September 17, 2026

Living in Portsmouth has become out of reach for most city employees

September 17, 2026

Cost of housing is making it harder to hire essential workers, say union officials

Editor’s note: This article is the second in Granite State News Collaborative’s “Invisible Walls: Seacoast” project, produced in collaboration with Seacoastonline.com and Fosters.com.

By Paul Cuno-Booth-Granite State News Collaborative, Seacoast Online

Twice a week, Brandon Grigori gets up before dawn at his home in Keene and drives across the state to his job as a firefighter in Portsmouth. It takes him a little under two hours on a good day. He gets to work around 7 a.m., logs a 24-hour shift and gets home exhausted the next morning, around 10.

“My first year doing it, I didn’t really mind it,” he said. He even enjoyed the drive. “But now, doing it for almost three years, it’s getting old.”

Grigori joined the Portsmouth Fire Department a few years ago, after getting out of the Navy. His wife was working in Keene at the time. They looked into moving to Portsmouth, but were shocked at the cost. Grigori said rents were comparable to his home state of California. So they’ve stayed in Keene, where housing costs are lower.

“Our original plan was, we’re going to rent for a little bit and then try to save up, get a good cushion to be able to buy,” he said. “But we realized pretty quickly that we can’t do this on the Seacoast.”

Grigori’s commute is longer than most, but his situation isn’t unique. As rents and home prices in Portsmouth have skyrocketed, it’s gotten harder and harder to live nearby on a civil servant’s salary — pushing people like police officers, firefighters and teachers farther and farther out from the city they serve. Many of Grigori’s co-workers drive 45 minutes to an hour.

Union officials say that’s making it harder to hire the essential workers that Portsmouth needs, and risks weakening the connection between the community and its public servants.

“You want your firefighters, your police officers, your teachers to be part of the community,” said Steve Morse, president of the Portsmouth firefighters union. “And I don’t think a lot of guys that I know really feel that way.”

‘More unaffordable here’

Communities across New Hampshire are grappling with a surge in housing costs, driven by a shortage of available units. But the problem is especially acute on the Seacoast, where a desirable location, growing economy and limited supply of housing have combined to make it one of the least affordable places in New Hampshire to live.

Last year in Portsmouth, the median home sold for $895,000, and someone making less than $45 an hour would have struggled to make rent on a typical apartment. Prices have shot up in Dover and other area communities, too.

Even for public servants who make decent money on paper — the starting base pay for Portsmouth firefighters is around $56,000 to $60,000, depending on their credentials — living in the city is out of reach for most, union officials say.

“We have 45 officers in our union, and six of those live in town,” Det. Charley Raizes, head of the Portsmouth Patrol Officers Union, which represents rank-and-file police officers, said late last year.

Portsmouth Police Chief Mark Newport says high housing costs and lengthening commutes are affecting the police department’s ability to recruit and retain enough officers. (File photo)

Raizes said some officers have considered leaving because the pay doesn’t keep up with the area’s high cost of living. “Real estate is high everywhere, but it’s even higher here, more unaffordable here,” Raizes said.

It’s a similar story at the fire department, where just five of 48 members in the local firefighters union live in Portsmouth, Morse said recently.

The region’s high housing costs and lengthening commutes are affecting the police department’s ability to recruit and retain enough officers, said Police Chief Mark Newport. The department used to require that officers live within a 30-mile radius, but dropped that when it became clear how far some have to go to find something affordable.

“Once people have families, they’re moving further away to find affordable housing,” he said. “With day care, those expenses, it’s really difficult to live in this area and work.”

One of the few police officers who has managed to live in town is Owen Rand. Rand, in his early 20s, told the Collaborative late last year that his housing situation was possible only because he shared an apartment with his brother, a pilot who earns good money and was paying more than half the rent, which came to about $3,100 after utilities.

“On paper, it sounds like decent money,” he said of working as a police officer. “It goes away pretty quick when you start paying rent.”

Rand doesn’t see a path to staying in the city long-term. His goal is to eventually buy land 30 to 40 minutes north and put a tiny home on it.

“Realistically, I don’t know if I’ll be able to live in this general area, even let alone Portsmouth,” he said. But he doesn’t want to move away; he grew up nearby in Greenland and likes the department and his colleagues. “It’s hard to swallow,” he said. “It’s like, you love the area, you love what you do, but you’re not fully able to afford to live here.”

Disappearing opportunities

Erin Bakkom, a longtime teacher at Portsmouth Middle School and head of the district’s teachers union, said almost half of her colleagues live in Portsmouth. But they’re mostly veteran teachers like her, who’ve owned homes there for decades.

Erin Bakkom, a longtime teacher at Portsmouth Middle School head of the city teachers union, has owned her home in Portsmouth for decades. But ‘the opportunities that I had in 2004, when I bought …. don’t exist for young teachers now.’ (File photo)

Bakkom, for instance, moved to the city in 1999 and bought a $200,000 condo in 2004 with help from a first-time homebuyers program. That’s unimaginable for people entering the profession today, she said. A condo like hers might cost three times as much.

“The opportunities that I had in 2004, when I bought — those opportunities don’t exist for the young teachers now,” she said.

While some teachers prefer to live somewhere they won’t run into their students after hours, “there’s something to be said about living in the community that you work with,” Bakkom said. “As a taxpayer, as someone that watches City Council meetings and things, I have a vested interest — not only in my profession and what happens with school budgets, but also what happens in the community.”

Bakkom is especially worried about the impact on lower-paid workers, such as paraprofessionals, custodians and cafeteria staff, who keep the district humming. If you make $20 an hour, it might not be worth a long commute.

“We’re going to lose people because they’re like, ‘Well, I can do this job in the district where I live,’ which is no longer Portsmouth,’” she said.

Sam Ellis works as a paraprofessional at Portsmouth Middle School, where he grew up and his mom still works as a language arts teacher. He and his partner lived with his parents in Portsmouth while looking for a place of their own to rent. With a budget of $1,500, it took them about three years.

“The whole time we were looking for a place to live, a 45-minute commute was the most we were really willing to move ourselves into,” he said. “And even in that radius it was rough.”

Ellis said they finally found a place in Rochester, about a half-hour away. He and his wife are both planning to get teaching certifications, which will eventually allow them to earn more money. But even so, Ellis doubts that settling in Portsmouth itself will ever be within their reach.

“I do not know that my parents would have been able to afford the house that I grew up in now,” he said.

Morse said some firefighters live elsewhere by choice — Morse himself grew up in Hampstead and now owns a house there — but others would like to live closer to work if they could, he said. Some of his members commute from the Boston suburbs.

He worries something is lost when so many of a city’s first responders are commuters. It’s a lot harder to join a local club or attend a community event when you live 45 minutes away.

“Back in the day, just about everybody would live close to town, and there was more, I think, community spirit, from the stories you hear from the older guys that are still around,” he said.

As for Grigori, the firefighter commuting from Keene, he still keeps an eye out for places in Portsmouth, hoping to find a steal. He and his wife have a young daughter, and he wishes they lived close enough to visit him at the station during long shifts.

“I love the city, so it would be nice to be able to actually get to enjoy it, instead of just working in it,” he said. “And for the family aspect.”

The “Invisible Walls: Seacoast” project was produced in collaboration with Seacoastonline.com and Fosters.com. It is a continuation of the original “Invisible Walls” project, which focused on how Manchester’s exclusionary zoning laws reinforced areas of persistent poverty, impacting many aspects of community life, including crime, public health, affordable housing and access to economic opportunity. Audrey Nielsen and Michael Nolan from MuckRock’s Sunlight Research Desk provided research and data analysis for parts of the series.

Melanie Plenda

August 31, 2026

How urban renewal laid the groundwork for the gentrification of Portsmouth

Melanie Plenda

August 31, 2026

Nationwide 1960s redevelopment program had devastating impacts on the city’s working class

By Paul Cuno-Booth-Granite State News Collaborative

When Jim Splaine was growing up, Portsmouth’s North End was a diverse, working-class neighborhood settled by generations of immigrants. His family lived above his grandfather’s beer parlor, one of dozens of local businesses. His neighbors included veterans, service workers and people employed at the shipyard.

“As a pup, I used to remember walking up the streets around dinnertime and smelling the different dishes of the different cultures,” said 79-year-old Splaine, who went on to serve as a longtime state legislator and city councilor. “It was a wonderful place for a little guy to live.”

Jim Splaine, whose North End neighborhood was razed during urban renewal over 50 years ago to make way for hotels, condos and office buildings, recalls the area as a collection of mostly small apartment buildings, boardinghouses and neighborhood businesses. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

But that place would soon disappear. In the 1960s, city officials decided to raze most of the neighborhood to make way for a shopping mall and other commercial development, one of a wave of federally funded “urban renewal” projects around the country at that time. Three hundred families would be displaced.

Splaine still remembers the night the Portsmouth City Council voted to move forward with the project.

“Walking home that night, to our home in the North End, my father cried for the first time in my life because his house was going to be torn down,” Splaine said.

Over the past 60 years, Portsmouth has transformed from a working-class port city to one of the state’s most expensive places to live, pushing low- and moderate-income people farther and farther out in search of an affordable place to live.

The city’s housing crisis has gotten increasing attention in recent years, as rents and home prices have skyrocketed. But concerns about the loss of affordable housing — and the displacement of Portsmouth’s low-income residents — go back decades.

As Portsmouth emerged as a hub for arts, dining and tourism over the past half-century — drawing new residents and money to the area — the city’s stock of affordable housing was steadily eroded, first by government-backed “urban renewal” projects, then by successive waves of redevelopment and gentrification.

Portsmouth resident Merrill Aharonian got involved in advocating for affordable housing in the 1980s, when her housing complex was slated for conversion to high-end condos. She said the issues being raised today — including concerns that high housing costs are depleting Portsmouth’s workforce — echo discussions from 40 years ago.

Portsmouth resident Merrill Aharonian got involved in advocating for affordable housing in the 1980s, when Mariners Village – the housing complex where she lived – was slated for conversion to high-end condos. She says the issues being raised today, including concerns that high housing costs are depleting Portsmouth’s workforce, echo discussions from 40 years ago. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

“Portsmouth was losing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of units that were viable housing,” she said. “Perhaps not the best quality housing, but they meant that people who really, really cared about Portsmouth could stay.”

A neighborhood destroyed

Today, Splaine’s old neighborhood is a mix of offices, stores, restaurants, hotels and luxury condos, extending roughly from the Sheraton Portsmouth Harborside Hotel on one end to the Bridge Street Parking Lot, a stone’s throw away. Apartments in a brand-new building on the edge of the neighborhood, advertising their proximity to Portsmouth’s “Historic North End,” have sold for as much as $5 million.

It was a very different place 60 years ago, Splaine recalls — a collection of mostly small apartment buildings and boardinghouses with some neighborhood businesses mixed in. About 1,000 people lived there.

But the city officials of that era viewed it as a problem, an overcrowded neighborhood filled with deteriorating structures. In the 1950s and ‘60s, federal policy encouraged cities to identify “blighted” neighborhoods that could be torn down entirely and redeveloped in the name of “urban renewal,” with the U.S. government footing most of the bill. It was a policy that led to the displacement of over 1.3 million people in cities across the country from 1950 to 1971.

The Portsmouth Housing Authority, which city officials created in the 1950s to pursue such projects, had already initiated two smaller projects. Forty-five families were forced out of Portsmouth’s South End for what at first were going to be garden apartments. When it became clear the finances on that plan wouldn’t work, the land and some remaining buildings were turned over to a historical-preservation nonprofit to create what’s now Strawberry Banke. Another “blighted” area became the Hanover Street garage.

But the North End project, at 30 acres, would be the city’s biggest. The goal, as an appraiser’s report put it at the time, was “to remove a blighted area adjacent to downtown Portsmouth and provide new access to downtown, additional parking facilities and new commercial development.”

Across the country, urban renewal projects were generating widespread backlash for their devastating impacts on low-income communities, particularly communities of color. Portsmouth was no exception. The plans met with fierce pushback from North End residents and others who objected to the neighborhood’s wholesale destruction.

The project left a bitter taste, and its economic benefits were murky, as former Portsmouth City Planner Robert Thoresen recounts in his recent book “Reinventing Portsmouth.” Many parcels sat vacant for years. The newly built Parade Mall faced bankruptcy within years of opening.

Jim Splaine, 79, recalls the North End neighborhood where he grew up as a “a wonderful place for a little guy to live.” (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

The neighborhood “had been replaced within 10 years not by housing, but by businesses,” Splaine said. “Since then, it’s been replaced by hotels, by offices, by condominiums. Very little housing, and the housing is very expensive.”

Most North End residents moved to other parts of the city that were still considered affordable. Splaine’s parents bought a house for $22,000. Others settled in Seacrest Village, a cheap if poorly maintained housing complex off Market Street with hundreds of units.

‘The last remaining place’

Originally built as temporary housing for workers during World War II, Seacrest Village — later renamed Mariners Village — was for many years a haven for low-income families who were increasingly being priced out of the rest of Portsmouth.

Merrill Aharonian moved there in 1981. The wood-clad structures had little insulation and walls thin enough to hear the neighbors. But the owner had kept the rents low, and Aharonian, who then went by Merrill Black, quickly felt at home there.

She remembers a close-knit community of working-class families who threw lawn parties and looked after each other’s children. The neighborhood school held a Halloween parade each year. It was also one of the city’s most diverse areas, with 16% of residents in one survey identifying as Black.

“It was my favorite place that I ever lived,” she recalled recently. For most of that time, she was a single mother working a job at the University of New Hampshire. Even back then, she recalled, people were leaving Portsmouth for places like Rochester and Farmington in search of affordable housing. If not for Mariners Village, “I wouldn’t have been able to stay in Portsmouth.”

By the 1980s, Mariners Village was one of the few options left for low-income residents of Portsmouth. The city and region had been undergoing drastic change. Rockingham County’s population swelled in the 1970s and ‘80s, pushing up land values. Portsmouth was attracting new industries and jobs as its economy — historically dependent on two giant military employers, Pease Air Force Base and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard — gradually diversified. A focus on historic preservation, efforts to revitalize downtown, new restaurants and a burgeoning arts scene were attracting new residents to Portsmouth.

Merrill Aharonian remembers living at the former Mariner's Village, which for many years was a haven for low-income families who were increasingly being priced out of the rest of Portsmouth. They eventually lost that option when a developer bought the property and turned it into condos. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

As the city’s stock rose, once-affordable rental properties were increasingly converted to expensive apartments or condos, leaving low-income residents with fewer options.

“Beginning in 1983, an increasing number of high-priced, restricted-access (no children, no pets) townhouses and condominiums are listed for rent,” the nonprofit Women’s Education and Resource Center noted in a 1986 report. Meanwhile, the wait times for subsidized housing had stretched to two years or more.

So it sent shockwaves through Mariners Village when a New York-based development group bought the community in 1985 and began converting it into condos. Aharonian and her neighbors were among the first to receive eviction notices giving them 30 days to leave — or to move to another unit in the complex at a much higher rent.

Residents fought back, forming a group called SOHO — the Save Our Homes Organization — and teamed up with legal aid lawyers in an effort to delay the evictions and preserve some affordable housing at the site.

Mariners Village “was pretty much the last remaining place that low-income residents of Portsmouth could live in if they weren't in federally assisted housing,” said Elliott Berry, one of the attorneys who worked with tenants. “And so when we began to hear about the plans for the village, we realized that, you know, this is going to end up displacing an awful lot of people.”

“The city was losing something incredibly vital and important to its economy and its culture and its heart,” he said. “And it didn't even realize that it was losing something of value.”

The battle over the future of Mariners Village dragged on for more than a year. Many residents left, but others remained. Aharonian was moved from unit to unit as different parts of the property were redeveloped. (At one point, she told a reporter she had been relocated to an apartment that was one room smaller, and cost $130 more per month.) Some residents claimed they were being harassed in an effort to get them to vacate early, charges the developers’ attorney denied.

An aerial view of Portsmouth’s North End, taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s, about a decade before almost the entire neighborhood was razed and eventually replaced with a shopping mall and other commercial development. The demolition was part of a wave of federally funded urban renewal projects across the country. (Portsmouth Atheneum Collection)

After lengthy negotiations with the city, the developers agreed to keep renting about 200 units to current tenants at subsidized rates for up to five years, in exchange for a zoning change that allowed them to build an extra 250 condos on the property.

It wasn’t everything SOHO wanted, but it at least gave some residents a reprieve. And the advocates’ efforts brought more attention to the issue of affordable housing in Portsmouth. At one point, Jesse Jackson, while running in the New Hampshire presidential primary, met with residents in a show of solidarity.

In the end, the developers declared bankruptcy after converting just 42 units to condos, which are now known as Spinnaker Point. The rest of Mariners Village was taken over by a different developer, John Madden, in the early 1990s.

Berry said Madden agreed to honor Section 8 housing vouchers for any existing tenants who chose to stay, so they wouldn’t be displaced.

“It was getting harder and harder to place vouchers already in Portsmouth because of how high rents had gotten,” Berry said. “So Madden's commitment to keep those who wanted to stay with vouchers was significant.”

The resulting development, Osprey Landing, still has some of its units set aside as income-restricted affordable housing.

The fight over Mariners Village hinted at what was to come. In the following decades, Portsmouth’s working class would keep getting priced out as the population became more affluent, housing construction slowed, and older buildings continued to be bought and converted into higher-priced units.

For those who were able to stay at Osprey Landing, “the result wasn’t terrible,” Berry said. “What is terrible is that no low-income people can afford to live in Portsmouth anymore, unless they have some kind of federal subsidy.”

Melanie Plenda

August 26, 2026

Effects of Seacoast’s persistent housing crunch reverberate across area’s communities

Melanie Plenda

August 26, 2026

Skyrocketing rents and home prices have contributed to everything from rising homelessness to workforce shortages

By Paul Cuno-Booth, Granite State News Collaborative

Editor’s note: This article is the first in Granite State News Collaborative’s “Invisible Walls: Seacoast” project. The series produced in collaboration with Seacoastonline.com and Fosters.com, looks at how zoning laws, housing and other public policies have resulted in historically high rents and home prices, which have had consequential economic and social impacts on the area’s communities, residents and businesses.

Talia Walley has moved around a lot in the past two years.

First there was the landlord who told her to vacate the mobile home she was renting in Epping because he wanted to sell it — only to turn around and rent it to someone else. Then there was the apartment in Rochester that stank of cigarette smoke.

Now she needs to move once again — but everything she looks at is too expensive. A 250-square-foot apartment in Exeter going for $2,500 a month. A place over a garage for $1,990 that, because it was furnished, would have forced her to give up her own stuff.

Walley lives alone and juggles a few different gigs to make ends meet: health coach, restaurant server, house cleaner. She can’t be too far from her adult daughter in Exeter, who has health issues and sometimes needs emergency help with child care. But she’s not sure what she can afford.

“I’m just still looking and just praying for a miracle,” she said. “I’m 56 years old. I’m not gonna have a roommate.”

For many residents of New Hampshire’s Seacoast, housing costs are reaching a breaking point.

Skyrocketing rents and home prices continue to push people out of Portsmouth. Once-affordable alternatives like Dover, Somersworth and Rochester are steadily getting less so. Many people have to commute long distances just to find a reasonably priced place to live. Employers worry about workers leaving. Homelessness is getting worse.

Cities like Portsmouth and Dover are responding with zoning reforms and other changes meant to expand the supply of housing, and the region is adding new units at its fastest rate in two decades. But given the scale of the crisis, housing advocates say there’s a long road ahead.

“It took us years of underbuilding to get us here,” said Nick Taylor, the director of Housing Action NH, a coalition of businesses and nonprofits that advocates for more affordable housing. “It’s gonna take us a long time to get out.”

‘They have to look elsewhere’

Rising housing costs are an issue across New Hampshire. But the problem is especially acute on the Seacoast, which has become one of the state’s most expensive places to live. In Portsmouth last year, the median sale price for a single-family home approached $900,000, and it took a wage of $45 an hour to afford a typical apartment.

‘Even the folks who are making a moderate amount of income, they simply cannot afford a place to live here,’ says Craig Welch, executive director of the Portsmouth Housing Authority of the city’s high housing costs. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

“Even the folks who are making a moderate amount of income, they simply cannot afford a place to live here,” said Craig Welch, executive director of the Portsmouth Housing Authority.

With the construction in 2022 of the Ruth Lewin Griffin Place, a 64-unit housing development downtown (where units go for well below market-rate rents), the PHA oversaw the city’s largest expansion of permanently affordable housing in decades, and it has more projects in the works. But Welch said they can’t keep up with the loss of “naturally occurring” affordable housing as older buildings are bought, renovated and turned into upscale apartments or condos.

“The story we hear from the people who apply for our housing is that they had a rent that was affordable to them, ‘but my landlord sold the building and they just told me that my rent is going to go up 700 bucks a month and there’s just no way I can afford that,’” he said. “That’s what we hear over and over again.”

As more and more people have been priced out of Portsmouth, nearby cities have seen their housing costs surge too.

The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Dover last year was just over $2,100, compared to $2,300 in Portsmouth, according to data provided by New Hampshire Housing. Meanwhile, the median home in Dover sold for $560,000 — an increase of more than $200,000 since 2019, according to the N.H. Association of Realtors. Rochester and Somersworth have seen similar spikes.

“Our children and grandchildren aren’t able to really stay here in the community,” said Rochester Mayor Chuck Grassie. “They have to look elsewhere to find affordable housing.”

The area’s housing crunch is reflected in everything from rising homelessness to workforce shortages.

“We're seeing much longer stays,” said Susan Ford, executive director of My Friend’s Place, a homeless shelter in Dover.

People who fell on hard times used to spend three to five weeks at the shelter before finding another place, Ford said. That’s changed in the past five or six years, as the rental market has tightened. With so little available, people with better incomes and credit scores are taking apartments that are a bit run down or in less desirable neighborhoods — units that used to be attainable for her clients.

These days, individuals are now spending three to five months at the shelter, and families even longer.

The region’s housing crunch is resulting in much longer stays – three to five months and for some families even longer, according to Susan Ford, executive director of My Friend’s Place, a homeless shelter in Dover. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

“There’s a lot of landlords out there that we used to be able to count on,” who would be willing to rent to someone with a previous eviction or bad credit, Ford said. “That’s just not the case anymore.”

Taylor said the lack of housing is also a top concern for local employers.

“We hear from businesses that are offering good salaries, good jobs, and they have folks who want to take the jobs — but they can’t find a place to live,” he said. “They’re having people that accept the position and then have to turn it down.”

Restrictive zoning and lack of supply

Housing advocates and experts say the trends driving up costs on the Seacoast are an extreme version of what’s happening across the state.

The region’s desirability, high-quality jobs and proximity to Boston have drawn people to the area for decades — a trend that was supercharged during the COVID-19 pandemic as people fled big cities. But not enough new housing has been built to keep up with demand across the region.

After a building boom in the 1980s, residential construction fell in the 1990s and, after an uptick in the 2000s, it slowed further in the wake of the Great Recession, according to building permit data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the 2010s, the region built fewer than half as many units as it did during the 1980s.

Along with economic cycles and rising labor and material costs, restrictive zoning codes have limited how much new housing can be built.

Large swaths of many Seacoast municipalities are zoned exclusively for detached, single-family homes. In Portsmouth, that’s all you can build in three-quarters of the city’s residentially zoned land, according to an analysis the research group MuckRock conducted on behalf of the Granite State News Collaborative.

And some of the surrounding towns allow little, if any, multifamily housing. As of 2024, towns including Madbury, New Castle, Newfields, Newington, Sandown and South Hampton did not allow anything larger than a duplex to be built, according to the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, a comprehensive catalog of local zoning rules.

Even in the region’s four cities — Portsmouth, Dover, Somersworth and Rochester — any multifamily project of five or more units has to go through a hearing to get approved.

Minimum lot sizes, setbacks and other requirements further limit how much and what kinds of housing can be built. Outside of urban cores, most areas require an acre or more per home — making it hard to build starter homes or other smaller, more affordable dwellings.

“Everything, when it comes to housing, is essentially a math problem,” said Ryan Pope, senior director of multifamily development and finance at New Hampshire Housing, which finances affordable housing projects around the state.

Pope said zoning codes that favor single-family homes on large lots are one reason the development pattern on the Seacoast has tended toward more expensive homes. If a developer buys a 10-acre parcel and can build only four units on it, “then they’re gonna be $2 million houses” to make the project financially viable. If they can instead build 20 houses, each one will sell for much less.

“If you want things to be cheaper, you have to allow for more of the things to exist,” he said. “Density is the name of the game.”

Local reforms gain traction

The urgency of the housing crisis has spurred some Seacoast cities and towns to action.

Portsmouth, for instance, has rezoned an office park area to allow apartments and passed an ordinance allowing “co-living” developments with private rooms but shared living space. Dover allows developers to build extra units if they keep the rent below a certain rate. Exeter has created incentives for mixed-use developments in which a portion of units remain affordable.

And the rate of new housing construction has picked up, according to state permitting data. Portsmouth and Dover each approved more than 1,000 new housing units between 2020 and 2024 — a rate comparable to the 1980s building boom.

But that’s not the case everywhere in the Seacoast. Portsmouth, Dover, Rochester and Somersworth collectively accounted for nearly 60% of the region’s new housing units in the first half of this decade, despite representing a little over one-third of its population.

Some of the area’s towns have also seen increased housing construction in that time. Epping, for instance, expanded its total housing stock by 15% over five years with the approval of 451 new units. But others have lagged.

Portsmouth ‘could be at risk of becoming more of a tourist town or a seasonal town if we can’t build the housing we need,’ says Kara Anne Rodenhizer, executive director of the Home for All Coalition, which works to prevent homelessness in the region. (Deb Cram/Seacoast Online)

“Where we really need to have more traction is in the more rural areas, where the lot sizes are very large and really just catered toward single-family housing on multiple acres,” said Kara Anne Rodenhizer, executive director of the Home for All Coalition, which works to prevent homelessness in the region.

Efforts to expand the housing supply also face other hurdles, including rising labor and materials costs, higher interest rates and local pushback to projects, especially those serving lower-income residents. Welch, with the Portsmouth Housing Authority, estimated that an unsuccessful court challenge from some city residents added 18 months and $1 million to $2 million in costs to the Ruth Griffin Place project.

Pope said cities like Dover, which he used to work for, are doing a good job of encouraging more middle-income rental housing. But he said more state and federal funding is needed to build housing that’s truly affordable for low-income renters, which is not economically viable without public subsidies.

“We are seeing a lot of development occur,” he said. “I would say most of it is in and around the market rate. There’s an argument to be made that the more housing that’s produced, the more quantity there is in the market, that that in and of itself will drive down cost. I think the demand is still so high that we’re not going to experience any decreasing cost anytime soon in the Seacoast region.”

As of 2023, the regional planning commissions for Strafford and Rockingham counties estimated the Seacoast region would need an additional 19,000 housing units by 2040 to create a balanced housing market.

Rodenhizer said there’s no silver bullet to getting there. Rather, it will require pulling a lot of different policy levers at the same time, both at the state and local levels.

Ultimately, she said, what’s at stake is the very vibrancy that has drawn so many people to the Seacoast in the first place.

“Think about all the people in your day-to-day life that you interact with,” she said. If baristas, delivery drivers and child care workers can’t afford to live in the area, they’ll eventually leave. “And towns like Portsmouth, I think, could be at risk of becoming more of a tourist town or a seasonal town if we can’t build the housing we need.”