Commentary: Concerned about housing crisis? Join Portsmouth Listens to work on solutions
If our badly broken national politics is getting you down, we’d like you to consider an antidote. Think local. More specifically, think housing. On January 11, Portsmouth Listens kicks off its latest public input project: the 2024 Housing Dialogue. You can sign up here. The focus will be on understanding the complexity of our housing crisis and then identifying the ideas, concerns, and key priorities of residents. Participate and you’ll get a Housing 101 orientation, then meet and deliberate in small groups, and finally present findings to the City Council and the city’s professional planning staff. The results will be rolled into the city’s formal planning process for addressing the issue. Taking part won’t change the depressing mess of our national politics, but you might just, for a change, feel the satisfaction of being a citizen who can make a real contribution. Believe us, it can be therapeutic.
Gerald Duffy has owned a number of homes in Portsmouth over the span of 40 years. He and his wife currently live in an 850 sq ft condo in the South End. Byron Matto has lived here for a decade and is a West Ender who shares a single family home with his wife and three children. He sees Portsmouth’s housing crisis first-hand as young colleagues struggle to find affordable homes. We are both interested in Portsmouth making good on the promise in its motto: the city of the open door. If, like us, you’ve owned property in town for any length of time, you will have benefited from a substantial rise in your home equity. For example, a South End home near Duffy’s condo recently sold for three times its price just 10 years ago. We doubt Portsmouth has ever seen this kind of wealth generation in so short a time. This wealth is not liquid, of course, but owners can harness it to take out loans or eventually help downsize and finance retirement. The trend of rising prices is unlikely to end anytime soon. In a recent Seacoastonline article, local real estate statistician, John Rice, said: “We’re getting closer and closer to having a median price of a million dollars.” For better or worse, Portsmouth has been discovered by the 1%. In a city with that kind of median price, a large swathe of potential citizens – buyers and renters, especially those who make up the workforce essential for our service industry – don’t have a prayer of finding an affordable home. While homeowners have generated wealth, renters have not been as fortunate.
The lack of housing for people who are not wealthy is a real threat, the urgency of which is just now being fully communicated by our city government. It’s a threat to the future vibrancy of our neighborhoods, which are strongest when they enable service workers, trades employees, and lower-income professionals to live alongside people of means. Neighborhood life always benefits from that dynamic mixture of jobs, backgrounds, and financial means. For example, Duffy’s condo looks directly out at a cluster of Portsmouth Housing Authority (PHA) units. He counts the PHA residents as friends and neighbors. Were it not for the ability of the PHA – whose nonprofit operation enables it to remove the profit motive and offer rents well below market rate -– these residents could never afford to live in the South End of Portsmouth, with the South Mill Pond on their doorstep. There is no question in his mind that their presence enriches the South End, where the median home prices have already reached the $1 million mark..
We have to say that not everyone in town is on board in addressing the housing crisis. You’ll hear people say housing is important but then comes the inevitable “ . . . but . . .” , especially if new housing is likely to impact their own neighborhood. So-called NIMBYism is often motivated by fear of a negative effect on home values. But, data shows that communities which encourage the construction of new housing typically see value per square mile growing over time. If the PHA tried to build the units next to Duffy’s condo today there would probably be some noisy opposition, of the kind we’ve recently seen when a prospective partnership between the city and PHA presented an affordable housing proposal for the old and now vacant Sherburne School.
In that case, some residents of the nearby Panaway Manor turned out in numbers to object, some against the number of units proposed, some against any kind of workforce housing, some against too many new dogs on the streets, and some against increased traffic. In reality, even a modest increase in traffic would not directly affect their neighborhood, which has no through road. It would be unfair to call these residents NIMBYs because the property in question is actually nowhere near any of their backyards. The Sherburne School is a full quarter mile from the heart of this neighborhood and is separated by an 8-lane interstate highway with wide median and shoulder strips, and dense barriers of trees on both sides. The site is located next to an office park and a factory. The opposition, some of it fueled by manufactured outrage, unfortunately included personal attacks on the PHA director, the City Council, and (incorrectly) challenged the nonprofit operations of the PHA itself. The PHA creates revenue by selling federal tax credits to businesses that then use the credits in whatever way best suits their own tax purposes. The PHA itself owes nothing to investors. A challenge facing Portsmouth’s Council and planners is how to work through the reality of this kind of opposition and find a balance between the feelings of nearby residents and the larger concern of what is good for the whole city. We hope the Council and PHA pursue the Sherburne project. Affordable housing is a citywide issue that one way or another affects us all. Because it will give residents a direct chance to respectively discuss these tensions with each other, the Portsmouth Listens sessions could be invaluable.
Stimulating the development of workforce housing will inevitably mean revising outdated zoning ordinances, which often represent the greatest barrier to housing solutions. For example, current zoning in Portsmouth is unnecessarily complex; Portsmouth has numerous single-family zones with multiple “overlays.” During the past two years the new Land Use Committee has worked hard to ease the burden on residents who want to add an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) to their property. The application process for ADUs is frequently very costly for applicants, who have no guarantee of final approval. In spite of the committee’s diligent work to ease the burden on ADU applicants, we have to acknowledge, however, that ADUs will only ever contribute a sliver of the new housing units we need to build. We hope the committee will now tackle the hard work of making significant changes to the zoning regulations that are limiting the ways we can respond to the crisis. For example, land use boards must be empowered to approve the construction of multi-family homes where single homes exist today. Done well, these projects can enhance a neighborhood without compromising its character.
Land use boards play a critical role; if zoning and the members of boards are not aligned with the city’s broader goals, their decisions can actually thwart solutions. For example, it’s been disappointing to watch several very promising housing projects crash and burn in Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) hearings, where property owners must appear to gain approval for exceptions to the zoning rules. To cite one example, two years ago local developer Mark McNabb — who has first-hand knowledge of the residential and parking problems facing service staff — presented a unique and highly innovative plan for service worker housing on Court Street behind the Treadwell-Jenness mansion. The plan called for 52 micro-units, designed to maximize the efficient use of a small space. Tenants would pay rent that included all utilities, including broadband, thereby ridding young tenants of the cost of connect/disconnect fees. Further, if tenants agreed to have their rent garnished from wages, no down payment would be required. Down payments of several thousand dollars are often a major entry barrier for young people seeking apartments. McNabb had earlier presented to the Planning Board a summary of the conditions necessary to develop solutions of this kind – a bulleted list of requirements that included a developer willing to make less profit.
McNabb’s project had already gained permits for limited parking and suitability for a historic district. But some ZBA members used a very narrow interpretation of the zoning regulations that disallow residential units at ground level in parts of the city center. There is solid thinking behind this approach but, in this case, they were insisting on commercial use at ground level, even though there is no commerce or retail use along Court Street. Our hunch is that, had the board heard stories directly from the service workers who would be the beneficiaries, they may well have decided differently. They certainly had the legal leeway. Had that happened our downtown would now be home to a few dozen young service workers, most of whom would walk to work. This was a golden opportunity squandered. I hope revised ordinances encourage instead of deter projects like this.
Some opposition to housing developments is both frivolous and costly. Two residents brought a lawsuit against the PHA's excellent project that eventually materialized on Court Street. The lawsuit cost the PHA nonprofit about $1 million in delay and increased construction costs. Future tenants had to wait an extra year to move into their below market-rate rental units. And who do you suppose now has to pay that unnecessary cost going forward? One of the individuals involved later gloated about the harm he’d done in this newspaper. Portsmouth does not need that kind of deliberate interference.
The newly re-elected Council clearly has housing in its crosshairs. At the recent inauguration ceremony, our mayor singled out housing as the city’s top priority and added that addressing it is “. . . not just an economic imperative but a moral one, ensuring that the city of the open door remains a haven of hope and opportunity.” It will not hurt for residents who care about housing to increase pressure on this Council and encourage it to act boldly and with a sense of urgency. After all, the voters of Portsmouth just gave them a clear mandate. We also urge the city to set transparent housing targets for the various categories of housing. We have enough data to do this. A Housing Market Study performed recently for the PHA identified unmet demand for 2,897 rental units and 227 home units in Portsmouth. That’s a considerable gap in supply. It’ll take concerted, multi-pronged effort to make a dent in it. The study also highlighted the fact that almost exactly half the residents of Portsmouth live in rented homes. This is the segment to which the bulk of our work should be directed. Using the data we have, we can come up with specific goals for ADUs, micro units, multi-family developments, PHA-developed units, and so on. It’s important for citizens to be able to easily track our progress, or lack of it, and make sure the city is adapting to results accordingly. If you want to see a beautiful example of a community that does this, check out this “housing dashboard” from Kirkland, WA.
We are already revising the incentives we give developers so that they cannot sidestep the affordable housing requirements by offering non-housing value. However, the biggest bang for the buck will almost certainly be joint projects between the city and the PHA. Again, remember the PHA does not need to make a profit and it is the only entity that can create a volume of units that permanently rent below market rates. For that reason it will be better for the entire city if, instead of fighting such initiatives, we encourage and support them. The future viability and vibrancy of Portsmouth may depend on it.
Gerald Duffy and Byron Matto are co-founders of Progress Portsmouth. Byron is a newly elected member of the School Board.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Commentary: Sign up for vital Portsmouth Listens sessions on housing
