Special Board of Aldermen 04-08-2021 Page 4
Chairman Dowd
Yes.
Mayor Donchess
OK, so | will turn it over to Director Marchant to provide any additional information.
Chairman Dowd
Director Marchant.
Sarah Marchant, Director of Community Development
Thank you so much. If it is OK with you, I’d like to share my screen. | have just a couple slides to put up.
Chairman Dowd
Sure.
Director Marchant
Thank you. Tonight we are here to talk about the Housing Trust Fund as the Mayor has suggested. He
outlined the purposes of the fund. The Housing Trust Fund, this idea came about through the Housing
Study that Economic Development and Community Development partnered on last fall. It really highlighted
the incredible need for doing more to support housing and affordable housing in the City. So | was just
going to run through a couple of those stats because it has been awhile since we talked about. But by all
means, the full information is in the Housing Study which is available on the website if you want more
information.
First and foremost, the median household incomes of and I’m not sure why this isn’t full screen, | apologize.
Median household incomes in Nashua vary greatly depending on race and ethnicity. If you are White and
Asian household, median income that’s almost 2 % times higher than that of our Black, Hispanic, and
Latino populations. A really important thing about future growth and between now and 2030, we are
expected to need approximately 4,700 new housing units; that is the very conservative number. Who
needs those housing units? And the key thing is if we look at the left side of the screen, this would be
keeping todays or the 2018 household composition steady. You can see that 1 and 2 person households
make up over almost 65% of all households in the City. That was not the case 10 years, 20 years ago, 30
years ago where there was much higher percentage of larger 3, 4, 5 plus person households.
Based on our growth in the last 5 years or the ’13 to ’18 period and it has certainly even been exacerbated
more so in ’19 and ’20. The vast majority of our households have been 1 and 2 person sized households
and of these 4,700 housing units, we expect over 70% of those to be needed for 1 and 2 person
households. So it is incredibly important that we look at the what and what we are encouraging and what
we need to have built in the City. 1 and 2 person households don’t need very large single family homes
which was what we were building through most of the 2000’s.
Again, of the new households that we have added recently, the households are growing faster than
population and that’s, again, because they are 1 and 2 person households. Single households accounted
for almost 37% of all households in the new household growth in the five years viewed in this study. In
addition, | think it’s important to note that our older residents are a huge portion of that 1 and 2 family
households, but there are also married couple households. Nashua is unique compared to the rest of the
State in that yes, we certainly have a growing population of older households and older householders, but
we also have a very large population of 24 to 35 year old’s which are our young professionals and our first
