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.
