What's Working: Upper Valley grapples with housing crunch

Dec. 8--One renovated sewer line could launch hundreds of new apartments.

But Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland fears those apartments and other new homes won't be affordable enough for his police officers, firefighters and others who live in more affordable communities.

He hears developers are proposing as many as 1,200 housing units in the city -- mostly at market-rate prices -- and will begin submitting requests starting next month.

"We're not achieving our objectives," Mulholland said Friday. "We're not able to find a way to influence that process to create more affordable housing. We have not been successful in our efforts to do that."

Across the state, employers and communities are grappling with high housing costs, whether people rent or own. Developers aren't keeping up with demand, and prospective residents find themselves priced out of homes or apartments in areas they desire, often driving them farther away from work.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and Dartmouth College are taking steps to develop their own. A study they commissioned determined Dartmouth-Hitchcock needed 800 more housing units for workers while the college's grad students and employees needed about 500 more.

One-bedroom units ranged from $675 to $2,100 a month in the Upper Valley area, with two-bedroom rentals running $800 to $2,450, according to the study.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock has asked a firm to seek proposals from developers for housing ideas on roughly 35 acres of land across the street from the medical center along Route 120 in Lebanon.

"We would look to arrange a deal with a developer where the developer would fund the initiative, and we would find a way to make it profitable for the developer," said Tom Goins, vice president of facilities operations for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health. That could include donating the land, which is worth millions.

Housing is "a big factor" for job recruits, said Sarah Currier, vice president of workforce strategy at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. "It matters to our most highly paid recruits as much as it does to our lowest paid hourly recruits."

Even D-H adding 200 to 300 units would represent "a drop in the bucket," Currier said. "We can't solve this by ourselves."

A task force established by Gov. Chris Sununu to address the state's housing shortage produced two pieces of legislation, including one to improve the predictability of the development process. The second focuses on accelerating investment in housing.

"Whether it's an individual small developer or a big time developer, it's right now a really big risk to make an investment in a lot of communities because of the unpredictability of the process they would have to go through," said Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the Department of Business and Economic Affairs and a task force member.

On Wednesday, more than 170 invited guests will convene at a roundtable event at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Organizers will update progress made since a similar roundtable there in June 2018.

Housing is an important topic for employers, according to Mike Kiess, workforce housing coordinator at Vital Communities, a nonprofit that brings people together in 69 communities in New Hampshire and Vermont.

One focus, he said, should be for communities and developers to "use infrastructure we already paid for and created," such as existing roads, sewers and power.

"That lowers the price of construction significantly," he said.

D-H last year hired about 1,000 new workers who needed to move to the area.

"Every single conversation with everyone I had from outside the area came with a conversation about how hard it is to find housing," Currier said.

Some job seekers ask for a higher salary than offered to help deal with high housing costs.

"It ends up going to the most savvy negotiators," Currier said. "You don't get what you don't ask for."

Currier said some workers who commute up to an hour away pass other medical centers. Dartmouth-Hitchcock sees people jump to a competitor "all the time" because their commutes are shorter.

Goins, who noted one-bedroom apartments were going for as high as $1,700 a month near the medical center, said he is solidifying support for his organization's board to approve a new in-patient bed tower to open in 2022.

"We have to get ahead of that in hiring employees, and the ability of hiring those employees is largely (based) on the ability to house them," Goins said. "You can add 300 more housing units needed just from that initiative."

Employers are becoming a bigger part of the conversation about housing solutions, according to Mike Skelton, president and CEO of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce.

"Some businesses, in the short term, are going further and taking direct action by assisting employees with their housing search, providing incentives, or in some cases developing or securing their own units they can offer directly to employees," he said.

Mulholland said employers providing housing for workers harkens back to the days of operating mills.

"This was not untypical when you had old factory towns. They built housing for their workers," he said. "The housing was built by the major manufacturers in the area."

Studies have shown the Upper Valley, on both sides of the state line combined, needs 5,000 to 6,000 housing units of various sizes in the 22-community area in New Hampshire and Vermont.

He knows not all of that will be built in Lebanon.

The apartment buildings sparked by the renovated sewer line, Mulholland said, will help employers and reduce traffic congestion on some roads.

"It doesn't come anywhere near solving the problem of workforce housing," he said. "I'd like to say we're solving this problem. We are not."

What's Working, a series exploring solutions for New Hampshire's workforce needs, is sponsored by the New Hampshire Solutions Journalism Lab at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications and is funded by Eversource, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the New Hampshire College & University Council, Northeast Delta Dental and the New Hampshire Coalition for Business and Education.

Contact reporter Michael Cousineau at mcousineau@unionleader.com. To read stories in the series, visit unionleader.com/whatsworking.

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