Alicia Williams can't find a home of her own in the place she has spent all her life, the Upper Valley. A Dartmouth Dining Services employee, she and her husband have spent the last two years scouring the newspapers for a home in their price range.
"We're looking for a house right now, and it's really difficult. By the time you find a house, its already been sold," she said.
Meanwhile, they were fortunate enough to find temporary shelter in her sister-in-law's house.
But not everyone in the Upper Valley has been even that fortunate. Amid a surge in available jobs and sluggish growth in the housing market, a housing crunch has snuck up on the region over the last 10 years, unduly inflating housing prices and relegating some to live far away from their jobs, or, in the extreme cases, the street. And a handful of organizations have only just begun to address this problem.
Chronic Causes
"We've only been active in terms of affordable housing in the last two and a half years," Hanover Planning and Zoning Director Jonathan Edwards said. "Between 1974 and 1999, the town of Hanover did literally nothing about it."
Becoming problematic only recently, the housing deficit in the Upper Valley emerged as a product of the unprecedented economic success of the 1990s.
Between 1991 and 2000, the arrival of new technology firms and the expansion of the College and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical center helped to create 15,975 jobs, and new residents flocked to the Upper Valley.
But the housing market did not grow along with the population numbers, and the supply of available housing dropped to alarming lows -- and continues to do so. In the last 18 months, there has been a 40 percent drop in the amount of available rental units and homes.
The poor, as with most social problems, have been hit the hardest.
In a glutted market, the average home price has increased by 36 percent as the average median household income has risen only 13 percent in the last ten years. Fewer families can afford to work and live in the Upper Valley, and more often than not, sufficiently priced housing can only be found farther and farther away from where they work.
Struggling to Build
Responding to the new heights that the housing deficit has reached -- the vacancy rate in the Upper Valley is now less than one percent, whereas healthy communities typically have rates around five percent -- a number of organization have recently cropped up to address the problem.
Unfortunately, it has so far been an uphill battle.
"Its harder to build affordable housing and find finance for it than it is to build regular housing," Edwards said.
In stride with other towns in the area, Hanover has charged its recently created Affordable Housing Commission with the responsibility of developing a plan to relieve the housing pressure.
Edwards said that although a plan exists, little has been done to act on its provisions.
The Upper Valley Housing Coalition, an organization comprising local businesses and social services, has been working with local social services to increase all kinds of housing.
Len Cadwallader, the Housing Coalition coordinator and executive director of Vital Communities, a non-profit devoted to improving quality of life in the Upper Valley, said both the coalition and the non-profit are interested mainly in getting contractors to build more affordable, mixed income housing that will blend in with New England architecture.
Contractors have been relatively easy to find. Financing them is another question.
"It takes a lot of financial power to create a cluster of fifteen houses, which makes it challenging for there to be a big impact on housing," Cadwallader said. He estimates that the Upper Valley is short 3000 housing units.
Government funds for building affordable housing are swathed in heavy layers red tape. Parallel organizations at local, state and federal levels will often have several divergent requirements that organizations must fulfill in order to obtain funding. Proper funding is typically obtained about two years after a proposal is submitted.
Housing and the Public
Even with funding, the contractors must have somewhere to build -- and no one seems to want the housing to be built near them.
The "NIMBY effect," which stands for Not In My Backyard, the unofficial appellation for the groups trying to prevent affordable housing from being built in their communities across the country, has also taken root in the backyards of the Upper Valley.
The key to solving the housing problems lies precisely in the popular perception of affordable housing, Cadwallader said. What must occur is "a change in public attitude so that they see the connection between our strong economy continuing to be strong and the need for housing -- and not see [affordable housing] as something to be afraid of," he said.
The anti-NIMBY cause has particular resonance in Hanover, where groups of townspeople have consistently thwarted the College's efforts to expand the supply of on-campus housing, according to Edwards.
The less housing there is available on campus, the more students are forced to live off campus -- and the higher Hanover rent prices can soar.
The captive student market allows landlords to charge students exorbitant rents, forcing many of those who work on campus to find housing far outside of Hanover. A host of problems result; commute times rise, pollution mounts and time that could be better spent with family or friends is essentially wasted in the car.
The Slow Build
Despite the problems facing the organizations, houses are slowly being built
One of the only organizations that has been able to add to the housing pool is the Twin Pines Housing Trust, the only non-profit affordable housing developer in the Upper Valley. The Trust has built 34 units in Vermont and New Hampshire, 21 of which are supportive housing where the occupants are chosen by social service agencies, according to Rob Bryant, the executive director of The Trust.
Bryant said that the trust has found it difficult to obtain land for building new houses, which, in order to conserve money, must be connected to municipal sewer and water lines.
Falling Through the Cracks
Governmental organizations that allocate funds to affordable housing organizations have rigid guidelines regarding who is allowed to live in subsidized housing. Occupants have to meet strict requirements of income level and credit history to be eligible for reduced rents. Sometimes, the most needy families are excluded from government subsidized housing because they fail to meet these requirements.
This is where the Upper Valley Haven, the only shelter that supplies transitional housing in the area, tries to make a difference. In its four family-sized units, the Haven provided transitional housing for 63 people who were looking for homes last year, less than half of the number who stayed at the Haven last year.
Less people in the shelter does not portend to an improving market; it means that they must stay in the shelter longer because it has become more difficult to find permanent housing.
Mary Feeney, Director of the Upper Valley Haven, said that the shelter has been forced to turn away more people each year, particularly those who belong to income groups that never needed the services of the shelter before.
Those who are turned away from The Haven often have nowhere else to go. Feeney said that the ranks of communities of homeless people living in makeshift housing have swelled in recent years.
"We probably need about 10 more Havens in the Upper Valley," Jim Tonkovich, the executive director of the United Way of the Upper Valley, said. The United Way collects funds for some of the organizations involved in housing issues and assesses community needs semi-annual reports.
Progress lends hope to the faithful, but Alicia Williams and others like her still need a place to live.
"The reality is the folks that stay here are no different than you and I. They've just run into some difficult times," Feeney, said.
