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.
