Standing, from left: Annette Cole, manager of workforce development, White Mountains Community College; Margaret Callahan, recruitment sourcing manager, OMNI Mount Washington; Harrison Kanzler, executive director, AHEAD Inc.; Jim Miller, manager, Santa’s Village; Edward Duffy, chief medical officer, Littleton Regional Health Care. Seated, from left: Ericka Canales, executive director, Coös Economic Development Corporation; Sarmad Saman, president, White Mountains Community College; Tony Ilacqua, retail banking regional manager, Bank of NH; Paula Kinney, executive coordinator, Androscoggin Valley Chamber of Commerce; Jeanne Robillard, CEO,Tri-County Community Action Program (Photo by Christine Carignan)
Heading north through Franconia Notch can feel like passing through a tunnel into another world. Even the weather can be vastly different on the northern side of the notch. A whiteout starting in Lincoln slowing traffic to a crawl on I-93 often reveals a clear sky and the expansive mountains and valleys on the other side.
The North Country is about one-third of the state geographically but is home to only 2% of the state’s population. Winding roads cut through a rugged wilderness containing small towns, ski resorts, mountains, and even grand hotels. It includes Coös County as well as portions of northern Grafton and Carroll Counties. The population of Coös County, which makes up the majority of the North Country, was 31,372 in 2023. The median household income in Coös County is $55,247, just over half the state average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
More so than other regions in the state, the North Country’s efforts to grow its economy while meeting people’s needs is an ongoing challenge. Roundtable participants voiced concerns about a lack of housing and a dearth of skilled workers as well as a host of community challenges like transportation and the need for job training. In the North Country, these challenges are often exacerbated by the area’s geographic isolation and demographic realities that include some of the state’s highest poverty rates and highest median age. According to the Carsey School of Public Policy, roughly all of Coös and half of Grafton County have the highest shares of low-income residents in the state.
Geography is challenging in a rural area. Food and child care deserts are more prevalent in the North Country along with a lack of amenities like rideshare services and reliable internet, which is taken for granted in more urban southern regions. And for people in many small towns, a drive to the grocery store, the daycare, or the hospital, often requires thoughtful planning and consideration of road conditions, especially in winter months.
For those living and working in the North Country, confronting challenges is a way of life, says Jeanne Robillard, CEO of the Tri-County Community Action Program (Tri-County CAP), a human services agency helping over 25,000 people annually with housing, food, utilities and other needed services. “We get the same amount of dollars that someone downstate is getting and that makes it very, very difficult to sustain our programing,” she says. “But we endure more in the North Country. That’s what we do.”
Housing and Workforce Challenges
Finding employees is the biggest challenge in the region, says Paula Kinney, executive director for the Androscoggin Valley Chamber of Commerce, which represents the towns of Gorham, Randolph, Shelburne, Milan and Berlin. “Those who do want to move here for work can’t find housing,” she says. “I just got a call from a gentleman the other day trying to move here to work in Gorham and he cannot find an affordable apartment to live in. He couldn’t believe we don’t have an Uber. I guess we’re just, I don’t know. I don’t like to say we’re behind the times, but to some people, they’re a little shocked at how different it is up here.”
The community is trying to help. White Mountains Community College (WMCC) in Berlin is training people to fill positions in industries like healthcare, says Sarmad Saman, the college’s president. “[But] we also need people to do the training.”
A big part of the problem is a lack of housing, Saman says. WMCC had teacher openings in its prison and marketing programs, but the college hadn’t received any applications as of last November. “People who specialize in these positions wouldn’t move up here because of the lack of housing,” he says. “We need to graduate students who can help the community and the economy of the city, whether it’s in nursing, welding or whatever. But we need people who will teach them. It’s a vicious cycle.”
The need for qualified staff and faculty at WMCC was apparent at an open house on Nov. 15 that Saman says many students from high schools throughout the region attended. “Before the pandemic we’d have around 200 students and today we had 250,” he says, adding the college recently received a federal grant of $4.4 million to update and expand its science and nursing facilities. “This high number of students interested in the college’s programs is a great sign that our levels of enrollment are coming back. But we need faculty to teach them.”
Saman says seasonal housing available in the past is often out of reach for students and teachers because of the high demand during the tourist season, which sees many properties being rented through web platforms like Airbnb. “There are a lot of seasonal rentals that charge $500 a night,” Saman says. “They compete with everything else, and they put their prices up. That’s a problem for us.”
The lack of services like rideshares and reliable internet also affects the college’s ability to fill open positions, Saman says. “We need some work done on the infrastructure to really expand that,” he says. “And to make housing more affordable so we can attract talent in this area.”
At Santa’s Village, which employs around 65% to 70% of its staff seasonally, Manager Jim Miller says housing constraints limit the pool of available workers. “We’re a seasonal business and [we] find seasonal workers, but it’s finding that extra 30% or 35% each year that can be a challenge,” he says, adding that while the need for workers is met most of the time, a smaller labor pool slows the potential for growth.
Santa’s Village, which has around 400 people on its payroll during the summer, employs about 26 international J-1 Visa students over the course of the season. The company has purchased two large houses with multiple bedrooms to house them. Miller says getting into the real estate business as a landlord is, “not something at the top of the list of things the company wants to do, but considering the need for growth it may continue.”
Robillard says the COVID pandemic has reduced housing availability in the region. “COVID really did a number on our housing stock because folks wanted to get out of the city,” she says. “And like Sarmad, we can’t find staff either. The people that we’re trying to assist to find housing, we often can’t find it. It’s a very, very difficult place to be in all the way around.”
Tri-County CAP serves around one in six people who live in Carroll, Coös, and Grafton Counties, Robillard says. Those services include food distribution through food pantries, medical transportation, Head Start, and housing stabilization. “We’re feeling we don’t have the capacity and we don’t have the dollars to fix some of the problems,” Robillard says. “It’s going to take everybody coming to the table. With housing, having stock is key. You know I can put some money into a shelter and keep people there for two years, but often there’s nowhere for them to go afterwards.”
Another challenge linked to housing and workforce is the North Country’s aging population. As of 2023, those aged 65 and older comprised about 20.8% of the population in NH. In Coös County, those aged 65 and older made up 25.8% of the county’s population in 2022, according to USA Facts. In fact, the 65+ age group was the fastest growing age group between 2010 and 2022, increasing 26.7%. Conversely, the 35 to 49 age group declined by 22.3%. That is a problem for a county that experienced the lowest overall population increase in the state between 2020 and 2023 at approximately 0.4%, according to NH Fiscal Policy Institute. Robillard says the lack of affordable housing is a challenge for young people wanting to stay in or move back to the region. “What’s hard is that, again, there’s nowhere for them to be,” she says.
The Housing Crisis Extends to Healthcare
Edward Duffy, chief medical officer at Littleton Regional Health Care, a critical access hospital that depends on Medicaid to pay for some of its services like labor and delivery, echoes Saman’s concerns about housing. Housing is needed, he says, to meet the hospital’s large workforce demands ranging from neurosurgeons to emergency department staff. “We’re able to attract people at all levels, but we can’t put them anywhere,” he says. “It’s a little bit easier if you’re in the higher income brackets, but I will tell you right now, the town of Franconia only has about five homes available that are the kind of homes my physicians would want to buy.”
For people in lower income ranges finding a home can be next to impossible, Duffy says. “If you’re coming in and you’re making about $80,000 and your spouse is probably working, you’re looking at a $400,000 to $500,000 home,” he says. “Forget it.”
According to the “2023 New Hampshire Statewide Housing Needs Assessment,” housing in the Granite State currently falls short of needs by an estimated 23,500 housing units. By 2040, NH will need nearly 90,000 units to meet the state’s housing demand.
The median sale price for a single-family house in the Granite State reached a record $515,000 in April 2024, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, an increase of over 11% from 2023. In Coos County home prices increased 103.5% between 2018 and 2023 and in Grafton County, where Littleton Regional Hospital is located, median single-family home prices increased 76.5% during that same period.
In the rental market, more than half of NH citizens are cost burdened, defined as paying 30% or more on rent and utilities. The statewide median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in NH in 2024 was $1,833, up from $1,764 in 2023, and the vacancy rate was 0.6%, well below a balanced market for tenants and landlords. From 2019 to 2024, the median price of a two-bedroom unit increased by about 67% in Grafton County, the largest percentage increase across all counties according to NH Fiscal Policy Institute.
Duffy says people accepted offers at the hospital and then declined after failing to find housing. Sustaining services, he adds, comes down to workforce. “We have $275 million a year in gross patient revenue and sustainability is still an issue,” he says, adding that the hospital employs over 600 employees.
Healthcare is the biggest industry in the state and the 13 critical access hospitals had a net operating margin of 0.4%, Duffy says. “Fortunately, some of the hospitals— not all— have a very strong or reasonably strong balance sheet so they can sustain some losses for a while,” he says. “But many can’t.”
Duffy cites the challenge of maintaining services like labor and delivery units in the face of workforce constraints. Nine NH hospitals cut labor and delivery units since 2016, but Duffy maintains Littleton Regional Health Care will not be cutting its obstetrics department, or others. “We’ve adopted a philosophy that we’re not going to close anything,” he says. “It’s as simple as that and it’s not an executive philosophy. It’s our trustees and our community.”
Building Homes Is Slow Work
While workforce housing is a problem, Harrison Kanzler, executive director for AHEAD (Affordable Housing Education and Development), says there is a general housing shortage. “Most of the housing that is being produced is single family on a luxury scale,” he says. “So, it’s not intended to be a home. It’s intended to be a commodity and that is what starts to impact regions like ours.”
Kanzler cites infrastructure, particularly municipal water and sewer, as a massive problem contributing to the lack of housing development. “As a result of not having those services in many communities you start to see larger parcels of land sold off for one house,” he says. “I’ve got 10 acres, but I can’t put 20 homes on it because I don’t have water and sewer. But I could put one really nice house on it, sell that, and get my money and move on.”
Margaret Callahan, recruitment manager for the OMNI Mount Washington and Bretton Woods Ski Area, agrees the biggest problem is a lack of housing across the board. “It doesn’t matter if you’re making $15 an hour, or if you’re making $200,000 a year. It doesn’t matter when you can’t find any housing,” she says. “Finding employees and attracting them to this area, to entice them with their favorite outdoor activities, that’s a big draw. But even if they’re really passionate about the outdoors, attracting a lot of people here is hard.”
Kanzler says the hardest pill to swallow for the region is that building housing is slow work. “A typical development from inception to finding tenants is three to five years,” he says. “On top of that is we don’t have access to large scale construction groups. We typically have people drive up from the Manchester or Concord area to do the work. We’re now paying not only their wages, but for them to come up here.”
Kanzler says these constraints, along with infrastructure improvement costs, can make it difficult. “If we’re estimating a project for 10 houses to be built at $5 million, we need to subsidize at least 50% of that to be able to sell them affordably,” he says. “Where do we get that other $2.5 million? Do we sell four homes on the open market and take the money we get from sales as downpayments on other homes to sell affordably? We’re looking at models
like that.”
A Rural Lens
The North Country’s challenges must be seen through a rural lens, says Ericka Canales, executive director for the Coös Economic Development Corporation. This involves ensuring funding mechanisms created in Concord are applicable to the region. “Harrison [of AHEAD] has been so helpful in really educating me on the whole housing component,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I have an unofficial PhD, especially after he educated me on the New Hampshire housing process and Low-Income Tax Credit funding.”
Tax credit funding, which has been promoted by Gov.-elect Kelly Ayotte and other NH housing advocates as one solution for enticing developers to build affordable housing, usually applies to 20 units or more, Kanzler says. “It doesn’t work for those developments with four units that we want to build,” he adds.
Canales says more money is needed to make housing work in the North Country. “Things can’t just be passed in Concord and then expect us to figure out how to make them work,” she says, citing the InvestNH program, which made $100 million available to create affordable housing. “This was a huge step forward,” she says, but the requirements created by legislators to access the funding are difficult to overcome in rural communities.
Providing important services for the North Country is also more expensive than it is in other parts of the state, Robillard says. “We can’t just give someone a bus pass because there’s no bus line that goes to where they live. There’s transportation and we run it, but it doesn’t look the same as it does down south,” she says. “It’s not like in Manchester where you can walk out your door and grab a bus and go over to the hospital for your medical appointment or go to Health and Human services and get your paperwork done.”
One way Tri-County CAP is addressing transportation is through a bicycle repair program. “This has been a great solution, especially in places like Conway where a lot of people ride a bike to work,” Robillard says. “It’s those thinking out-of-the-box things that you need to do here in a rural community.”
Lack of public transportation is not the only major challenge in the region. Tri-County CAP recently completed a community needs survey and people overwhelmingly said they need childcare, Robillard says. “There is a child care desert here. So even if you get the workforce and they find a place to live, you can’t always get them care for their kids,” she says. “As an organization that touches on the fringes of all of these issues, we’re asking ‘what is the common thread, what can we do to help make these connections and fill these gaps?’”
Businesses also play an important role in meeting the challenges of the North Country. Tony Ilacqua, retail banking regional manager for Bank of NH, says community-based banks support local communities and a variety of different organizations in the region. He paused following Robillard’s reference to the number of people in the region receiving services. “One out of six…. We all know there’s one of those folks who we know,” he says.
Ilacqua recalls driving through darkness on I-93 near Campton 20 years ago, just south of Waterville Valley. He asked the group, “What did you see to your left and right? You saw nothing and today you see lights. The big homes Harrison was talking about. The same is true on 302 from Littleton to Twin Mountain,” he says. “You can’t blame a contractor for not wanting to build a two-bedroom one-bath home when someone’s willing to give you a couple million dollars [for a bigger house]. This has all happened in 20 years. What we have to start thinking about is where we are going to be 20 years from now.”
Ilacqua, who lives in Littleton, has served on the planning board and chambers of commerce in the region. He says addressing the North Country’s challenges needs to happen quicker than it does. “We need to be more responsive to get the funding quicker,” he says. “We know the challenges of fiscal policies every two, four, or six years, and in the North Country we do have a lot of great representatives that fight for us down south. But sometimes people forget what happens above the White Mountains—above mile marker 100.”
Ilacqua says the region is fortunate to have mutual banks serving communities and partnering with businesses and organizations but adds Bank of NH suffers from its own workforce concerns. The bank has had around eight openings in its northern branches but not many qualified applicants. “Or they’re qualified but unaware of how far away we are,” he says. “One person from Rhode Island wanted a job. I said, ‘Do you realize you’re trying to apply for a job in Gorham, New Hampshire?”
Finding Hope
Saman says area high school students are motivated, noting that 25% of seniors had already filled out their financial aid applications last November. “This number is higher than any other region in the whole state,” he says.
To meet the housing needs for students, the college has formed a partnership with the Town and Country Inn in Shelburne to house its students. “They actually have a whole wing that they put the Community College students in,” Canales says, adding that the rates are affordable. “How often do you hear of a business that’s willing to do that?”
Duffy says WMCC has been instrumental in training nurses that then contribute to the local workforce. He says nursing has the most job openings at the hospital. “We’re getting them, as well as techs, from UNH and all over the state. This is a tremendous success story,” Duffy says.
Saman says he hopes to be able to expand the college’s nursing facility soon. “Instead of having 28 students, which we have in the program now, we’ll be able to expand to 40 students,” he says. “And we have other great programs, our culinary program ranked sixth in the nation.”
And while many in Southern NH think of the North Country as NH’s playground, tourism is serious business for the region. Robillard points out that many people in the North Country served by Tri-County CAP depend on the tourism economy between the summer and winter seasons. “They depend on that tourism economy to keep their families fed and the money coming in,” she says. “That’s something the lower 48, if you will, need to understand about our tourism. It’s not just about tourists. It’s about feeding people who live here.”
Kanzler says unfortunately many people from downstate who travel to the White Mountains forget that a third of the state still lies beyond the mountains. “No offense to all of you, but when we talk about access it’s not just access to housing and access to quality and affordable childcare and access to healthcare,” he says. “It’s literal physical access.”
