Standing from left: Tracy Hutchins, president, Upper Valley Business Alliance; Shaun Mulholland, Lebanon City Manager; Amanda Charland, general manager, Hanover Food Coop Stores & Auto Service Centers; and Aimee Claiborne, chief HR officer, Dartmouth Health. Seated from left: Alfred Williams, president, River Valley Community College; Jodi Hoyt, HR director, Kendal at Hanover; Clay Adams, president, Mascoma Bank; and Michael Redmond, executive director, Upper Valley Haven (Photography by Christine Carignan)
In January, leaders from the Upper Valley and from a range of industries sat down for Business NH Magazine’s fifth regional roundtable at Mascoma Bank in West Lebanon to talk about the big issues facing the region: the high costs of housing and childcare, and the connections these issues have to retaining and recruiting the region’s workforce.
The Upper Valley, a bi-state region of 69 towns and cities nestled along the Connecticut River bordering NH and Vermont, is known as an innovation hub as it is home to Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, large manufacturers and many tech firms. But that veneer of prosperity covers a complex web of economic and social challenges.
In 2023, the median household income of the 92,848 households in the Upper Valley, which includes parts of Grafton and Sullivan Counties, was $78,347, according to the Upper Valley Business Alliance, the region’s chamber of commerce. There is a wide disparity between those with high paying jobs in healthcare and tech, and those in retail where wages fall short of a living wage for the region.
Median home prices in Lebanon last December were $394,500, according to the website realtor.com, and average rent on the NH side of the Upper Valley, specifically around Lebanon, is around $2,250 per month for all property types, according to Dartmouth College’s Real Estate Office. This creates cost burdens for retail employees whose wages range from $15 to $20 an hour, says Michael Redmond, executive director of Upper Valley Haven, which operates shelters and provides other housing services in the region.
Despite the challenges, the Upper Valley has a vibrant network of municipalities and organizations working to create a more sustainable future. Upper Valley Haven and Vital Communities, a nonprofit seeking equitable solutions to the region’s challenges, are among those seeking to address affordable housing, food insecurity, and access to healthcare. Organizations like the Twin Pines Housing Trust are working to increase the availability of affordable housing options and Dartmouth Health, along with the city of Lebanon, is addressing childcare with the creation of a new facility that will offer services for 200 children.
Three Big Challenges
The three biggest challenges facing the region mirror those facing the state overall: a lack of affordable housing, a lack of childcare and a workforce shortage.
Clay Adams, president of Mascoma Bank, started the discussion by citing a recent Community Needs Assessment performed by the bank which surveyed 1,200 customers and employees. “By a two to one margin, housing was the number one problem that everyone talked about,” he says, adding childcare was second. “This wasn’t just a group of retired people, but people just starting out.”
The Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Council reported that since 2020, 230 units of housing were built, but Adams says 10,000 units are needed by 2030. “We’re very underhoused here at every possible point on the spectrum,” he says. “I think we’ve made good progress on apartment buildings, but employers have employees who want to buy a place and there’s nothing.”
Tracy Hutchins, president of the Upper Valley Business Alliance, says the housing shortage is hitting every level of business. “We’re hearing about the shortage of homes from the largest employers and the smallest employers as well,” she says. “Last fall it was very hard for restaurants to hire a chef and there’s only so many executive chefs around. It’s hitting
every level.”
Finding affordable childcare is also a huge challenge for many people, Hutchins says. “We have another childcare center that is struggling right now and that may be another 48 slots for childcare that could potentially go away,” she adds. “We’re a very spread-out region so when someone has to drive an hour to drop their child off before they go to work, and maybe it’s in the opposite direction of their workplace, that’s when you start seeing people leave the workforce.”
Amanda Charland, general manager of Hanover Co-op Food Stores & Auto Service Centers, says in addition to those challenges, increased mental health needs and a lack of access to mental health services is also a big workforce issue.
Charland explains that because wages are lower in the retail food industry, childcare costs hit their employees especially hard. Also, she adds, “Our employees don’t work traditional 9 to 5 schedules. Our earliest employees get in at 3 a.m. and the latest employees leave around 10 p.m.”
“The cost of living is really hitting those on our lower wage spectrum because their rents are going up $50 to $150 and their incomes just are not rising at that same level,” Charland says.
Partnering on Challenges
Vital Communities is working with the White River Valley Consortium, funded by a Working Communities Challenge grant, to help 14 towns in the White River Valley increase the availability of affordable housing for early-career young adults and beginning entrepreneurs. “It’s all about partnership,” Hutchins says. “The Upper Valley Business Alliance is not going to solve these problems alone. Vital Communities is not going to solve them alone. It’s going to take a regional approach.”
Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland cites a partnership between the city, the Business Alliance, and a Colorado-based nonprofit called Executives Partnering to Invest in Children (EPIC) to address childcare shortages. “They will be working directly with businesses to help them determine what their childcare needs are and what some of the solutions are.”
“Lebanon will not own its own childcare center, but the city can help facilitate future projects through partnerships,” Mulholland continues. One of those projects is a $22 million child-care facility to be built near the Lebanon Municipal Airport. That center would serve 200 infants, toddlers and preschoolers, and would be staffed by the Boys and Girls Club of Central and Northern NH.
As for the lack of affordable housing, “there’s a lot of regulatory pieces that we can help with as well” he says, citing the Barrows Street Development, an affordable housing project that is awaiting approval by the Lebanon planning Board. That development consists of five, one-story, detached residential units surrounding a central courtyard, each with approximately 930 square feet of gross living area, and will be available for employees of the City, the Lebanon School District, and the Lebanon Housing Authority.
Dartmouth Health Focused on Housing and Training
Dartmouth Health is the region’s largest employer (and the system is among the largest employers in the state) with 13,000 employees throughout its network of nine community hospitals and clinics. Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center generated revenue of $3.61 billion in FY 2024.
Amy Claiborne, director of human resources at Dartmouth Health, says the shortage of affordable homes in the area has prompted the organization to take a lead on housing. “We worked with Vital Communities and others to look at the workforce shortage issues we were having and I never thought I’d be saying this out loud, but it’s true, we have 180 master leased apartments for direct patient care employees that are subsidized so employees will have a place to live.”
Dartmouth’s workforce housing is located at four different apartment developments in Lebanon and in White River Junction, Vermont. “But to Clay’s [Adams] point, they are in a new apartment for a couple of years, and they want to move out, but there’s an inventory issue,” Claiborne says. “We’re looking at what that next step is to keep people here
longer term.”
Dartmouth Health has also established a concierge service and fostered relationships with local landlords and others to find spaces for people to live. “So far, Dartmouth Health has helped place almost 2,800 people into housing in our region in the past two years,” Claiborne says.
Dartmouth has also created an apprentice program with state certification, which increased retention and decreased attrition at Dartmouth Health, especially for nurses, Claiborne says. Across the state, roughly 20% of nurses leave their jobs at hospitals each year but Dartmouth Health has a 12% turnover rate, she adds. “This is almost unheard of,” Claiborne says.
“The alternative is to bring people in from out of state, which is costly.”
To develop affordable housing throughout the community, Dartmouth Health also contributes to the Upper Valley Community Loan Fund, run by Evernorth, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing and community investments in Maine, NH, and Vermont. Employers in the region have contributed over $9 million to the fund in recent years, which provides loans to first-time home buyers with low or moderate incomes and helps to finance the development of affordable rental housing.
“When thinking about this we focused on the group of people making $15 to $25 an hour,” Adams says, adding one project has been completed, and others are in the planning stages in Windsor and New London.
Meeting Childcare Needs
Jodi Hoyt, director of human resources at Kendal at Hanover, a retirement and assisted living facility that employs Licensed Nurse Assistants (LNA’s) and Registered Nurses (RN’s), says the cost of childcare is the most pressing need. Most of Kendal’s employees are women, Hoyt says. Kendall has an on-site childcare center that serves 30 to 32 children. “Originally it was community based and today it’s more employee based,” she says, adding that the childcare center has allowed Kendal to rely less on traveling nurses who are more expensive.
Dartmouth Health is partnering with the Upper Valley’s Early Care and Education Association to develop the childcare workforce and reengage and re-credential childcare professionals. “We’re helping get them through a training program, and for this area, we’ll have 200 plus more childcare slots when the workers come on board and they start invigorating the centers again,” Claiborne says.
Economically Disadvantaged, Seniors Hit Hardest
Redmond, executive director at Upper Valley Haven, often reminds people there are 68 towns in the Upper Valley that extend beyond Hanover and Lebanon. “By and large those are small towns that have lost a lot over the years, and housing is a problem for our aging population,” he says.
Grafton County, where Hanover and Lebanon are located, has the second highest rents in the state, behind Rockingham County. The average cost for a two-bedroom apartment is over $2,000. “Soon it might be the highest renting market in the in the state,” Redmond says. “Yet, here we are with a diverse population of low- to moderate-income people and struggling seniors as well.”
Upper Valley Haven serves about 100 families at its community food market, the second largest in Vermont, and operates homeless shelters in Vermont and NH. “The ultimate market failure is if people have no place to live at all. We need livable rental wages and that’s $24 to $26 an hour,” he says.
The lack of living wages and affordable housing has led to an increase in the unhoused, Redmond says. “We’re seeing increasing numbers, particularly with the withdrawal of some COVID era aid,” he says.
Redmond says the lack of affordable housing in Vermont and NH happened due to under-building for 30 years in many towns. “A lot of these places have had zoning restrictions against multifamily development and poor infrastructure,” he says, adding that Vermont’s centralized support system for housing makes construction of homes easier than in NH where zoning and funding decisions are made primarily by cities and towns.
Redmond says partnerships are crucial to build housing in the Upper Valley. Haven’s low-income housing partner Twin Pines opened 100 units in Hartford, Vermont, with the help of COVID funding and other private sources. “Thirty of those units were targeted to people that are unhoused and living in motels, in our shelters, living in cars and camping,” he says.
Community College Helps Students Earn More
River Valley Community College in Claremont is addressing workforce challenges and raising students’ economic status by placing them in high paying jobs, says President Alfred Williams. The college is ranked first in the state for moving students from the lowest fifth to three fifths of the income bracket, he adds. “This relates to the conversation about income disparities Michael [Redmond] addressed,” Williams says. “We’re taking people that may be on the lower end and getting them educated so they can go into higher paying jobs at Dartmouth [Health] and other places.”
The average age of students at River Valley Community College is 29 and 70% of students are women, Williams says. “Many of them are dealing with childcare and every time we lose a student, that’s a job that goes unfilled,” he says.
The college is helping to meet nursing demands and created a Licensed Practical Nursing (LPN) program four years ago, doubling the nurses it graduates between its RN and LPN programs. “The big challenge is getting people to come to school at 18 rather than waiting,” Williams says. “We’ve been running boot camps in the summer for 7th and 8th graders free of cost to get people acclimated to a college setting.”
Moving Forward
In a sea of challenges there are solutions being put forward. Mulholland says pattern zoning, which includes the construction of smaller structures in downtown areas, is one way to address the shortage of affordable homes. Lebanon has a pilot project for these types of homes funded through a state grant that is part of the Housing Champions Bill.
Creating more affordable homes can also cut down on the time people spend commuting, Mulholland says. Seventy percent of Lebanon’s municipal workforce are coming into the city, he adds. “When they’re in their cars, they’re less involved in their local communities and that erodes the social fabric of wherever those people live,” he says.
Adams says partnerships in the region will continue to chip away at the housing shortage. “We all know each other and some of the conversations happening give me hope of getting at some of things like childcare, housing, whatever the issue is.”
Redmond says after looking at recent surveys he’s hopeful more people are supportive of affordable housing but wonders if public sentiment is ahead of political will. “The new governor mentions affordable housing all the time, but I haven’t seen anything that really strikes me, as you know, ‘We’re going to make this happen.’ We’ll work around the edges of some things, but you know, who’s ready to break something?”
