Board of Aldermen 09-28-2021 Page 3
President Wilshire
Yes.
Kyle Talente, President of RKG Associates
Oh, | love technology when it works. | want to thank you all for the opportunity to make this presentation today. | am
sharing my screen. Are you able to see the presentation on your screens at this point?
President Wilshire
We are.
Kyle Talente, President of RKG Associates
Excellent. My name is Kyle Talente. | am the President of RKG Associates. | have been working with Sarah and Tim and
their staff 1) pulling together this analysis for the city as we get into it. The genesis of this is RKG and my partner Eric
Halvorsen worked with the city already in doing a housing market analysis, identifying housing needs and challenges, and
we're going to walk through a little bit of that in just a moment to refresh everybody's memory. Though I'm sure everyone
remembers that study intimately. One of the recommendations that came out of that was to relook at the city's existing
inclusionary zoning policy and identify ways so that it can be more effective for the community. Our recommendation was
to perform an analysis, a financial feasibility analysis of a potential inclusionary zoning policy that promotes the
development of price diversity and housing diversity, but does it so within market and financial realities. We'll talk just a
moment about what that means.
Luckily, the city opted to extend our contract so that we can perform this analysis for the city. So like | mentioned, very
briefly, just to kind of go through the previous study. I'm not going to try and bore you with that presentation all over again.
Kind of hitting the highlights. The city is growing and it's growing both from a population perspective but also from a
diversity in housing demand and housing typology. One of the biggest things we learned was that one in two person
households were a large predominance of the growth that has been going on within the city of Nashua but it's also
diversity in terms of incomes. A lot of the new households that are moving into the community are more affluent
compared to the existing incomes within the City of Nashua. All this translates into an effect on your existing housing
market. Development hasn't really kept pace with that demand so it has driven higher costs both from the ownership side
and the rental side. It's also driving new interest in housing development. What we learned through that study, though,
was the housing development has been really concentrated in, you Know, income controlled housing through federal and
State subsidy programs and then market rate housing and not much being done in what's called that missing middle or
the middle income groups.
This is just a slide showing the effect of homeownership and the impacts the changes that have been going on. | would
just call very quickly the attention to the substantial amount of demand for housing of higher income households as
opposed to the supply. | just point that out to say this is one of the things that is driving price points of new housing
construction is if I'm a developer and | see that there's unmet demand for half million dollar homes and there's unmet
demand for $200,000 homes, I'm going to build towards the higher value homes because it's going to be able to create
greater returns.
Similarly in rental when we looked at it from that perspective had consistent trends that are going on within the city. So
many of the new developments that have occurred have been market rate focused towards those highest income earners
but also some developments that have been done successfully using as | mentioned federal housing programs and not
much kind of in that that middle range. So while there is some supply, not much of that new construction, not much of the
new supply being built is really hitting into that middle of the market.
So the previous study really kind of summarized in a manner of saying, look we have growth that is going on, our current
housing stock can't accommodate it, so as a result, affordability is being effective. Creating new housing across a
continuum of price points and housing types will help serve not just new folks coming into Nashua but also folks that are
already here so they could be able to stay and find how price appropriate housing that particularly in the downtown area,
the opportunity, and the potential, and the desire, frankly, to see a greater diversity of housing pricing is there, and then
how do we then leverage those resources that we have as a city both the financial resources and our regulatory
resources.
The study came up with several recommendations on how the city can pursue that. Obviously, the one that we're talking
about here tonight is updating the inclusionary zoning regulations. For those maybe not as familiar with the terminology at
