“You can get stuck in one place or the other, and you can languish there for a while,” she said. “We all know that if that happens, money dries up, opportunity dries up, especially when we’re thinking about an interest rate environment like you’ve been in that makes a big difference in terms of how you can finance the project.”
She pointed to four state agencies where housing developments can get delayed: the Department of Transportation, the Department of Environmental Services, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, and the Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.
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“Unfortunately, there’s no one system,” she said. “There’s not congruency between all those agencies.”
Ayotte also said she will look at different financing structures that have been successful in other states, such as commercial property assessed clean energy, or CPACE, where building owners borrow money for energy efficiency, renewable energy, or other projects and repay it through an assessment on their property tax bill.
It doesn’t require upfront costs and can be used to finance new construction, retrofits and rehabilitation, Mansoor Ghori, a C-PACE provider explained in Forbes.
It’s increasingly being used to fund the construction of new buildings, according to the US Department of Energy. There is enabling legislation in 40 states and D.C. and 32 states and D.C. have active programs, according to PACE Nation.
Senator Daniel Innis, a Bradford Republican, has requested legislation on the topic that Ayotte said she will be watching.
The housing crisis Ayotte is inheriting remains challenging.
New Hampshire is among the top 10 states for rising housing prices, according to Katy Easterly Martey, executive director of the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority who also serves on the New Hampshire Council on Housing Stability.
“When you have rising housing prices as acutely and quickly as we’ve had here in New Hampshire, we’re going to have rising housing instability, a lot in the form of homelessness,” Easterly Martey said.
She said housing instability will continue to rise for a few more years, until the supply of housing catches up with demand. And she said the cost of providing shelter has increased since the pandemic because there are fewer volunteers providing services.
“The cost of providing shelter and the complexity of doing so in a meaningful way has really increased,” she said.
In the past three years, there has been little to no change in the amount of buildable area for most kinds of housing, according to the latest data from the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, a statewide database and interactive map on zoning laws.
“In most communities in New Hampshire, it’s still difficult to build anything but large-lot, single family homes,” said Noah Hodgetts, a principal planner at the N.H. Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
He said the solution is for communities to change their zoning and make it easier to build smaller, more affordable homes on smaller lots.
Recent polling found that a majority of respondents want the state to push communities to make it easier to develop housing: 63 percent of New Hampshire voters agreed, showing “growing skepticism about local control,” according to a 2024 statewide survey from Saint Anselm.
Ayotte made clear her approach to working with local communities will involve more carrot than stick.
“If the state models good behavior, it’s a lot easier for me to say to local planning and zoning and going, like, listen, we’re modeling good behavior. How do we work with you to make sure you’re modeling good behavior too in your communities,” she said.
Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.com. Follow her @amanda_gokee.
