When Sylvia von Aulock started working in Exeter’s planning department more than a decade ago, the McMansion was the home of choice. The widely produced large homes on large lots had become popular during a booming housing market and were appealing to buyers, developers, and towns.
But there was a problem.
“We realized all the subdivisions that were being approved were creating housing (people) couldn’t afford or that their kids (who were) leaving the nest couldn’t afford either,” von Aulock said.
The rising cost of housing is an issue at the forefront of planners’ minds around the Seacoast, yet building affordable housing remains mired in logistics, high costs, and, often, negative public perceptions. But, two Seacoast communities — Exeter and Dover — have found success by employing a holistic view, addressing zoning restrictions, and tackling public perception with hard data.
Changing perceptions
Workforce housing is an often-misunderstood term. Some think it’s analogous to public housing. It’s not. Others think it’s only for the very poor. That’s false, too.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions about workforce housing and about who needs workforce housing,” Seacoast Workforce Housing Coalition executive director Ashlee Iber Amenti said. “A lot of times, when people hear about workforce housing, they think it’s for people who are not working.”
According to New Hampshire law, workforce housing is housing that’s intended for sale or rent and is considered affordable based on the median income for the area. It can include apartments, condominiums, or single-family homes.
In the Seacoast, where median income is $86,100, the maximum affordable purchase price is $289,000, according to current federal guidelines. For renters, it is $1,160 per month, including utilities. It’s not the unemployed or working poor who often live in these homes — it’s people who consider themselves middle class.
Watson Woods is an 80-unit development in Exeter that includes workforce housing. Residents who have moved there include a teacher, a real estate agent, a marketing consultant, a nonprofit employee, and a writer, according to Iber Amenti.
“If you target one style of housing over another, at some point there is going to be a backlash and the pendulum will swing the other way.”
— Dover city planner Christopher Parker
Even under the best of circumstances, workforce-housing proposals can die when they come up against opposition from neighbors. Sometimes, these fears are easily dispelled. But often they require an extensive education campaign. One of the most common misconceptions is that workforce housing developments flood local schools with students and strain city and town resources. The data does not support those claims.
“So many of our schools have had either flat enrollment for five years to a decade or are even declining,” von Aulock said. “When you are talking about multi-family (developments), you are talking about these small homes. If you look at reports on the number of children per unit, there are hardly any children.”
Dover city planner Christopher Parker said whenever a proposed development comes before the city, the planning board receives a report predicting the impact the development will have on schools and other city services. That data can allay fears.
“The more information you have and the more accessible things are, the less fear you have,” Parker said. “When you start making stuff up and you start supposing, that’s when things get troublesome.”
A diverse mix
If you talk to von Aulock or Parker about affordable housing in their communities, they both start the conversation the same way: by not talking about affordable housing. It’s not that they are dodging the issue; both emphasize their approach involves attracting a mix of housing options.
“I don’t really look at it as workforce housing or affordable housing or upper-class housing. I look at it as a community,” Parker said. “We need to provide a diversity of housing. If you target one style of housing over another, at some point there is going to be a backlash and the pendulum will swing the other way.”
Workforce housing advocates agree that communities should take a holistic approach to planning housing stock. But, in practice, people often find themselves moving between towns as their housing needs change.
“One thing we’ve seen in the Seacoast is there are certain types of housing in different communities,” Iber Amenti said. “Someone might get their first apartment in one community, then move to a townhouse condo somewhere else, and then to a single family home somewhere else. You shouldn’t have to move (towns) every single time you want to have a different kind of housing.”
Exeter’s Watson Woods has been touted as a success story. The development, which broke ground in 2005, includes about 80 units with a mix of styles and rates — townhouse-style condos alongside single-family homes, for example, with some units rented at market rates and others at fixed prices.
“Not a lot of towns have successful examples of that,” Iber Amenti said. “It’s really great when that can happen. You don’t necessarily need to divide the two.”
Leveling the field
Although officials in Dover and Exeter prefer to look at housing as a big picture, affordable options face unique obstacles. High land costs around the Seacoast alone are enough to derail a potential project.
Marty Chapman is executive director of The Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that secures funding for and develops income-restricted housing in the Seacoast. Because partnership developments are not rented at market rates, the margins are so narrow that many potential developments don’t work because costs are too high. In the case of Woodbury Mills in Dover, a project that advocates and officials have considered a successful example of workforce housing, the 42-unit development cost nearly $10 million to build.
“Of course, the economics have to make sense, and land costs are often the difference between feasibility — or not — of a potential site,” Chapman said.
City and town officials have little control over these economics, but they do have control over zoning — deciding how and where workforce housing developments can be built.
“We hear a lot from developers that it’s both the policies in place as well as the process they have to go through to get an actual development approved,” Iber Amenti said. “In some communities it’s easier or faster than other communities. The longer the process is and more difficult it is, the more expensive it is to put it in the ground.”
Chapman said community need is the first criteria the Housing Partnership considers when examining a potential development, followed by cost.
“We also scrutinize the local zoning requirements to determine the likelihood for success in meeting the local nuances of the ordinance,” he said.
In turn, Parker and von Aulock said they have focused on easing restraints in their communities’ zoning and ordinances. Exeter offers developers density bonuses for workforce housing projects.* These allow developers to build more units than would otherwise be allowed, which helps ease those tight margins.
“It’s not the responsibility of just one or two towns to provide all the workforce housing for all of the Seacoast.” — Ashlee Iber Amenti of the Seacoast Workforce Housing Coalition
In addition, Dover loosened its restrictions on the location of manufactured housing.
“We have said, if the market supports it and the land values support it, we are not going to limit it from other single-family districts,” Parker said.
In 2009, Dover overhauled its downtown zoning to adopt “form-based code,” which, among other things, encourages the placement of residential units above street-level commercial or retail businesses in the downtown core. This housing often app