Jason Sorens, pro-housing advocate and researcher at the American Institute for Economic Research, speaks to the Housing We Need conference at St. Anselm about New Hampshire zoning changes, Dec. 12, 2025. (Photo by Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin)
For years, the housing shortage has dominated New Hampshire residents’ concerns, rising to the top in poll after poll. On Wednesday, the Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen decided to respond.
The body approved a sweeping overhaul of the city’s zoning code, completing a yearslong effort to encourage more housing.
The new ordinances, which take effect in March, are intended to assist in the creation of “missing middle” housing — development that uses existing buildings to increase density. And they come after a 2024 University of New Hampshire survey sent to every Manchester household found general support: A majority of respondents said housing is too expensive and scarce in the city, and a majority said they would favor duplexes and townhouses over large developments.
Mayor Jay Ruais lauded the changes, calling them the “most important steps we can take to secure Manchester’s future.”
But while interest in housing remains high, Manchester’s action appears relatively rare. Only a handful of New Hampshire cities and towns made meaningful, pro-housing changes to their zoning codes in the past year, researchers at St. Anselm College have found.
Municipalities collectively made 59 “liberalizing” changes to their zoning codes from June 1, 2024, to May 31, 2025, according to a tally presented by St. Anselm’s Initiative for Housing Policy and Practice this month. Fifteen of those changes were “significant,” the researchers found. The numbers came from an analysis of the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, an effort by St. Anselm to catalog zoning codes across the state and display which areas have the most and least restrictive regulations around housing development.
The changes that did happen in the last year were mostly pro-housing. The 59 liberalizing changes outnumbered the 13 “restrictive” changes to zoning made in the past year, the researchers noted.
But the tally exposed a bigger reality: Even as housing prices remain high and shortages persist, most New Hampshire cities and towns have avoided taking actions that could address that shortage by allowing more building in their own borders, housing advocates say.
“The number of liberalizing changes was similar to what we’ve seen in prior years. The number of restrictive changes was significantly lower,” said Jason Sorens, a researcher at the American Institute for Economic Research, addressing attendees of St. Anselm’s Housing We Need conference on Dec. 12.
“However, of those restrictive changes, a high proportion of them were significant restrictive changes,” he said.
Zoning hurdles remain
For those municipalities interested in change, many have looked to accessory dwelling units — the small apartments often built by dividing or renovating existing housing into multiple units. After New Hampshire passed a law in 2016 to require municipalities to allow ADUs, many of them passed restrictive zoning to slow down ADU construction, such as minimum parking requirements that were hard to meet.
Now, some are reconsidering. Fourteen of the 59 pro-housing zoning changes in the last year related to ADU construction, according to Sorens.
Still, Sorens says New Hampshire housing development continues to be constrained by zoning barriers — including for ADUs.
ADUs are technically allowed by right across the state, but about 50% of the land requires at least two parking spaces, the St. Anselm research reveals.
Other types of housing are also constrained. Multi-family developments of five units or more are allowed on only 46.5% of the state’s buildable land, and the vast majority require public hearings for approval, the data shows.
And housing advocates say many zoning ordinances discourage starter homes because they bar housing on small lots. Just 13% of the state’s buildable land is zoned to allow houses built on less than 1 acre of land and with less than 200 feet of frontage on the street, according to the Initiative for Housing Policy and Practice. It also found that of the total land where manufactured homes may be built, just 40% is likely to be affordable. The rest requires such large minimum lot sizes per manufactured home that it is likely cost prohibitive.
“It’s really still a minority of the land area where there are good opportunities for using manufactured housing as an affordable housing typology,” Sorens said.
Speaking to the Housing We Need conference, Mike Kingsella, the CEO of Up for Growth, a national housing advocacy organization, said New Hampshire is far behind other states when it comes to positive zoning.
The state is 25,000 housing units short of what is needed for a healthy market, a gap equivalent to 4% of the state’s overall housing units, Kingsella said, which he said is one the highest under-production rates in the country.
Speakers at the conference highlighted some communities that have made meaningful strides. Antrim passed a zoning code that creates “connected villages” — compact, walkable neighborhoods that allow up to 12 homes in close proximity, each around 900 square feet, noted Noah Hodgetts, the principal planner of municipal and regional assistance at the Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
Lebanon is in the process of developing “pattern zoning,” an approach that ties zoning districts to pre-approved housing design to allow easy construction that follows a similar aesthetic. And Newmarket has rolled out “form-based” zoning, in which new buildings are approved based on their physical characteristics rather than their use. In theory, that allows housing to be built alongside businesses and other entities.
“It really focuses on regulating the character and physical form of different building types, rather than just the use,” Hodgetts said.
Legislation still rolling out
As cities and towns inch toward change, state lawmakers have taken more forceful measures. Legislators passed a slate of laws this year that would prohibit municipalities from implementing certain zoning ordinances that restrict housing, an effort championed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
The state now has laws limiting the number of parking spaces municipalities can require for new housing developments; expanding the number of accessory dwelling units that may be built by right; and requiring municipalities to allow housing in most commercial zones.
But some of those changes won’t take effect for months, and even when they do, housing advocates say it will take time for development to increase in response.
Meanwhile, some lawmakers have argued the zoning overhaul laws passed this year have gone too far and have trampled on local control. Pro-housing advocates say they are preparing for that backlash, and a slew of bills to roll back the new zoning laws.
One form of legislative action supporters of housing are less confident in is state investment toward affordable housing and programs to incentivize local zoning changes. Some of those programs were capped or cut in the 2025 budget process, and will likely not get support in 2026, noted Jack Ruderman, the energy and legislative affairs adviser at New Hampshire Housing.
“Hope is not a strategy, but I do hope that we will be surprised and there will be some funding for some housing programs,” Ruderman said.
To Kingsella the lack of sufficient development in New Hampshire is due not to bad intentions, but to a system in which decisions are scattered among local communities and the incentives for more housing are not aligned.
Up for Growth has championed a federal bill this year, the ROAD to Housing Act, that would offer federal funds such as Community Development Block Grants to incentivize local housing production and zoning reform. That bipartisan bill passed the Senate Banking Committee but has since faced resistance; earlier this month, the House removed it from the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, rebuffing the Senate.
“New Hampshire scarcity is not an abstraction,” Kingsella said. “It is a predictable output of a system built without alignment or a mandate to deliver.”
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