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.
