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.
