high prices, restrictive rules and a booming population have squeezed working folks out of the housing market 

On a humid June afternoon, Lauren sits outside the children’s playground with her son Kyle at Crossroads House in Portsmouth. Dressed in khaki-colored overalls and a tank top, Lauren is one of the faces of homelessness on the Seacoast. A series of bad breaks and personal misfortunes have left her, Kyle and her other son, David Jr. without a home, without a car and with few chances to get back on their feet.
“How can you expect me to get ahead if I can’t prove to you I can do it?” she said. “I would like one little chance to prove I can do it.”
When her husband left her two years ago, Lauren said, he agreed to pay child support and the rent for their Seabrook apartment. But by December 2003, Lauren discovered her husband hadn’t been paying the rent at all. Her job at Kitchens Etc. sustained her and her two sons, giving them just enough to cover grocery costs and the $184 rent each week. But when Lauren began missing too much work, from a combination of taking care of her sons and going to court to wrangle money out of her ex-husband, she lost her job. They were kicked out of their apartment in August 2004.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I don’t know how (my ex-husband) sleeps at night.”
Lauren and her kids are just three of thousands of people experiencing homelessness in the state. A one-day count in January by the department of Health and Human Services found 1,395 homeless in the state, up from 1,081 last year; a number that does not include statistics from Manchester or Nashua, which perform their own annual count. This year, Manchester alone had 1,277 homeless, while Nashua had 606, bringing the state’s total number of counted homeless to 3,278. However, the number of total persons sheltered in 2004 was 6,672, up from 6,553 in 2003 and far above the January 2005 census count. Because of the difficulty in keeping tabs on the state’s homeless population, advocates estimate the number to be much higher.     
As the number of homeless in the state increases, their demographics are also changing. The common misconceptions of homelessness are far different from reality. The majority of the homeless people on the Seacoast are families struggling to get by, set back by a combination of bad luck, bad finances and bad decisions.
“The homelessness we’re now seeing is economic homelessness,” said Keith Kuenning, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness. “The thing we’re seeing more and more are two-parent families that simply cannot afford housing in this state.”
That affordable housing, the kind that pretty much any family earning under $50,000 a year needs, is increasingly hard to come by on the Seacoast and in the state as a whole. Towns reluctant to support the development of more affordable housing for fear of straining schools and municipal services have only exacerbated the problem.
Though a handful of groups in the Seacoast and the state are addressing the housing crunch, almost everyone agrees it’s going to take a long time for things to get better. Meanwhile, as lawmakers and advocates figure out solutions, Lauren, her sons and thousands like them are faced with the almost Herculean task of finding a good place to live on the Seacoast.
how we got here
“The big picture is pretty simple,” according to Arnie Alpert, state program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that advocates for public interest and peace and justice issues. The New Hampshire AFSC has been tackling the workforce housing problem for the last decade. Like most tackling the issue, Alpert said the driving force behind the shortage of housing and the rise of the state’s homeless population is the tremendous amount of growth in the state since the 1990s.
According to data from the state’s Office of Energy and Planning, the state’s population increased by more than 90,000 people between 1990 and 1999. In Strafford and Rockingham counties, which make up the southeastern tier of the state, the population went up by about 30,000 during the decade.
“The population of the state is growing faster than the housing stock, and the housing stock being built is at the high end, and that means the housing is increasingly out of the reach of middle- and lower-income people,” Alpert said.
As the population has boomed, so have home prices. According to data compiled by the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority, the median cost for a house in Rockingham County in 2004 was $283,000, up from $180,900 in 2000. However, wages have not managed to keep pace. Data from the U.S. Census shows that in 1990, the estimated median income for the Seacoast was $34,920; in 2000, it was $48,740.
“Home prices have increased…faster than a typical worker’s income. Local regulations such as minimum lot size and building moratoriums, in addition to high land costs, have exacerbated the problem,” according to Joe Galli, interim director of the Workforce Housing Council of the Greater Seacoast.
During the last few years, almost a dozen workforce housing advocacy groups have formed in the state. They’re quasi-governmental groups, made up of state officials, private developers and housing experts with one primary goal: to educate the public on the lack of affordable housing. Part of that goal includes educating municipalities on how to effectively accommodate workforce housing, something that many towns are reluctant to do for a variety of reasons.
The various workforce housing groups work closely with town planners to “educate them about the need for housing, how much it costs, how far people are having to commute… and if the community is interested and wants to pursue solutions, the coalition will sit down with them and look at zoning codes and figure out why it’s not cost effective to build workforce housing in that community,” said Meredith Hatfield, coordinator for the New Hampshire Workforce Housing Council.

schools, seniors and other roadblocks
The most common fear about affordable housing revolves around multi-family housing developments bringing hordes of children into already-crowded local school systems, a phobia that is not supported by statistics.
Despite a recent study by Russ Thibeault, president of Applied Economic Research in Laconia, the idea that new multi-family housing units are dumping scores of children into schools is still pervasive. The accepted wisdom among many planners is that each new unit of housing will generate two children. However, Thibeault’s study found that each new housing unit accounts for only .5 children. The study does not differentiate between single and multi-family homes.
The results are surprising to a lot of planning board members who believe in what Thibeault calls “the Brady Bunch syndrome,” that every new house generates a wealth of children.
“The basic story is this: in the 1990s, the baby boomers’ kids entered the school age population. In this decade, the baby boomers’ kids are leaving…or have left…the school age population. So I think it will take a while before the real relationship between growth and school enrollment sinks in,” he said.
However, Thibeault cautions that not every housing development is going to necessarily generate a low number of children.
“My advice would be to look at this study and don’t … assume every development that comes in is going to flood schools…. I think that has been the mindset and made it more difficult to get housing approved at a time when housing affordability is essentially at the crisis level in a lot of New Hampshire,” he said.
The “Brady Bunch syndrome” that Thibeault speaks of isn’t the only misconception among planners and developers that’s thrown the Granite State’s housing stock out of whack.
Housing developments for senior citizens have been increasingly popular with many towns during the last few years, a trend that has some hidden costs, according to Jill Robinson, a regional planner with the Rockingham Planning Commission.
“The idea behind senior housing being attractive to towns is that seniors would not bring additional children into towns and town school systems, and thus not have additional impact on the town,” Robinson said.
And while that may seem like a bonus for towns with overburdened school systems, seniors bring with them costs of emergency and age-related services. Additionally, as a demographic, seniors tend to spend less in commercial areas than young families, according to Robinson.
“A shift in population to a grayer age demographic…is going to potentially have a negative impact on commercial areas,” she said. “Favoring one type of age over another is probably not a recipe for success.”
Another factor is the affordability of some senior housing. Often, towns will give developers the OK on a senior housing project, assuming that the development will be inhabited by retirees in the community. However, that development may turn out to be expensive, high-end housing that’s out of the reach of seniors on a fixed income, something the town may not have intended.
It’s not just owning a home that’s gotten more difficult, though. As more people funnel into the Seacoast, rents have also skyrocketed. The average rental price for a two-bedroom apartment in the Seacoast has gone from $717 in 2000 a month to $909 in 2005, according to data from the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority.
“In general, the (federal) Housing and Urban Development guidelines for affordability of housing is that no more than 30 percent of a household’s gross income should be spent on gross rent, that is, rent plus utilities. For example, a household earning $30,000 can afford a two bedroom apartment renting for $750 a month,” according to Galli. “Therefore, the household must earn approximately $38,000 to ‘technically,’ per HUD guidelines, afford to live there. As a result many people cannot ‘afford’ to live in the area.”
To simply rent an average two-bedroom apartment on the Seacoast, a person would need to earn at least $18 an hour after taxes, or up to $25 an hour gross, to afford the apartment, Galli said. In other words, someone earning minimum wage would have to work three full-time jobs to cover rent, utilities and other expenses.
“I also think there’s a prejudice against poor people in this society, and that’s not unique to New Hampshire. But at the same time, we see that the job growth that’s been taking place in the state has been going on in the low end of the wage scale,” Alpert said.
For those on the middle or low end of the wage scale, this means that housing is a precarious luxury, one that could easily vanish with a simple stroke of bad luck.

left out
“No one wants to trust anybody to give you a break,” Lauren said.
In front of her on a picnic table outside Crossroads House in Portsmouth are two thick binders, full of legal correspondence, insurance papers and two hand-written pages full of the phone numbers and addresses for apartments where she’s applied to rent but was rejected.
“It’s really frustrating,” she said. For each new apartment, potential landlords need only check her rental history, where they’ll find her and her husband’s name on the lease and eviction notice for her former apartment. She’s been denied public housing in Portsmouth because of her previous eviction.
But even without the black mark on her rental history, Lauren would still have a hard time finding affordable housing because, at the moment, she’s without a steady job or a driver’s license. She lost her job after taking too many days off to care for her sons Kyle and David Jr., who suffer from ADHD, ADD and depression. She’s also been fighting a protracted legal battle with her ex-husband over missing child support and alimony payments. At Crossroads House, children can’t be on the property without a parent, and so getting a job has proven difficult for Lauren, who must often take time off when the kids are sick or don’t have school.
“If you can name one employer that will take me, you let me know,” she said. “The hardest part is, I could be working every day, but they can’t be left alone.”
Lauren’s story is typical of the state’s homeless population. According to Chris Sterndale, executive director of Crossroads, many of the people who walk through the shelter’s doors have another problem—medical, legal, family—that is coupled with the homelessness. Crossroads tries to “get the foundation squared away” by getting people stable employment and helping with whatever issues are keeping them from moving forward, Sterndale said.
“For everybody, it’s a different path, but the trick is to give them a new tool or two to make them succeed when they get out of there,” he said.
But just getting out of the shelters and into a stable apartment is getting increasingly difficult. Funding for homeless services in the state is not increasing as fast as the population. It takes between $3 and 4 million a year to keep Crossroads running, with half the money coming from federal, state and municipal sources and half coming from “generous local folks,” Sterndale said. The state and federal money is “stable, but fading,” he said, pointing out that the town of Hampton announced it would not contribute to Crossroads this year because of budget cuts.
On the state level, homeless service providers receive about $3.1 million each year from HUD, with the state chipping in another $2.7 million, according to Patrick Herlihy, director of the state’s office of Housing and Homeless Services. HHS also administers $1 million for housing security guarantees, which assists people with poor credit or rental history in obtaining housing. The office also administers another $1 million for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grant, which is similar to the housing security guarantee.
But the fact remains that many people in the state don’t realize exactly how much of a homeless population the state has.
“People just don’t realize the magnitude of the problem we’re facing here in New Hampshire,” said Keith Keunning of the NHCEH. “Their first response is ‘I didn’t even know we had homeless in New Hampshire.’ My job is to put the issue of homelessness in the public policy debate.”
In a University of New Hampshire survey commissioned by Keunning’s group, of 544 people surveyed, 17 percent think homelessness is a “very serious problem”; 50 percent said homelessness is a “somewhat serious problem” in the state; 16 percent said it’s “not very serious,” 5 percent think it’s “not serious at all” and 12 percent said they “don’t know. A little more than half of those surveyed identified low-income levels and the affordable housing shortage as the most important causes of homelessness.
“They really can’t afford the houses to have two or three bedrooms, to have the American dream. It is just out of reach for most families,” Keunning said. “The thing we’re seeing more and more, the first thing (families) give up is health insurance, and then they make a decision to eat, and then…they don’t have the money.”
Lauren is lucky enough to have insurance for her kids (a leftover benefit from her ex), but she still struggles with other costs, including food (Crossroads provides nightly meals during the week, but families must provide their own food at other times), a cell phone (which she uses so potential landlords and employers can contact her, since Crossroads will not confirm if a person is staying there or not) and $120 a month to keep her and her sons’ possessions in a self-storage unit.
For the most part, the state’s homeless are without insurance, which also has an economic impact on the state, Kuenning said.
“The thing we’re trying to do is show, obviously not only the humanitarian cost of this lack of affordable housing, but just how it’s affecting the state in every way. Homelessness has a tremendous cost to individuals but also to the state,” he said.
At Crossroads, about 700 people stay at the shelter each year, a mixture of individuals and families like Lauren’s.
“We’ve managed to meet the demand in a lot of ways,” he said. “You don’t see people sleeping in Market Square, like you would in a big city. Homeless people don’t want to be seen as homeless. They don’t want to sleep in Market Square, they don’t want to sleep in someone’s back yard.”
For now, Lauren will continue to stay at Crossroads House, but said it’s not the ideal environment for her kids. She tells of a recent incident in which police arrested at gunpoint a man staying in the woods behind the shelter. Lauren’s also had a couple run-ins with other people staying there. However, for the most part, “people can be really nice here because we’re all in the same boat,” she said.
The only thing that’s stopping her from moving on, she said, is one small break—enough money to pay the first month’s rent for an apartment or a steady, reliable job that will accommodate her erratic schedule.
“Once I get a job, it won’t matter,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t get that foot in the door to get going.”

density bonuses and other solutions
Sylvia von Aulock, a planner with the Exeter Planning Department, said the town began looking at the dearth of affordable housing in 2000.
“We were noticing that a lot of homes being proposed were unaffordable. They were … in the $450,000 range, and we saw that as a real problem. Between thinking about the (town’s) master plan and watching the development come in at pretty high figures, I think (the town) started realizing there were issues with affordable housing,” she said.
Von Aulock worked with members of the Rockingham Planning Commission to come up with bonuses for developers to build workforce housing as well as amending town ordinances to allow for more multi-family homes.
So far, Eric Chinburg is the only developer to take advantage of the density bonuses the town has to offer.
One of Chinburg’s latest projects is Watson Woods, which combines workforce housing units and some single-family town houses. The 20 workforce units will sell for between $189,000 and $229,000, while the townhouses will start at $329,000 and can go as high as $900,000. Ten of the workforce housing units are completed and occupied; Chinburg expects the remaining 10 to be finished and inhabited by March 2006.
“I live in Exeter, and I know it to be a nice community,” Chinburg said. He’s also a member of the Exeter Development Commission and president of the board of the Housing Partnership, an affordable housing advocacy group in the state. “They have … an ordinance that was creative and outside the box as far as giving private developers … incentives to develop housing that would be sold lower than market price.”
Chinburg is also modifying plans for his Islington Woods project in Portsmouth to include 30 workforce housing units.  
Density bonuses like the ones used in Exeter allow developers to build more houses on a parcel of land so that the homes may be sold at a lower rate. Otherwise, developers would face restrictions on how many units they could build over a certain amount of acreage.
But these incentives only provide a partial solution to the problem. As the population grows and New Hampshire’s pastoral landscape undergoes more and more development, land prices will continue to rise, another factor behind increased housing costs. And, according to Chinburg, the various regulatory fees required of developers by communities have grown considerably.
“You cannot underestimate the heavy burden … (of) what I considered a regulatory process that’s sort of lost touch with its initial intent,” Chinburg said. Developers used to typically figure about $2,000 in assorted permits and fees per lot, he said; now they must count on spending between $12,000 and $15,000 per lot.
“It’s taken on a life of its own. It’s a huge cost increase passed on to the buyer,” Chinburg said.
Von Aulock is hoping that other developers, and towns, will follow the example set by Exeter and Chinburg.
“I think there’s serious reservations from developers…on the stigma attached to affordable housing,” von Aulock said. “Workforce housing brings with it a very kind of negative picture in one’s mind. “I think a lot of people really need to open their minds (about) what it means to build and to live in (affordable housing) and who lives there and all those issues surrounding affordable housing.”
Other towns, like Stratham, have started to approve density bonuses and zoning changes, but the pace is slow.
“Exeter has done it because … the planning board did not have the fear that other boards have,” she said. “I’m glad we now have an example so we can send as many people as we can over (to Watson Woods) and say, ‘Hey, take a look at this.’”

looking ahead
To effectively solve the affordable housing crisis and find a home for low-income families, almost everyone agrees that it’s going to take a concerted effort from state officials, town planners and private developers.
“It’s not going to happen by itself, but if there are politicians at the local, state and federal level from both political parties that decide that having an adequate supply of housing is a public interest issue, we can find solutions that are going to make it better,” Alpert said.
Groups like the newly formed New Hampshire Workforce Council and the Public Policy Alliance for Housing are working to educate the public and policy makers.
“The trick is the leadership has to come from a combined effort of the towns, the planning boards and the builders who are building in those communities. They have to work in concert to solve a need that’s there because the market demands it,” said Don Bealko, president of the PPAH. “One of hte things we’re trying to promote is cooperation and education among people that make decisions.”
This education includes monthly meetings held by the various workforce housing councils, and a yearly housing seminar sponsored by the PPAH. Bealko said other strategies the PPAH advocates include reusing land that’s been previously developed and encouraging mixed use developments that include affordable apartments, town houses, condos, single-family homes and age-restricted housing. Large companies should also get in on the act. He cites Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover as an example of a company working to provide affordable housing for workers who have been shut out of high-priced communities like Hanover.
“That type of mindset may be something that needs to be further explored,” he said. “If I were building a new plant that required 1,000 employees … one stipulation I’d have for the community is how do I know I’m going to have adequate housing for the employee population here? I don’t think enough employers are demanding that,” he said.
Sterndale is cautiously optimistic about the future.
“I don’t think it’s getting worse,” he said. “When the economy was booming four years ago, rents were going through the roof. It’s not getting worse as fast as it used to… Of course, with the shipyard on the list, there’s a whole new uncertainty to the local economy. There could be a lot of indirect job losses.”