As the housing crisis in NH continues, it feels like you are more likely to score tickets to the Super Bowl or a Taylor Swift concert than land an affordable house or apartment. And despite an uptick in projects after legislative changes intended to fuel development, there are few signs the crisis will abate by the time the next Swift concert comes around.
Three years after NH Housing released its landmark Housing Needs Assessment, the report remains the benchmark for measuring the state’s progress. The assessment concluded that NH needs roughly 60,000 additional housing units by 2030 and nearly 90,000 by 2040. Single family homes account for most of the needed units over those time periods. By 2030 the state needs around 25,000 single family homes and 36,000 by 2040.
While the state is building more housing than it has in nearly two decades, experts agree it’s still falling short of what’s needed to close the gap.
New Hampshire Housing Executive Director Rob Dapice, when asked if he is optimistic about meeting housing goals, says progress is being made, “But ‘optimistic’ is too strong a word.” He says rising prices are pushing young workers and vulnerable residents out of the market. “We need to work harder and faster to meet the housing needs of our state.”
The lack of affordable housing, a necessity unlike a concert or a sporting event, poses a practical problem not just for buyers and renters but for businesses. New Hampshire’s quality of life keeps attracting new residents and fueling demand for homes, while historic underdevelopment and stagnant wages means there are fewer, affordable homes available.
In May, the state’s affordability index, which measures median household income against median home prices, reached a record low of 53. That means a household earning the median income of about $100,000 has only 53% of the income needed to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home at current interest rates. Meanwhile, housing developers face rising construction costs, expensive land and increasingly complex financing that stall projects or forces a funding scramble.
Compared to homeowners, renters are also likely to be burdened by cost. The median monthly rental price for a two-bedroom unit in NH, including utility costs, reached $1,833 in 2024, a 58.4% increase from $1,157 in 2015, unadjusted for inflation, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute (NHFPI) in March.
This shortage took decades to form, and there’s no quick fix. “The housing shortage we’re experiencing today was created over decades,” says Mike Skelton, president and CEO of the Business and Industry Association of NH. “It’s going to take a concerted effort over an extended period of time to bring us out of that.”
Progress, But Still Behind
After years of stagnant production, NH finally is gaining momentum. According to the NH Department of Business and Economic Affairs, the state issued building permits for more than 5,800 apartment units in 2025, the highest annual total since 2006. Permits climbed from 4,446 in 2020 to 5,822 last year, driven largely by multifamily construction and a series of legislative reforms intended to make housing easier to build.
Those numbers represent real progress, Dapice says, but they also illustrate how deep the shortage has become. “If every permit turned into a year-round home, we’d be closer to about 80% of where we need to be,” he says. “But not every permit becomes a completed home, and some are seasonal housing. It’s clearly not been enough to keep up.”
Skelton credits lawmakers for making housing a top policy priority. Recent legislative sessions have approved measures allowing more accessory dwelling units, permitting multifamily housing in certain commercial districts, encouraging smaller lot sizes and reducing parking requirements that drive up development costs. “There isn’t one singular housing change that unlocks it,” he says. “It’s literally dozens of reforms that, together, allow the market to respond to this significant demand.”
Skelton’s optimism comes with caution. “Many of these projects are on six-, 12-, 18-month or longer timelines. This is not an area where there’s a silver bullet that starts to work overnight.”
These reforms also have yet to solve to the affordability problem, which keeps getting worse. In May, the median sales price for a single-family home in NH reached a record $576,000. That median sale price has increased by more than 78% since 2019 and nearly 291% since 1999, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute.
While prices have increased throughout the last two decades, most incomes have not kept up with high housing costs. From 1999 to 2024, the statewide median household income in NH increased by 30%, less than a third of the 101% increase in the median cost of a single-family house, after accounting for inflation, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute.
At the same time, sales volume has fallen sharply over time: roughly 12,500 single-family homes sold statewide in 2025, down from 18,449 in 2020. Through the first six months of 2026, closed sales are up 3.8% compared to the same period in 2025.
“For those looking to keep the dream of homeownership alive in New Hampshire, it’s just becoming out of reach for too many,” says Bob Quinn, CEO of NH REALTORS.
The affordability index tells the same story. “If you’re looking at a $576,000 home, even putting down 10%, for households earning the area median income, they would need to earn roughly $170,000 to comfortably afford that home,” Quinn says.
And mortgage rates aren’t the fundamental problem, Quinn argues. Inventory is. Lower rates, he explains, could worsen affordability short-term by pulling more buyers into an already-starved market. “Increasing purchasing power without increasing the housing supply simply increases competition. Instead of six offers on a home, a seller may receive eight or nine as more buyers are brought into the market,” he says.
Homes now sell almost as fast as they appear. The statewide median time on market has fallen to a week or two, down from roughly a month a decade ago. “If a home stays on the market for more than a week, Realtors start wondering what’s wrong with it,” Quinn says. The shortage is self-perpetuating, Quinn adds, as homeowners with low mortgage rates are reluctant to sell, reducing inventory further and pushing prices higher.
Ammonoosuc Green in downtown Littleton is a family property with 17 units that provides rent assistance through the USDA. (Photo Courtesy of AHEAD)
The Building Challenge
Much of NH’s recent housing production has been apartments. While advocates welcome the increase in rental construction, several experts worry the conversation has shifted almost entirely away from homeownership.
“People talk about needing 80,000 or 90,000 housing units,” says Harrison Kanzler, executive director of AHEAD (Affordable Housing, Education and Development), referring to the 2023 Housing Needs Assessment. “But, of those, roughly 65,000 are supposed to be single-family homes. The entirety of the conversation revolves around apartments, but the goal is largely based on homeownership.”
Apartments address part of the shortage, Kanzler says, but families need opportunities to build equity and put down roots. “If we’re not matching production on the homeownership front, we’re just shifting the employment issue from one demographic to another,” he says. “We need to be talking more about single-family homes.”
That can be increasingly difficult as construction and infrastructure costs remain high for single-family lots, and financing smaller multi-family developments is a challenge in rural communities without public water and sewer systems. “A multifamily property on a well raises a lot of issues,” Kanzler says. “Source water, fire suppression, maintenance, those costs add up quickly.”
Instead of relying solely on larger developments, AHEAD has begun pursuing smaller projects and recently launched the NH Rural Community Land Trust, aimed at creating permanent affordable homeownership. Nonprofit developers lower purchase prices by retaining ownership of the land while homeowners buy the house. This model differs from the collective ownership of land and common areas involved with condos. “It’s a stepping-stone product,” Kanzler says. “If you’re renting for 10 years, you leave with nothing. Here you’re building equity while helping preserve affordability for the next family.”
Even as lawmakers loosen zoning and encourage higher-density development, affordable housing developers say turning those reforms into completed homes remains difficult and expensive.
“We just didn’t build enough of anything for 25 years,” says Robert Tourigny, CEO of NeighborWorks Southern NH. “In the spirit of growth management and restrictive land-use ordinances, we simply fell behind.”
NeighborWorks has spent more than three decades addressing that shortfall, helping thousands of residents become first-time homebuyers, and it also owns more than 550 affordable rental units. It is undertaking its largest project ever—a 126-unit apartment development in downtown Manchester that will also include 12 townhomes for first-time buyers—made possible by the city providing surplus land and preserving adjacent parking. This will allow NeighborWorks to focus resources on housing rather than costly site work, Tourigny says.
“It’s a big jump for us, but it’s necessary,” he explains. “The state has set ambitious housing goals, but our ability to meet them will be stretched, to say the least.”
Even under those favorable conditions, building starter homes is extraordinarily difficult. “Even with cheap land, infrastructure and density, it’s difficult to make the numbers work,” Tourigny says. “It doesn’t take long before construction and associated costs push the price of a home well over half a million dollars.”
Apartments at Pearl and Orange in Manchester, which will offer one-, two-, and three-bedroom affordable apartments, and is slated to be completed in December 2027. (Photo of Cross Photography)
This is why apartment construction has accelerated while starter housing has shrunk. “There are a lot of apartments going up,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of single-family homes, and the system works hand in hand. We need a pipeline of housing for families at every stage.”
Carmen Lorentz, executive director of Lakes Region Community Developers, sees the same dynamic stretching her own timelines. “What used to be an 18- to 24-month development cycle now takes years,” she says.
Her organization recently completed a historic preservation project in Belmont housing an early learning center, and she expects tenants to move into a new 30-unit affordable apartment building in Wolfeboro this year. That project, however, started as roughly 20 starter homes priced around $250,000. Rising site, environmental and construction costs eventually pushed projected prices to about $450,000. “We simply couldn’t make the prices work,” Lorentz says. “So, we pivoted to rental housing.”
Local opposition compounds the problem. Lorentz cites a proposed 76-unit development in Ashland that was under review for 15 months before being denied despite zoning compliance. Lakes Region Community Developers appealed, and a judge ruled, “The town acted in bad faith or with gross negligence in its process of reviewing and denying the applications,” ordering it to pay the nonprofit’s legal fees.
Lorentz traces battles like that one to NH’s heavy reliance on local property taxes to fund schools, which makes residents wary of multifamily housing. “It would be disingenuous to say there would be no impact” from adding multifamily units, she says. “But there’s a difference between adding students gradually over many years and needing to build a new school.” Until the state addresses education funding, she adds, “these things will keep happening.”
Lorentz also points to another gap: housing for households earning less than 30% of area median income, including many seniors, people with disabilities and residents on fixed incomes. The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program has financed much of the state’s affordable apartment construction, she says.
However, “it doesn’t hit all the income levels of housing we need.” Without additional state investment in rental assistance, supportive housing and capital subsidies, she worries that homelessness will keep rising even as overall production improves.
Housing as an Economic Issue
The shortage of affordable housing effects more than real estate. For employers, housing is a challenge to economic competitiveness. “The quickest way to deepen the roots of a young person in New Hampshire is to help them find a stable home to put down roots in,” Skelton says. “This is really a core ingredient to workforce development.”
Businesses increasingly report difficulty recruiting workers when job applicants discover they can’t afford to buy or even rent here, a problem especially acute as NH tries to retain its own college graduates while attracting talent from elsewhere.
“Higher education is one of the largest importers of young talent into New Hampshire,” Skelton says. “It’s a critical resource for the business community.” But without housing, he warns, those graduates may simply leave.
“Nationally, housing prices have increased by more than 50% over the last five years,” Skelton continues. “In New Hampshire they’ve gone up about 70%. That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.” He points to residents relocating to neighboring Maine for cheaper housing while keeping jobs and family ties in NH.
Despite the challenges, housing leaders expressed cautious optimism about the state’s direction. For Quinn, the immediate fix remains straightforward. “Until we start to see more inventory, we’re not going to see stabilization in pricing,” he says.
