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Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 3
Alderman Laws

I’m here, | can hear and | am alone.

Alderman Cleaver

| am here, alone and practicing social distancing.

Alderman Harriott-Gathright

| am present and | am in this room alone. | can hear everyone and | am practicing social distancing.
President Wilshire

| am here, | am alone and | am practicing social distancing. Also with us this evening is Mayor Donchess,
Corporation Counsel, Sarah Marchant, the Community Development Director and Carrie Schena, Urban

Programs Manager.

COMMUNICATIONS

From: Lori Wilshire, President

Re: Calling a Special Meeting of the Board of Aldermen on October 27, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss
affordable housing

From: Sarah Marchant, Community Development Director

Re: Nashua Housing Study

There being no objection, President Wilshire accepted the communications and placed them on file.

PRESENTATION
Affordable Housing

President Wilshire recognized Sarah Marchant, Director of Community Development, and Carrie
Schena, Urban Programs Manager for the affordable housing presentation.

President Wilshire

For the Affordable Housing Presentation, thank you for being here and we appreciate you doing this
presentation for us.

Sarah Marchant, Community Development Director

Thank you very much. | wanted to just open by saying that this is a project that the Mayor supported, along
with Economic Development and Director Cummings. This is a partnership together on this project and we
brought in RKG Associates who you will meet just shortly, Eric Halvorsen who has been a tremendous
asset to this process. And again we have worked pretty hard to understand a lot of data here. | know that
you got a report that’s over 80 pages long that’s in your packets. And so Eric is going to run through some
of the key highlights of this and then we hope to be able to have a discussion with you afterwards. So Eric,
| am going to turn it over to you to share your screen, if you have any trouble then | have your back.

Eric Halvorsen, RKG Associates

Can you see that there?

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 4
Director Marchant

Yes, you are a little bit quiet, but yes, we can see it.

Mr. Halvorsen

Alright. Hi everyone, thanks so much for having me this evening. | am happy to be here in front of all of you
to talk, hopefully at a fairly quick and high level about the findings from the Nashua Housing Study that my
company RKG Associates has been working on with staff over the last few months. So we are excited to
be here and to share the findings of the study with you tonight.

So just to start off the presentation with a few key considerations that | was hoping you all could keep in
mind as we go through this presentation and as you, if you haven’t had a chance to look at the full report
yet, as you do read that, | think these are kind of our big five takeaways. The first is really around growth.
The City has been growing both in its population as well as in its employment base. And it is projected to
continue that goal for the next ten years or so.

| think the questions around, “Does the City want to grow’, “How does it want to grow” and maybe more
importantly, “Where are those key questions” and some | know are going to be tackled through the City’s
Master Plan process, sort of around growth as one of our key findings. The second one is around
affordability and that’s a big challenge and becoming more of a challenge as time goes on. Both rents and
sale prices are escalating, have been escalating to a point where some residents are unable to afford it or
in some cases they might be forced to pay more for housing than what they probably should. Along with
the rising prices, | think it’s important to consider how these changes impact those that can’t afford to pay
more or end up having to maybe move somewhere else, possibly further from the City or outside the City,
further away from maybe where they work or maybe where they are going to school or their kids are going
to daycare or their existing neighborhoods and networks. So that’s an important consideration. We did a
deeper dive into downtown because there are very interesting dynamics here with a confluence of
development activity, future interest in development and a housing stock that is older and sort of as such is
just more naturally affordable. It’s not necessarily deed restricted affordable although some of it is, but there
is a fair amount of the stock that’s just priced below what the average is across the City and we will talk a
little bit more about that.

The Downtown does have higher concentrations of lower income households. It does have the City’s
greatest diversity of residents from a racial and ethnic standpoint. And much of the older housing stock is
in this area and some of it is in need of some investment. So really thinking through what happens in the
Downtown | think should be part of the ongoing Master Plan; | know that just started up. You know, how
does Downtown change, where does it change and maybe more importantly for whom does it change for?

The last one is around leveraging resources and addressing housing opportunities and challenges, as we
know requires resources. In most communities the resources (inaudible) often outplace what is available.
So coming up with strategic partnerships and leveraging human and financial capital as much as possible |
think would be important for the City going forward. | chose to arrange the presentation tonight to focus on
three issue areas and opportunity areas, they are sort of combined and select some of the supporting data
to kind of tell the story of what we think is going on in Nashua and the different influences that exist within
the housing market.

So the first issue and opportunity area | want to talk about is this idea around future growth. As | mentioned
before, the population has been growing in Nashua as shown in the figure to the left. So looking forward
into the future the City is projected to add another 8,000 residents if the trend from the last 10 or so years
do continue. The interesting piece is actually in the graphic on the right which is around the age
composition of residents in Nashua. So over the last five years, and |’ll say the last five years but by that |
mean 2013 to 2018, 2018 being the most recent year that we have census data for, so that’s what | mean
when | say the last five years.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 5

There has been a trend toward a large increase in residents over the age of 55. In this graph, we
compared it to Hillsborough County which is the orange bars; Nashua is the blue bars. Some of this growth
is from residents that are choosing to age in place in Nashua, so remain in the City as they get older and as
they move from age cohort to age cohort, but much is actually from the influx of those either nearing
retirement age or actually in retirement age. There’s also been a growing cohort of those aged 18 to 34, |
think that’s important to note because those folks may be actually looking for a different housing product
than maybe what was traditionally produced in Nashua or available in Nashua over time.

Nashua’s employment base has also been growing but as housing prices have continued to rise it is
making it more difficult for the lower wage employees to actually live in the City and a lot of time they end
up having to live elsewhere, where they can find more affordable housing options. Our analysis showed
that about 31% of workers who are currently working in Nashua aren’t able to afford the median rent or the
median sales price today, never mind if prices continue to increase over time. There are several factors that
are driving some of the change in the housing market which | think are worth pointing out. The first is that
Nashua is adding households at a faster pace than population is actually growing indicating an increase in
smaller one and two person households. This is a trend that we see in a lot of cities around the country
where we do work, where because of household formation, household sizes are getting smaller, people are
living longer and people are waiting longer a lot of times to get married or to have families. There’s just
generally an increase and a need for smaller units, so we are seeing a lot of growth in that one and two-
person household.

Householders living alone accounted for 37% of the household growth over the last five years. So one in
three households that has come into the City over the last 5 years has been householders living alone. One
and two person households increased by 12% for one-person household and 22% for two person
households. And interestingly we tried to look at the growth by age sector, age of the residents and age of
the householders and much of that growth has actually been driven, kind of as | mentioned before by
households age 65 and older and that’s sort of driven by both single person households as well as married
couple households who are age 65 and older.

One of the challenges that we potentially see for accommodating future growth is that nearly 63% of all the
residential land acreage in the City is occupied by single family dwellings, which tend to have lower density
and tend to be more expensive than a lot of other housing types. Right now single-family homes occupy
63% of that residential land acreage and they account for about 50% of all the housing units in the City.
Compare that to the larger scale multi-family units which comprise about 4% of the land area but account
for about 18% of the residential unit. With the push towards smaller housing units, and potential to
accommodate growth in the City, the City might want to consider appropriate locations for higher density
dissolvement over time. You would have the ability to utilize less land in doing that and those units might
tend to be smaller in size than your typical single-family home.

Adding to the pressure on the housing market in Nashua today from both new residents and households is
a very, very low vacancy rate. Only about 1.1% of all housing units in Nashua were being actively
marketed as for sale or for rent. So typically when you look at a market, we consider a healthy vacancy rate
for both owner-occupied and renter combined to be somewhere between 3% and 5%; Nashua is at about
1.1%. | just want to point out that this data is also from the latest census from 2018 and | can almost
guarantee you that with all the changes since 2018 including the pandemic and the impacts that the
pandemic has had particularly on the for sale market, | would be fairly certain that Nashua’s vacancy rate
has probably dipped below 1% at this point.

So some of this is likely to be eased by the development pipeline, which is projected to add about 615
housing units. About 60% of those units are in larger multi-family buildings and this is information that we
got from Sarah and her team. A couple of the developments, particularly 159 Temple Street that’s coming
in for 168 units and | am sure many of you know about the Bronstein Apartments Partnership that’s
permitted for about 216 units. So just between those two developments alone that’s a big portion of the
development pipeline, but again, those are in much larger multi-family buildings.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 6

As | mentioned earlier, Nashua’s population is anticipated to grow over the next ten years by about 8.4%
which means the City may need to produce another 4,800 housing units to accommodate that population
growth over time. If the housing split between renter and owner remains as it is today which is about 54%
owner and 46% renter, there could be demand for about 2,500 ownership units and about 2,300 rental
units. As prices continue to increase, households earning at or below 50% of their area median income will
likely have the most difficult time finding housing so those households that really that need truly and deeply
affordable housing in order to be able to stay in the City at an affordable price and still have money left over
at the end of the month or the end of the year for other costs that they may have to incur, that’s probably
the segment that might need the most attention going forward.

We also broke down the future housing needs by household size which can help to inform the size of the
units that the City, Housing Authority, future developers might want to think about targeting. If the City’s
household composition remained the same as it is today, about 65% of new households would consist of
either 1 or 2 person households. That’s the table that is shown in the left-hand corner. If household
composition continues to change in a similar way to what we’ve seen over the last 5 years, the shift would
be much more dramatic and really be geared more toward the 1 and 2 person household, which as |
mentioned before over the last 5 years have been experiencing the most growth and have led to most of
the household change that the City has seen over the last five years.

| would guess that these changes won’t be quite as dramatic as the table on the right. You will probably
see some hybrid of the two. But! think what is important to take away from this is that it points to a need
for smaller units for households at both the younger age of the resident spectrum as well as the older age.
What | was thinking about earlier was by focusing on the smaller units and having more housing choice in
the City, that could also help provide older residents looking to downsize with options for moving out of
single family homes, thereby opening those up for younger households or even families who might be
looking to either relocate within the City or locate to the City from other places.

The second issue area is around affordability and the financial resources of buyers and renters. In 2018 the
median household income in Nashua was just over $73,000.00 citywide. The map on the left shows the
median income delineated by census block groups across the City. So we can kind of look across the City
at different areas and we can see how median household incomes changes depending on where you are.
The lighter the color the lower the median household income for that block group; the darker the color the
higher the median income for that block. The Downtown has some of the lowest median incomes in the
City which we will discuss a little bit more later. It’s also important to note how household income varies by
race and ethnicity which is the graphic to the right.

White households in Nashua have a median income of almost 2 % times higher than Black, and Hispanic
Latino households, which also has direct impact on what those households can afford from a housing
perspective, something else to keep in mind as we talk about the downtown a little later on. On the
ownership side of the housing market, sales prices and home values are up pretty significantly. Value
citywide has increased about 19% over the last 10 years. In 2019, 84% of all the sales in the City were for
homes priced above $250,000.00. And what is interesting is while the sales volume of houses priced over
$250,000.00 accounted for 84% of all the sales, those houses priced at that level or valued at that level of
over $250,000.00 only comprised about 53% of all the houses citywide. So much of the sales activity over
the last year, the calendar year of 2019 was really focused on one specific segment of the market, those
higher priced houses. Homes are Selling (audio cuts out) average days on the market down 81% from
2011 to an average of 10 days on the market.

We also did a comparison of new, single family home sales and compared that to the sale of existing
homes and found that new homes, the homes that were built and sold in the same year, so a house that
was built in 2019, sold in 2019 or built in 2016 and sold in 2016, that sale price, the average sale price
stayed somewhat consistent at around $400,000.00 going back all the way to about 2010. But the
interesting thing is that the sales of existing homes are up to an average of $322,000.00 as of 2019. You
can see, that’s the darker blue bars that have been going up and up and up since about 2012.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 7

The map on the right shows the sales price activity over the last ten years and sort of looking at that
citywide and what locations in the City are selling for prices higher than other locations. Again, higher
priced housing tends to be located on the edges and in some of the historic areas in the City while lower
prices tend to be found in the older neighborhoods, kind of more in the center portion of the City.

It was kind of interesting to see the sale price data corelating with the median household income data as
the overlay goes on the map. Rents are also up over 19% over the last 5 years with the greatest increases
seen in units renting from between $1,500.00 a month and just under $2,000.00 a month. Some of this is
the result of new product coming online in the City, but much is likely attributed to the steady rent increases
keeping up with the market over time. So the pressure is not just on owner market but it is also on the
renter market and changes in the renter market tend to disproportionately impact lower income households
as well, particularly in the Downtown area where we have those concentrations.

So let’s just take a minute to talk a little bit about household income and what different households can
actually afford from a housing perspective. So this first chart shows households in Nashua broken down by
income and it shows how many households are within each category. We refer to these from bottom to top
as lower income tier, moderate income tier, and upper income tier. About 35% of existing households
couldn’t afford Nashua’s median sales price or median gross rent today. 66% of those existing households
couldn’t afford the median sales price alone. Really that upper income band, those who are earning say
over $75,000.00 a year are the ones who can pretty much afford the median rent prices and the median
sales price for a home in Nashua today.

Housing affordability is also looked at from the perspective of HUD programs, Federal Housing and Urban
Development Programs and the income restrictions that those place on housing units. That’s done by a
formula to determine basically what a household should pay based on the area median income for the
Greater Nashua’s HUD region. So this table shows the percentage of households within each of those
income brackets. These actually closely align with the breakdown that we were just showing on the
previous slide. This information is important as we think about affordable housing, deed restricted housing
and any HUD or City programs that are targeting — that are sort of using targeted programs and using area
median income thresholds to target those programs.

What we like to do when we think about housing supply and potential demand is to look at any mismatches
that we might have between a household in a particular income bracket and then compare that to the
number of owner or rental units that are priced to those households. So the graph on the right shows
owner households and the units. And we can see there’s a huge gap between the number of owner
households earning over 120% AMI and the number of units that are technically affordable to those
households based on what they can pay for housing costs based on their income. This likely means that
higher income households are purchasing housing that’s actually at a lower price than what they could
otherwise afford, because that’s sort of Nashua’s market and a lot of the housing units that are coming
online, even though those prices have been going up they are still very affordable to households earning at
those top income tiers.

What ends up happening is because those folks who can technically afford to pay a little bit more, but might
not be able to find housing that is sort of priced to their income range are ending up having to what we call
“buy down”, they are probably buying houses that are in the 80% of the AMI range and 100% of AMI range.
And what happens a lot of times when we see a big gap at the 120% of AMI and above, is that those
households have a really strong ability to compete in the housing market. They have more income they
have the ability to generate a higher down payment; they could potentially pay cash for a house. They
have better credit oftentimes, all the things that create competition in the middle of the market end up
driving prices up bringing the vacancy level down and creating a lot of times ends up creating bidding wars.
Now | don’t want anybody to walk away from this presentation and say, “Eric said we should go out and
build a whole bunch of $800,000.00 or $900,000.00 houses to satisfy people at the top of the market”. But |
do think it is important to recognize that there are segments in the market that may not be potentially
served to the level that they could be and sort of the impact that might be having on the housing market.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 8

So on the rental side, we see a similar gap on those households over 120% of AMI, again because they
can afford to pay a lot more than what the market probably has out there in terms of rental units at the top.
But we also see a substantial gap for households that are at or below 30% of AMI and that’s very typical in
most places that we work. This housing tends to be provided by the Housing Authority or other deed
restricted units that maybe the city creates in partnership with other entities. The gap here is close to 3,000
units which means many of these households are likely renting units priced above what they should
technically be paying, which creates a lot of challenges for those households because they are already very
income strapped, so if they have to pay more for housing, that means that they have less money to spend
on healthcare, education, childcare, transportation, family services, all those other services that they need
to live their lives.

Much of Nashua’s housing stock is priced, on the renter’s side, is priced between that 50% and 80% of AMI
band. So there’s a lot of units that are likely not being sold by households in those two bands and are being
sold by households at the 30% level and then those who are probably at or above 100%. Again sort of
everybody converging and meeting in the middle of the rental market. And then, as | mentioned earlier, so
much of the household change can be tied back to older households, particularly those with earnings above
$100,000.00 a year. Over the last five years alone, close to 1,000 new households were those who were
headed by a person or persons over the age of 65 earning over $100,000.00 a year. Interestingly, those
new households were actually split 55% owner and 45% renter. Honestly, | kind of expected the owner
percentage to be a bit higher than it was. So it’s interesting to see that those older households are actually
renting almost as much as they are purchasing.

| think the big take-away here is for older residents there seems to be demand on both the renter side as
well as the ownership side. So lastly, we wanted to take a closer look at the Downtown are to see the
population, the housing and the development dynamics. So we define Downtown and this was sort of
RKG’s definition of downtown and we talked with city staff about it and sort of explained why we picked this
particular definition and boundary. But we defined it generally as the block groups that are going from
Route 3 to the west to the Merrimack River to the east down to Lake Street to the south and so basically to
Lock Street to the north. So the map here on the right shows the different types of housing units that are
located on each parcel in downtown and this only shows residential, it doesn’t show commercial or other —
most of the neighborhoods sort of surrounding what | would call the core of Main Street, those
neighborhoods that are surrounding them having mostly one, two, three unit structures. And the closer you
get to that kind of core of the Main Street, the more dense the development patterns become, very typical
of most downtown environments, | don’t think Nashua is different from a lot of places, that we’ve worked
from that perspective.

We also wanted to look at some of the other dynamics to the downtown. So this map shows the percentage
of renter households in those block groups in downtown, just to get a sense of what types of units people
are living in today, renter versus owner. The large majority of the block groups are dominated by renter
households. And even as you push out a little further from the core into the surrounding neighborhoods,
the block groups rarely have less than 50% of the units as rental. As was mentioned before, this also
correlates to lower median incomes with downtown having several block groups with median incomes
regularly below $44,000.00 on average, compared with the City’s median of about $73,000.00. So from our
perspective this places pressure on households to afford those rising housing prices, but also trying to seek
out naturally occurring and deed restricted affordable housing that might be located in the downtown area
end up playing a really important role here for those households.

What we see when we look at the housing stock and the age of the housing stock is an older typically
investor owned building stock in the downtown that is providing that more affordable housing stock and the
units may not be as well maintained, they may not be kept updated as new rental units that are coming on
the market. They’ve got all the amenities; they’ve got all the bells and whistles; these older units tend not
to have those. And that ends up keeping rent a little bit lower and a little bit more affordable for those
households.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 9

As the downtown continues to change and attract private investment as it has been, it is possible that some
of those properties could flip and maybe rehab could take place. That could also mean though that as
housing prices go up, existing households could potentially be displaced either elsewhere in the City or
maybe even have to go outside the City to find housing that’s more affordable to their income.

The age of the household stock also correlated to the lower assessed building values. There’s about 73%
of all residential structures having assessed value below $200,000.00. Citywide, only about 57% of
residential structures have values below $200,000.00 but | kind of think it’s interesting that many of the
buildings in the downtown are multi-family, are multi-unit structures on the residential side and still have
fairly low assessed values, where you might expect them to be a bit higher as they have more units and
have the ability to generate more income than say a single family home that might be located elsewhere in
the City.

We also mapped sales activity in the downtown and over the last ten years, 93% of the sales in this area
were below the citywide median. In 2019 alone just looking at sales isolated 2019, about 80% of the sales
were below the citywide median. Again, the fact that many multi-unit properties are not selling for more
could speak to the age of the structure as well as the condition of the structure and the units that are within
that structure.

| wanted to spend more of my time tonight on the data and the story as | thought that was really important
background and context for you all to have, not only for this study but | think as you all are embarking on
the Master Plan Process and are engaging in that process. But | didn’t want to skip out on the
recommendations piece of it. In our report, the recommendations provided have far more detail than what |
thought we would have time for tonight. | was hoping to just provide kind of a higher-level overview of each
of the recommendations and then turn it over to questions.

So the first bucket of recommendations is what we are referring to as “Planning for Success” so this bucket
really speaks to leverage, the planning work that the city has already done. There’s been a lot of it across
the City and then even what they are about to do, what you are all about to through the Master Plan
Process to really look for those key opportunities to change zoning or rezone areas, find ways to continue
the integration of other concepts through that Master Plan Process. | think this is a really great opportunity
for the City.

The next is finding way to continue to integrate accessory dwelling units. The City is doing that but there
might be other mechanisms for speeding the process up or making it a little bit easier. One thing that we
suggested in our recommendations was a mechanism like pre-approved design for accessory dwelling
units that might make the approval and permitting process faster and easier for the City as well as for the
applicant. The next is continuing to look for ways to leverage public land or the disposition of public land for
housing production. This could be something like that’s happening with Bronstein and using existing public
land or buildings to further affordable housing or just housing in general. It could also mean looking at older
buildings or excess land that the City might have ownership and control over and maybe there’s a potential
for disposition through an RFP Process with a focus on some kind of housing.

Lastly, educating the public on why housing is such a critical issue to tackle and why it matters. The
households across the income spectrum is really important. This could help reduce the number of abutter
complaints or just general opposition to housing proposals in the City, over time.

The second bucket is around aligning policy and housing outcomes. There is interest from what we have
heard from City staff to create a vehicle for collecting and also deploying housing funds collected by the
City through various means. The most common vehicle for that process would be establishing a housing
trust fund. The City can collect funds through the trust and then create a process for deploying those funds
with goals, targets, metrics to ensure funds are meeting those goals. The funds could then potentially be
matched with other Federal, State, or Local Funds to actually sort of leverage that money and have a
greater impact on housing policy and programs.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 10

Sort of interlinked with the housing trust is this idea of updating inclusionary zoning regulations in the City.
We think that the City should revisit the existing inclusionary ordinance and update it and probably expand
its reach. Right now the Ordinance is generally tailored to downtown and the COD areas as we understand
it. But there is the opportunity to expand it citywide. You know the first step that we think in that process
would be to hire a consultant who can work closely with City staff to not only rewrite the Ordinance but also
to test the financial implications to ensure that whatever is done with the inclusionary ordinance doesn’t
have a negative impact on development feasibility and have the effect of potentially cooling the
development market. So it’s really a balance of writing the Ordinance in a way that achieves the City’s
goals and what you are trying to do but also being cognizant that it could potentially have an impact on
development feasibility, so really trying to balance those two.

If the Ordinance ends up including a payment in lieu option so a fee option, that money can then be used to
potentially feed the housing trust fund over time. Lastly, we had the recommendation that the City look at
phasing in rental registry program and inspection process for rental units. The Registry component we
think is critical to — | think first and foremost is track and register the rental properties in the City and have a
list of contacts just in case issues arise with the new contact, you know, if any issues come up. We
recommend that the registry fee would be collected annually and that the amount is enough to cover the
administration of the program. We think that the nexus between those two things is really important.

Secondly and it is probably a much longer-term process, the City could phase in an inspection process
recognizing that this might require additional staff capacity. Inspections could take place, for example,
maybe every 3 years. If tenants turn over during that time period but if the owner or landlord is able to keep
the same tenant for say more than 3 years, maybe consider just doing inspections every ten years if the
tenant remains the same. So it’s a little bit less of a list on City staff as well as on the landlord if it’s not
being done every six months, every year, every two years, but there’s some leeway in there. The City
should also consider coupling the landlord rehab program or even a loan program with the inspection
process just in case issues come up. We want to provide landlords, especially those who might be lower
income landlords and might not have cash on hand. We want to be able to give them an option where they
could make, where they could address the issue that comes up do the rehab and get that tenant back up
and running as quickly as possible but not have to spend all the money that they have in their bank account
to address that issue.

The third bucket is around new or expanded programs. The first recommendation is around expanding the
rental and owner rehab program. The City has both programs in place today, but the need for rehabilitation
funds appears to be higher than what is typically available in a given year. | think in the downtown this
issue is very present and would likely benefit from improvements to units as well as access to capital. So
one change that we were thinking about for these programs is considering moving from a 0% interest loan
that’s repayable at either the sale or maybe a refinance and changing that to a maybe a very low interest
rate loan, maybe it either stays 0% or 1% or 2% but that there is a requirement for that loan because the
interest rate is so low to be paid back over time so it is continuously paid back. This would help to create
more of a revolving loan pool instead of just depleting the pool each year and then having to wait to recycle
that money say with a new infusion of CDBG money or City funding in its place. And you could potentially
tier the interest rate based on the AMI of the owner, whether its landlord or an owner household to those
who are lower income maybe it’s 0%, those who are 120% of AMI maybe it’s a 2% loan.

The second recommendation is around restarting the First Time Home Buyer Program to assist with down
payment and/or closing cost. That program could be established as a grant and maybe if you were going
to target something like a $4,000.00 or $5,000.00 amount, maybe it’s just a grant. Or if it is going to be a
higher amount, maybe considering a loan that could be forgivable after a certain period of time, typically
after the person or persons have lived in the household for a set period of time. Or it can even be
something that’s paid back at little or no interest, similar to what we talked about with the rehab fund. That
option would then help to recapitalize that fund over time and make it more available throughout the year.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 11

And then just quickly on the last side, around leveraging and expanding partnerships, you know, in the
housing world, the ability to expand the City’s capacity for funding, programming, and education | think is
critical. The City likely can’t do all of this alone and finding those partner organizations like banks, or
employers, philanthropy, community development corporations and others | think would really help expand
capacity in many respects. We also recommend continuing that strong partnership with the housing
authority and also working with them to look for more opportunities to expand the offering of affordable
housing where possible.

Two other longer-term considerations — the first is what we refer to as a “Right of first refusal policy” where
the City could potentially require sales or deed restricted use or buildings that are coming up for sale or
maybe even unsubsidized rental units to provide advance notification of the sale to the City and maybe any
of their housing partners. The City or maybe another non-profit entity could then make an offer to purchase
that property, you’d probably have to match the highest offer to secure that sale. But there are varying
levels of intervention that the City could take. But! think beginning with notification for at least all
subsidized properties ones that are subsidized by other entities, as well as those that receive subsidy from
the City would be a really good start. The ones that are already subsidized, those are the ones you don’t
want to lose to market rate conversion.

Lastly, recognizing you have hospitals in the City who employ a lot of people. | think talking to them about a
potential partnership to understand the housing need, to see how sort of city resources can be coupled with
employer resources and then leverage those together to provide housing or housing options to employees
could be beneficial to both parties, but that’s likely a longer term strategy, | think there’s other things that
you would want to focus on in the shorter term.

So that is my overview, hopefully it didn’t go too, too long, in time for questions?

President Wilshire

Are you looking to take questions, Mr. Halverson?

Mr. Halverson

I'd be happy to, yeah whatever you all would like to do.

President Wilshire

Ok, does anyone have any questions? Alderman Klee?

Alderman Klee

Madam President, | have just a quick question. Thank you so much. Mr. Halverson, in all of this
information and so on, and | don’t know if you can even answer this. But how do we align with like
communities in New Hampshire/New England. Is there any kind of a comparison? Are we kind of on track
with it? | mean you talked about our low market in other words we didn’t have a whole lot of inventory and
that middle of the road group, it seemed like the high income/low income were kind of purchasing those
types of housing.

Mr. Halvorsen

Great question. | will just talk sort of in generalities, | think the things that | found really interesting and
potentially unique about Nashua. Nashua is a growing City and it’s growing quite a bit and has been

growing quite a bit. | think that makes it unique. | think its position on the Massachusetts border is very
unique versus a city that might be further up in New England.

Special Board of Aldermen 10-27-2020 Page 12

| think that is and has been attracting folks to come in, particularly | think from my opinion and I'd love to
hear what you all think but | think that’s part of what is driving the older cohort, say the 55+ residents who
might be coming over the border and looking to live in Nashua. | also think Nashua’s existing housing
stock is very diverse. | drove the whole City, | went into almost every residential neighborhood and
development as | working at the very beginning and there are just tons of really fascinating housing options
that | don’t often see in a lot of other places.

You can find a gorgeous, older, single-family home, a new single-family home, a two family, a three family,
there are all those really unique rental complexes, both at the high end and at the low end. You can kind of
find everything in Nashua and | think that makes it really unique. And then on the employment side, the
employment base continues to grow and hopefully that will continue in the future for all of you. So that is
also sort of putting pressure on that housing market.

The gaps that we saw at the 30% of AMI and the 120% of AMI are not necessarily unique in housing
markets that are growing as well as ones that are experiencing fairly vapid price escalation. So | don’t think
that necessarily makes you unique, but | would say that is a challenge that many, many communities
across the country are grappling with, is how do we find — how do we find, create, partner to create —
whatever it might be, encourage, incentivize housing that sort of matches the income spectrum for the
residents who live here.

Alderman Klee

Thank you.

Alderman Lopez

| have a question as well.
President Wilshire

Alderman Lopez?

Alderman Lopez

In your study and in your evaluation did you happen to maybe touch upon information about the
employment capacity relative to workforce availability or resources offered in terms of supported services. |
noticed that you were talking about one of the populations moving in being elderly, or not moving in, but the
growing population being elderly which is great because it means people are living longer. But it also
means people likely need more supportive services in terms of in-home care or that kind of stuff. How do
you see our economy and our infrastructure as positioned to meet those needs?

Mr. Halvorsen

Great question, so | will tackle the employment side first. | didn’t have it on my slide so | was trying to trim
as best | could — but it is in the report | think if | am remembering, over the next 10 years, one of the fastest
growing employment sectors in Nashua | believe is in the healthcare and social services industry. So much
of what we see around New England and around the country where this is growth in that segment, given
that you do have the hospitals some of that is going to go that way. But we are seeing such big growth
given the aging population for these wrap around services and in-home care workers that you mentioned.
So | do think that is going to be and continue to be that growing segment of Nashua’s employment base or
one of them.