fellow with the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote two years ago for the Josiah Bartlett Center about a New Hampshire educator who encountered this problem: 

For Becky Owens in Chester, trying to offer sporadic homeschool programs on her farm property turned into a regulatory headache that likely would have deterred many other aspiring education entrepreneurs from moving forward. Owens had been homeschooling her own five children for several years, after pulling her oldest son from the local public elementary school because it wasn’t a good fit for her shy, sensitive boy. She wanted a more personalized educational environment for him and her other children that would be responsive to their individual learning needs and styles.

A college professor for 15 years with a Ph.D. in education, Owens decided to create that personalized learning environment, and eventually expand her offerings to other children in her community. In 2020, she decided to host occasional nature hikes on her property for small groups of local homeschoolers. She had a handful of students register for one of her hikes, and she placed a chalkboard sign in front of her house with the words “Farm Rich Nature Hike” so families could find her.

This simple gesture set off a cascade of events involving the local building inspector, who issued her a “cease and desist” letter for her farm walks. Over the subsequent weeks, Owens had to prepare numerous documents for local officials, including an aerial view of her property, and appear before the planning board to ask for permission to operate as a home-based business. She also had a property inspection from the local fire chief, even though her program was held entirely outside. All of this was required just so Owens could welcome a few children to her property for a nature walk. Her walks never exceeded 10 kids.

And although these local regulatory roadblocks didn’t stop Owens (eventually she got approved to operate as a home-based business), she’s the exception that proves the rule. Who knows how many other aspiring education entrepreneurs seeking to offer alternative learning environments have either given up when faced with such prospects or haven’t even tried. 

As with child care, some municipalities don’t allow “education” services to be offered in residential zones even if all other regulations are followed and there’s no impact on the neighbors. The provision of the service itself is forbidden.

HB 1567 offers a blueprint for how the state can easily expand the marketplace for needed services simply by allowing home-based providers to offer them on a small scale, provided the service doesn’t violate other rules that offer legitimate protections for consumers and neighbors.

 

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How building more luxury apartments helps the poor

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As pressure builds for local and state policymakers to address New Hampshire’s severe housing shortage, some activists and lawmakers are again blaming developers rather than regulators for the state’s high rents. 

Developers are building “too many” apartments for higher-income renters, some claim. This raises rents, hurting the poor, so government must intervene to make builders reserve a certain percentage of new construction for lower-income households, the argument goes. Some also want the state to give subsidies to low-income renters. 

The idea that building more apartments raises rents has achieved the status of conventional wisdom in some activist circles. It’s done so despite it being untrue, and confirmed untrue by growing stacks of economic evidence. 

Even academics repeat the claim. A California political science professor, in a February opinion column for New Hampshire Bulletin, wrote that “construction in the high-end ‘luxury’ rental market, which drives up rents for everyone else, remains in an upward trend.”

In fact, building more market-rate apartments reduces rents for middle-and lower-income households. This has been well established in academic research for years. And recent studies have provided more detailed confirmation of the effect.

A review of recent research on the subject finds:

  • Researchers at the Upjohn Institute and Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found in 2019 that new market-rate apartment buildings “decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent relative to locations slightly farther away or developed later.” They made a point of stating that the evidence ran against common complaints about market-rate apartment construction. “Contrary to common concerns, new buildings slow local rent increases rather than initiate or accelerate them,” they wrote.
  • A 2020 study by the National Multifamily Housing Council Research Foundation found that a “substantial flow of new construction apartments, largely targeted to middle- and higher-income groups, has enabled the ‘filtering’ process to create affordable housing opportunities for low-income households,” as a summary of the report put it. 
  • NYU researchers in a 2018 paper sought to answer claims that building market-rate apartments raised rents. “We ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families.” They also noted that housing shortages are caused by regulations, not new construction. “Despite the arguments raised by supply skeptics, there is a considerable body of empirical research showing that less restrictive land use regulation is associated with lower prices. The evidence takes many forms. A large number of cross-sectional studies show that stricter (less strict) local land use regulations are associated with less (more) new construction and higher (lower) prices.
  • A 2021 UCLA review of recent studies on the effects of building market-rate apartments found overwhelming evidence that new construction of market-rate units lowers rents. Referencing the NYU paper cited above, the authors wrote: “Since that article came out two years ago, at least six working papers have been released that examine the connections between market-rate housing production and affordability at the neighborhood level. Four of the papers conclude that market-rate development makes nearby housing more, not less, affordable. The fifth paper looks at rents across entire cities rather than at the  neighborhood level, but finds that new development causes rents to fall for units across the income distribution. Findings in the sixth paper are mixed, and offer some reason to think new development makes nearby housing more expensive. Although the papers await peer review, and readers should bear that in mind, the importance and near-unanimity of their findings makes discussing them worthwhile.”

Building luxury or higher-end apartments draws higher-income renters out of yesterday’s luxury apartments and into the new luxury apartments. Increased vacancies in yesterday’s luxury apartments attract higher-income residents who’ve been living in mid-level apartments. As new construction creates more vacancies, rents come down. That effect filters throughout the housing supply, lowering rents all the way down. Economists call this “filtering,” and it’s an effect thoroughly established in academic and industry studies of rental housing markets. 

There’s no doubt that filtering occurs when enough new apartments are built. It can’t occur, though, if government prevents developers from creating those new high-end apartments. The problem in recent years has not been the creation of too many high-end apartments, but too few.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies pointed this out in 2020: 

“What is different about the recent dynamic is that new construction is accommodating a growing number of high-income households, but just barely. Indeed, despite the relatively high rents, the number of new apartment units being added each month is scarcely keeping up with growth in units rented out, or ‘absorbed’ by new renters. When new construction is only just meeting demand from new high-income renters, it means that, in effect, new high-end units are being rented out by new, high-income renters, rather than by current high-income renters trading up to a newer unit, and therefore fewer old units are left to ‘filter down’ to a lower-income renters.”

In other words, when developers are allowed to build more market-rate apartments, rents come down for everyone. When they aren’t, rents stay high. 

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As rents fall nationwide, they rise in New Hampshire, where construction lags

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Nationwide, rents have trended downward in the past year. But that relief has missed New Hampshire. 

Here, rents rose in the past year at double the rate of the year before, according to the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority’s (NHHFA) latest report, further illustrating how desperately underserved New Hampshire’s rental market is.

“The rental market hit a big milestone this month, as national rent growth is finally negative year-over-year,” rent-tracking website apartmentlist.com posted on July 26. “This means that on average across the nation, apartments today are renting for less than they did one year ago.”

A growing supply of apartments is having the predictable negative effect on rents.

“The supply side of the rental market also hit a major milestone this month: our vacancy index has reached 7.3 percent, surpassing the peak vacancy rate measured at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the apartmentlist.com report concluded. “With a record number of multi-family apartment units currently under construction, this vacancy rate will remain elevated in the near future. For the first time since the early stages of the pandemic, property owners will compete for a smaller pool of tenants instead of the other way around.”

That last sentence is key. More apartments = lower rents. 

Data from realtor.com also show rents falling in absolute terms from last year.

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded in its 2023 housing report that “rental markets are experiencing sharply reduced rent growth and rising vacancy rates.” 

The study cited lower demand for rental housing after a surge during the pandemic, coupled with a large increase in construction. 

“Multifamily production was extraordinarily strong over the past year, with 342,000 multifamily rental units added in 2022 alone, mostly targeting the high end of the market,” the Harvard study concluded. 

Another industry website, rent.com, concluded in a July report that rents nationally are lower in July 2023 than they were in August of 2022. 

That report pegged New Hampshire as an outlier, with the eighth-highest rent growth in the nation during the past year. 

New Hampshire is bucking the national trend. Not only are rents rising sharply here, but so is the rate of growth. The NHHFA’s 2022 report pegged the average annual increase in gross monthly rent at 5.7%. This year’s report, released last week, pegged the rate at 11.4%, exactly double last year’s.

Heat costs for renters were 58-64% higher than last year, and electricity costs were 62% higher, as measured by NHHFA. Those increases contributed to the surge in expenses for renters. 

But the biggest factor was the continued shortage of rental housing amid strong demand. That shortage is caused primarily by local land use regulations that restrict rental construction.

“Local zoning and planning regulations are probably the largest factor,” NHHFA Executive Director Rob Dapice said in an interview this week. “That’s true of both multi-family and single-family construction, and of course a lot of rental housing is multi-family construction. There are perhaps some obstacles at the state level. We really see more obstacles at the local level.”

The Josiah Bartlett Center’s landmark 2021 study of local land use regulations showed how these constraints on construction limit the supply of new housing in New Hampshire, driving up prices.

With the state’s population projected to grow to 1.5 million by 2050, and the New Hampshire economy booming, demand for new housing is expected to continue rising for years. That leaves the supply side, namely new construction, as the only way to arrest the growth in both rents and single-family home prices, which also hit a new record in May.

NHHFA’s research estimates that New Hampshire needs 60,000 new housing units by 2030 and nearly 90,000 by 2040. Without cooperation from local planning and zoning boards, which regulate land use in New Hampshire, those construction goals will remain out of reach.

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NH Zoning Atlas offers groundbreaking insight into local building restrictions

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In 2021, we published a landmark study that showed how local land use regulations drove New Hampshire’s housing shortage. That study changed the conversation on affordable housing in New Hampshire, from one focused on government subsidies to one focused on regulations. This week, the Center for Ethics in Society at Saint Anselm College set the next housing policy landmark when it released the New Hampshire Housing Atlas.

The New Hampshire Zoning Atlas is the most powerful tool Granite Staters have ever had for understanding local zoning ordinances. It catalogues—and maps—23,000 pages of zoning regulations in 2,139 districts in 269 jurisdictions. Never has this information been available in one place, much less open for public examination. 

In the atlas, users can quickly find the building and land use restrictions in one community, or search the state to see what restrictions are in effect across multiple communities. The search tool and maps reveal just how severely New Hampshire municipalities have restricted people’s housing options, and how much freer some towns are than others. 

The atlas shows that single-family homes are allowed by right on 90% of New Hampshire’s buildable land, and by public hearing on another 6%. Sounds good, right? 

A closer look, though reveals that single family homes on lots of less than one acre are illegal—yes, literally illegal—on most of that property. It is legal to build a home on less than one acre in only 16% of the state’s buildable land.

You might think of zoning as “allowing” certain types of property uses. In reality, zoning is a prohibition. It carves communities into areas in which most uses of private property are outlawed. Large minimum lot size requirements are the perfect example of a regulation that outlaws a once common housing preference. The result is a nearly statewide prohibition on the construction of affordable starter homes.  

People generally have no problem with municipalities using zoning to, say, keep industrial operations out of residential neighborhoods. The New Hampshire Zoning Atlas shows, however, that municipalities commonly use this power to outlaw small yards, duplexes, apartments and any mixing of commercial and residential activities. The maps show that it isn’t unusual for municipalities to take zoning restrictions to absurd extremes.

Lebanon’s rural lands 3 zone has a huge 10-acre minimum lot size for single-family homes, which we knew from previous research. But the atlas shows that Hanover isn’t alone. Meredith’s forest and conservation district also has a 10-acre minimum lot size. Marlowe’s rural lands district has a minimum lot size of 20 acres!

Neighboring towns can have huge discrepancies in the types of homes they allow. 

No portion of Bedford, Merrimack or New Boston has a minimum lot size of five acres or more. But significant portions of Mont Vernon and Amherst do. Two-family housing is allowed in most of Londonderry, but in only a small sliver of Derry. 

Though the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas is itself policy neutral (it’s just a presentation of data), it’s likely to lead to policy changes. It’s hard to justify zoning that allows rental housing of five units or more, but bans duplexes and triplexes, for example. This particular rule shows up in a surprising number of communities.

The atlas offers an invaluable tool for citizens who want to better understand how government regulations prevent the market from providing housing options that people want, even in times of sky-high demand.

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Moving to Maine to escape high housing prices in New Hampshire

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Two events on opposite ends of the state last week highlighted the central problem with New Hampshire’s housing market.

In Newmarket over the weekend, a group of renters held a demonstration to denounce landlords and protest high rents.

After experiencing a substantial rent increase, one couple said they had to move out of town to find a place where the rent and the quality of the apartment were better matched. 

That place, they said, is New Jersey.

Another protester said she had moved to Maine to find a more reasonable rent.

It’s true that, on average, moving from Rockingham County to Maine will lower one’s rent, as average rents are lower in Maine than in New Hampshire.

Apartmentlist.com puts the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment at $952 in Maine and $1,329 in New Hampshire.

Home prices are lower in Maine too.

The median home price in New Hampshire is about $430,000. 

In Maine, it’s about $350,000.

Maine and New Hampshire have almost identical populations. Maine has 1.34 million people, and New Hampshire has 1.35 million people.

That’s not enough of a difference to create such huge price variations for housing.

Why would prices be so much lower in Maine?

In a word: Supply.

Maine has 101,000 more housing units than New Hampshire does, according to Census Bureau data.

That’s almost exactly as many housing units as exist in Merrimack and Cheshire Counties combined. 

If New Hampshire had 101,000 more housing units, what do you think the effect would be on home prices and rents?

A few days before the Newmarket protest, residents of Keene demonstrated exactly why New Hampshire is suffering from a severe housing shortage that has driven home prices and rents to record levels.

On Wednesday, Keene’s Planning, Licenses and Development Committee recommended unanimously that the city council send back to committee a proposed zoning ordinance that would allow more housing in the city’s rural district, the Keene Sentinel reported.

The city had proposed reducing the minimum lot size in the rural zone from 5 acres to 2. 

That’s right. The City of Keene has a rural zone with a mandatory minimum lot size of five acres. Within that zone, no house may legally be built on any lot smaller than five acres.

This is exactly the kind of government regulation that reduces the housing supply and raises prices. 

Keene officials wanted to do their part to make it less expensive to build single-family homes in large sections of the city. But about 15 people showed up to oppose the ordinance, with many saying it would change the rural character of the City of Keene. 

Spooked city officials promptly moved to withdraw and rework the proposed ordinance.

Meanwhile, prices continue to rise and pressure continues to build for legislative action. Activists are pushing hard for state laws to pre-empt local zoning ordinances or regulate prices.

If local governments don’t take more decisive action to trim regulations that limit housing supply, state-imposed solutions will come. It’s only a matter of time. 

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Modest changes to housing regulations take effect

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On August 23, a handful of state laws crafted to address New Hampshire’s housing shortage take effect. Though the big reforms were left on the Legislature’s cutting room floor, these modest changes might prove helpful. 

The splashiest change, which might prompt some warrant articles next spring, applies zoning exemptions carved out for 55+ communities to workforce housing as well. 

Most of the changes are more technical fixes to ensure that municipalities don’t stick proposed developments in a legal limbo simply by delaying or refusing to act on applications. 

These changes amount to mostly modest improvements in the system that will make it slightly less antagonistic to new housing construction. But with home prices and rents remaining at record levels, pressure to pass more powerful reforms is likely to prompt more legislation next year. 

The new laws will:

  • Require the Office of Planning and Development to create and offer training to planning and zoning boards. The initial idea was to require board member training, but that was dropped in favor of making the training available at no cost to board members. 
  • Require that any fee imposed by a local land use board be published “in a location accessible to the public during normal business hours.” Any fee not published at the time an application is submitted shall be waived. 
  • Require that by July 1, 2023, any local incentive established for housing older persons “shall be deemed applicable to workforce housing development.” Many communities exempt 55+ communities from certain zoning requirements. The idea is to create exemptions that allow housing to be built only for people who don’t have school-age children. This change would apply those restrictions to workforce housing as well. 
  • Require that local land use boards issue a final written decision for all applications, and require those decisions to “include specific written findings of fact that support the decision.” Failure to offer specific, written findings of fact would be grounds for automatic reversal by the Superior Court.
  • Require zoning boards of adjustment to issue a final decision on an application within 90 days of receiving the application. 
  • Require planning boards to determine whether submitted applications are complete at the next regularly scheduled meeting, or within 30 days after receiving the application. Boards must then act on an application within 65 days of determining that it’s complete.
  • Require selectmen or city councils to certify approval of a plat if the planning board fails to act within the allotted time. Failure of selectmen or city councils to act will constitute grounds for the Superior Court to act if petitioned to do so by the applicant.
  • Allow municipalities to acquire land for use as workforce housing, but not by eminent domain.
  • Allow municipalities to lease basements, ground and second floors of public buildings for residential use, negotiate the sale or lease of property for residential use, and acquire, improve, operate, maintain or promote residential developments “aimed at increasing the available housing stock within the municipality.”
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Having the ‘hottest housing market’ means you don’t have enough houses

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New Hampshire has the top two hottest housing markets in the country, as rated by real estate search website realtor.com. These ratings should be taken with a grain of salt, as they’re based in part on search queries on a single listings website. But even if the rankings are an accurate representation of the market, that’s not really great news for Granite Staters, as it’s further confirmation that the state suffers from a severe housing shortage.

Having the “hottest housing market” based on realtor.com‘s system doesn’t mean your community is the most desirable in the country. It’s a proxy to measure the intensity of the housing market. Demand is just one side of the coin. Supply is the other, and that’s a big reason why New Hampshire has claimed the top two spots on the list. 

The demand side of the realtor.com rankings is based on unique viewers per property on that website only (which is a serious limitation). Concord tops the list at 3.2 views per property. Manchester is second at 2.6. 

The proxy for the supply side of the ranking is based on how long homes stay on the market. Median time spent on the market in Concord is 13 days, according to the site. For Manchester it’s 12 days. 

Rochester, N.Y., has a median time on the market of 12 days, making it the only other community in the site’s list of top 20 hottest markets that is close to the Concord and Manchester numbers.

Such a short time spent on the market indicates not just high demand, but an extremely low supply. A balanced market is considered one that has at least six months of inventory. It would take less than a month to sell every home on the market in New Hampshire, according to the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority.

The realtor.com ranking shows Concord and Manchester to be in the top four communities for price, behind two other New England metropolitan areas. That’s another sign that our supply is extremely low.

The top median listing prices were Portland, Maine, at $549,000, Burlington, Vt., at $484,000, Manchester at $478,000, and Concord at $457,000. 

Concord and Manchester had higher median asking prices than Worcester, Mass., Springfield, Mass., Hartford, Conn., and New Haven, Conn. 

A housing growth map published this week by Axios helps illustrate the underlying supply problem. It shows the percent change in housing units from last July to this July, by county.

Only three counties in New England experienced at least a 1% increase in housing units in the last year. Grafton County was the only one in the Granite State.  

The New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority’s annual Housing Market report, released last month, again noted that it “would take at least 20,000 housing units to achieve a balanced market” in the state.

New Hampshire is indeed a highly desirable place to live. The combination of remote work and the pandemic have boosted demand for homes in the Granite State. With remote work now a permanent and growing feature of white collar employment, and blue state refugees seeking low-tax jurisdictions from which to live and work, demand for homes in New Hampshire is likely to remain elevated for years. 

But it’s important for policymakers and voters to understand that this is not the cause of New Hampshire’s housing shortage or high prices. Housing prices in the state have risen steadily since 2012. The recent bump in demand just adds to the previously existing imbalance. 

New Hampshire was in a housing shortage long before the pandemic. That shortage will remain, as will the resulting high prices, until supply is increased enough to balance demand. 

Being labeled home to the nation’s “hottest housing market” would be nice if that term measured demand only. In reality, it’s further confirmation that we don’t have enough housing.

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Will local governments pass rising costs to taxpayers?

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When inflation comes for your property tax bill, will your local officials be prepared?

Greed is the real cause of inflation, according to the President of the United States, progressive senators and left-wing activists. 

You, simple American selling driftwood sculptures on the roadside to cover gas money, are merely the victim of corporations who greedily raise prices so they can pocket record profits. 

So when rising prices hit local governments, which are entirely altruistic and never motivated by a desire to spend other people’s money, they’ll absorb the costs and not raise taxes, right? 

Rising costs have already hit New Hampshire municipalities hard, WMUR has reported.

Governing magazine reported in April that “state and local governments are having to contend with a range of fiscal challenges. Inflation is at a 40-year high, meaning the cost of capital projects and even routine service delivery is going up. The tight labor market means governments are having to increase salaries, which in turn puts upward pressures on pension costs. Already, rising interest rates are limiting the success of governments in issuing taxable bonds.”

And then there are the self-inflicted cost increases. Manchester has approved a $15 minimum wage for full-time, hourly city employees, and the city Board of School Committee is mulling one for the schools as well. 

These wage hikes were initiated not to keep up with market pay rates, but as part of the “living wage” movement. 

Raising pay to at least $15 an hour, even if qualified people are willing to do the same work for less, is held to be a moral imperative.

The real moral imperative, however, is to spend taxpayer money efficiently and effectively. Paying more than necessary for goods and services is not an obligation of government; it’s a violation of government’s obligation to the taxpayer. 

One test of how aggressively local governments pursue efficient management of taxpayer resources will come during the next round of local budgeting. We could see then whether local officials sought to protect taxpayers from rising prices, or whether they passed costs on with little regard for people’s ability to pay. 

(Toronto this spring approved a tax increase double the normal size, citing inflation.)

Another test of whether local governments are willing to help fight inflation will come at local planning and zoning board meetings, and on local ballots next spring. Are these boards willing to roll back the most restrictive land use regulations so the private sector can build more housing, more warehouses, more gas stations, more pipelines?

If municipalities do cite higher costs as a justification for tax increases, will progressives denounce them as greedy? Or is greed, to progressives, a vice that afflicts only the private sector?

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