Lisa Morales of Keene finally received her housing voucher after 18 months of waiting — a relatively short time compared to the sometimes years-long process others face in obtaining one. Waiting was not the main issue she encountered, however — finding a landlord who would accept her voucher remains her bigger worry.

Morales explained that her current landlord, Princeton Properties, does not accept housing vouchers, and she only has until March 19 to find a new apartment that will accept one. Her alternative would be renewing her current lease and pay a rent that is far too high for her to comfortably afford, she said.

Morales said she currently pays $1,575 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. The rent is being raised to $1,640. She won’t know her voucher amount until she receives it.

“The rent increase is more than my Social Security increase,” said Morales.

Princeton Properties initially refused to renegotiate her 12-month lease to six months — to match the maximum amount of time typically given to find a place that accepts a voucher.  But she was able to them to agree to a shorter 10-month lease, still at the higher rent, she said.

This puts her in a possible difficult situation if she finds a landlord that accepts vouchers: either pay the remaining months of rent on her current lease as well as rent on a new place that takes a voucher, or, pay to break the 10-month lease, which is expensive. That is, unless she can find a place before March 19, when her current lease is up.

Her task is not an easy one. Landlords who accept housing vouchers in New Hampshire are hard to come by and are picky when it comes to them, making her time constraint all the more worrisome.

 “Somebody who’s applied to [the voucher] program might not have a perfect rental history. Certainly their income is going to be limited,” said Jennifer Chisholm, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness. “So there might be some things that, if I’m a landlord who sort of just takes the cream of the crop, they’re not going to look at me, they’re gonna look at somebody else.”

This is only one of the many issues facing low-income individuals and families applying for affordable housing and Section 8 vouchers. Waitlists for vouchers that span several years, barriers to finding places accepting vouchers, and rising costs are among the many challenges  facing them amid New Hampshire’s continuing, complicated housing crisis. 

Affordable housing waitlists

According to Denise Pratt, director of the Keene Housing Authority, the agency’s affordable housing waitlist currently has 853 applicants.

“The shortest amount of time that people are on the waiting list is one and a half years, and that’s for units of three or four bedrooms,” said Pratt. She added that for one of the authority’s senior housing properties, the waitlist is eight years long.

The authority’s voucher waitlist has 2,510 people on it, which translates to a wait of four years.

Pratt emphasized that Keene is trying to find solutions.

“Keene Housing is doing its best to also develop new affordable housing, in order to help meet needs in the area,” said Pratt. “We have a property in mind on Washington Street that we’re hoping to be able to purchase in the near future … that would be 60 units.”

The Portsmouth Housing Authority’s waitlist had 1,941 applicants seeking affordable housing in January, and 501 on the voucher waitlist. 

Craig Welch, director of Portsmouth Housing, said the wait times differ as some people are prioritized over others, including those who are elderly, disabled, veterans or who are already living or working in Portsmouth. 

For those individuals, Welch said, the waitlist may only be a matter of months.

However, he added, “if you don’t fit those particular preferences, then you could be on the waitlist forever.”

Stacey Price, director of the Rochester Housing Authority, said the public housing waitlist has 840 applicants currently, and only 232 units available. The voucher waitlist has 549 applicants but only 190 vouchers are available.

Price said they are currently pulling from 2018-19 applicants on the waitlist, making it five to six years long.

The situation in Concord has gotten so difficult — with thousands on the waitlist — that Concord Housing and Redevelopment, the agency that oversees public housing and housing assistance in the Capital City, paused its housing voucher program on March 1. 

“Applicants are frustrated with the wait time and feel they are being given false hope of being housed in our portfolio,” Julie Palmeri, executive director of Concord Housing and Redevelopment, said in a statement to the Concord Monitor. “For this reason, we decided to close our waitlists and will reopen when the list reaches a manageable level, which we deemed to be a one-year wait time.”

New Hampshire Housing is a statewide housing authority that operates similarly to the local agencies, except that it does not own or manage specific affordable housing units, but instead solely provides vouchers. 

Dee Pouliot, executive director of NH Housing’s Assisted Housing Division, said they have 4,300 vouchers, 900 of which are used by families and the rest are used by elderly or disabled individuals. Their voucher waitlist, she said, is between five and seven years long. 

Not enough landlords

The “choice” element is what makes the housing voucher so attractive, as opposed to other affordable housing options, Pouliot explained. However, people have faced other issues with obtaining them besides the waitlists.

One of these is the lack of landlords who are willing to rent to voucher holders. 

Chisholm said even with extensions that typically allow holders up to 6 months to find an apartment, they often cannot find a landlord who will accept them.

“So then they lose their voucher,” Chisholm said. “And what happens is they go to the bottom of that year’s long waiting list again.”

Miguel Picano, of Lebanon, never had the chance to use his voucher due to restrictions on shared living spaces. 

At the time his voucher was finally issued to him, Picano had just secured a job as manager of a McDonald’s and was living in an apartment with three roommates in Keene. His current landlord had agreed to accept his voucher. However, the fine print on his voucher restricted the holder from being able to split a rental unit with others and apply the voucher towards just their portion of the rent. 

Despite looking for housing that would qualify, he never was able to find any. Picano was specifically looking for shared housing, as single- bedroom places were too expensive to afford even with the voucher. 

Pratt clarified that Keene Housing does accept shared housing vouchers, but oftentimes there are specific requirements when it comes to who can utilize a voucher in a shared space, and where the unit is located, as local zoning can sometimes create additional barriers.

“It strikes me as extremely odd — the red tape involved with the housing voucher program, which I understand has to protect itself, but it kind of becomes moot when it’s completely useless,” Picano said.

Eventually, when his voucher expired, Picano landed a job that paid just enough that he did not qualify for the voucher program anymore.

“I still was right at the poverty line,” he said.  “And for some reason, that’s not enough to qualify for housing vouchers.”

Chisholm added that another issue that arises with obtaining vouchers is often that those who do not have stable living situations will have frequent address changes, due to living on friends’ or family members’ couches, or even being without an official address for a while.

“I’ve seen people where the authority has attempted to reach out to say, ‘Hey, your name is coming up on the list,’ but unfortunately, they’ve missed the communication, just because [their address] can just change so frequently,” she said.

Lack of available units

Pouliot said the main issue NH Housing faces when it comes to housing vouchers is that turnover is so low.

On average, about 25 people leave their program each month and open up spots for someone new. However, this number doesn’t compare to that of new applicants.

“Since February 1, we’ve had over 200 people apply,” she said.

She added that there is no limit to how long one can stay on the voucher program. And, over time, people have needed to stay on the voucher program for longer.

“Once someone has the voucher, the average time they stay on the program is up to 10 years,” she said. “If you’re going to have a voucher for 10 years, and hundreds of people keep applying, you’re gonna get this imbalance of supply and demand.”

Another factor is that 75% of new admissions have to be in the “extremely low income” category, which NH Housing defines as “a low-income family whose annual income does not exceed 30 percent of the median family income of a geographic area.”

 “Those households tend to be persons with disabilities, seniors, people with extremely low income and are going to need help paying their rent for a lot longer,” Pouliot explained.

Simply put, there are not enough housing units.

Chisholm said that typically, the rental vacancy rate, which she defined as the percentage of rental units that are available at any given time to be rented, should be around 5 percent. 

According to NH Housing’s 2023 Residential Rental Cost Survey Report, NH’s vacancy rate sits at 0.6 percent. Chisholm added that some parts of the state were coming in at around 0.3 percent.

“It’s critically low,” she said.  “We’re talking about crisis low.”

Welch agreed.

“It’s a game of musical chairs,” he said. “You’ve got between 2 and 5 million housing units short in the United States.”

Welch added that in order to meet the demand in Portsmouth alone, 1,500 new affordable housing units would need to be built by the end of the decade.

“And over the 17 years that we’ve been in operation, we’re averaging nine units a year. So do the math on that — if we’ve got six more years in this decade, we need 1,500 more units, and we’re producing nine more a year, it’s not even remotely close to filling the demand.”

The Portsmouth Housing Authority completed its newest project in 2022 — Ruth Lewin Griffin Place on Court Street, which comprises 64 units.

“It took six years to build that. We had to battle through lawsuits. Absolutely frivolous, disgraceful lawsuits that wasted 18 months and another million dollars. And in the middle of a housing crisis, that kind of stuff happens.” Welch said.  “If it takes us six years to build 64 units, then it’s going to be really hard.”

Price echoed the frustration, emphasizing that the Rochester Housing Authority has struggled to find affordable land to build new units.

“Trying to find land, and affordable land at that, is very hard to come by,” she said. “Obviously, the pandemic made everything skyrocket as far as pricing is concerned. So it’s extremely expensive at this point to build new.”

Median rents and median incomes

In addition to the lack of affordable housing units, another reason for long affordable housing waitlists, is skyrocketing rent prices.

According to NH Housing’s 2023 residential rent cost survey, median renter income is $51,432. However, $1,764 is the median gross rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in New Hampshire. That would mean the average renter would need an income of $70,600 to afford the median rent. 

In addition, one in four households make less than $50,000 a year and  one in six make less than $35,000 according to a 2022 report from the NH Fiscal Policy Institute.

The same report also said for that time period there was a statewide annual increase of 11.4 percent in monthly median gross rent for two-bedroom units. 

To add to this, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that of all 50 states, New Hampshire and Vermont experienced the most drastic inflation-adjusted declines in median household income. According to the bureau, the buying power of the median New Hampshire household in 2022 dollars actually declined by over 5%.

In Rochester, “rents have increased substantially over the last few years, which has really pushed a lot of people out. The majority of our applicants are receiving Social Security benefits, and they can’t afford the rents that are being charged right now,” said Price. “It’s really creating more of the homeless population, unfortunately. So the need for affordable housing is really, really great in our area.”

Welch added that even if people do have accommodations, many are still cost burdened by the skyrocketing costs of housing in New Hampshire. 

 “There are a lot of people who do have a place to live, but when they’re spending more than 50% of their income on rent, it’s debilitating. You can’t go back to school, you can’t improve yourself, you’re working two, three jobs in order to do that,” he explained. “There’s just no way to catch up.”

He added that, typically, people who spend over 30 percent of their income on rent are considered cost-burdened. And with that, he noted that 30 percent going towards rent is still a lot for someone with a $20,000 salary, which looks a lot different than 30 percent of a $100,000 salary.

What are the solutions?

Housing officials emphasized that the bottom line is finding ways to create more affordable housing. For instance, Price said that if more businesses and individuals donated land for affordable housing development, it could open up more opportunities.

“We’ve received some land in the past that was donated to us, which made development much easier,” said Price. “It was a tax write-off for the company that donated the land.”

Pouliot also said NH Housing is offering $1,000 incentives for landlords to participate in the voucher program. The NH Housing landlord incentive lists other benefits of being in the voucher program, including a guaranteed “direct deposit for on-time, reliable monthly payments” and a “built-in supply of potential tenants.” Dee said she hopes educating landlords on these incentives will grow the number of participating landlords.

Chisholm also said it’s time to look at state zoning ordinances that prohibit new units in certain areas.

Currently, most communities in New Hampshire have zoning ordinances that prohibit or greatly restrict construction of single-family homes on small lots — those that are less than an acre and with less than 200 feet of road frontage, according to the NH Zoning Atlas created by St. Anselm College.

Chisholm also stated the importance of accessory dwelling units, which are housing units attached to or on a homeowner’s property. 

However, the NH Zoning Atlas outlined that often the approval process for accessory dwelling units is time-consuming and costly. In addition, some areas require extra parking for these units, which can prevent people from being able to build them.

Fear of the unknown

Craig Welch said one of the biggest issues in wealthier communities is a fear of low-income individuals and families coming to their areas. Many attempts at building affordable housing in certain places, such as Portsmouth, he said, have been met with backlash.

“I think it’s morally wrong to be opposing opportunities for other citizens to have a place to live,” Welch said.

Chisholm emphasized the importance of public education as one of the biggest solutions when it comes to the housing crisis.

“It’s going to take some public education because, oftentimes we bump into that ‘not in my backyard’ the NIMBYism,” said Chisholm. “I think there’s a real fear of the unknown.”

Picano, the tenant who was prevented from using a voucher, also emphasized the importance of breaking down stereotypes associated with low-income individuals.

“It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can still be a terrible tenant or that terrible roommate or terrible neighbor,” he said.

Welch said much of the objection in communities to low-income housing “goes beyond rationality.”

“People bring up a lot of different objections, which really is code for, they don’t want to live next to people with low incomes. And I think that is a complete misunderstanding, at best, and it’s blatantly discriminatory, at worst.”

Despite the mounting pressures of the housing crisis and current barriers to affordable housing, Chisholm holds some hope.

“The legislative session is open now. And so there are a lot of bills that touch housing and homelessness,” she said. The recognition of [the housing crisis] is at a level that I haven’t seen before, which is wonderful. People are paying attention.”

These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.