New Hampshire
New Hampshire real estate: How people from Mass. drive up prices – The Boston Globe
Right here’s one various to the actual property affordability disaster in Massachusetts: Go away.
Over the previous couple of years, extra individuals have been shifting out of Massachusetts than shifting in. And one of the well-liked locations is New Hampshire, the land of a decrease price of residing, no gross sales tax, and no revenue tax (property taxes are sometimes larger, although).
“Homes are extra reasonably priced than they’re in Massachusetts,” says Invoice Weidacher, working companion of Keller Williams Realty Metropolitan, which has places of work in Bedford, Londonderry, Keene, and Harmony, New Hampshire. “And folks can nonetheless work in Massachusetts fairly simply and personal a house in Southern New Hampshire.”
If they’ll discover one, that’s. Over the previous 5 years, the common stock of single-family properties on the market statewide plummeted 70 p.c, from 5,926 to only 1,791. In the meantime, excessive demand pushed the statewide median from $266,000 in 2017 to $440,000 in 2022, in keeping with the New Hampshire Affiliation of Realtors. (Not nice for patrons, however that’s nonetheless 25 p.c decrease than the Massachusetts median of $550,000.)
One other factor New Hampshire doesn’t have loads of: range. The state inhabitants is 1.9 p.c Black, for instance, and 4.3 p.c Hispanic or Latino, in keeping with the 2020 Census. Development in youthful populations of individuals of colour within the state will hopefully begin to change that, with an estimated 16 to 18 p.c of the under-18 inhabitants figuring out as BIPOC and/or Hispanic. Weidacher says he’s additionally been speaking with the NAACP about the way to diversify the pool of actual property brokers. “I simply imagine that the realtor group may very well be higher served with range, in order for you higher range in housing,” he says.
One of many hottest New Hampshire spots is Hillsborough County, which incorporates Manchester and Nashua. Greater than 4,000 Massachusetts residents moved to the county in 2020, in keeping with the Pioneer Institute, a Boston suppose tank. Consumers are drawn to locations like Goffstown, a city identified for its charming middle, good colleges, Saint Anselm Faculty, and the Annual Large Pumpkin Regatta on the Piscataquog River. It’s a 10-minute commute to Manchester and about an hour and quarter-hour to Boston down Interstate 93.
The curiosity in Goffstown is altering the real-estate figures quick. The median value of a single-family — $441,000 — is up 65 p.c since 2017, and the common variety of days available on the market has dropped from 35 to 10, in accordance the state realtors affiliation.
One cause for Goffstown’s reputation is that it’s good for households, says Carroll Berg III, 38, whose dad and mom moved to the city from Massachusetts almost 40 years in the past to begin their household. He’s a graphic designer with a advertising firm — he lived and labored in Portland, Maine, for a stint, earlier than returning to Goffstown — and his spouse, Marissa, 36, works for an affiliation of companies serving adults with developmental disabilities and volunteers with the Fundamental Road enterprise group. They personal an 1888 house within the village and each their kids, ages 9 and 15, go to Goffstown colleges. They just like the city’s walkability, comfort, and group spirit.
“There’s all the time one thing happening,” Berg says. He ticks off occasions comparable to Springfest, with its enterprise exposition and children carnival, in addition to the pumpkin regatta, which includes paddling an enormous pumpkin down the river. “We’re 20 minutes from Pats Peak, which is a fairly ski space. So there’s winter stuff to do. Glen Lake — you possibly can skate on it in order for you. You possibly can swim in it. That’s 5 minutes down the highway.”
The city is nice for youths, Marissa Berg says. It has a busy kids’s sports activities scene — Goffstown narrowly misplaced to Harmony for the Little League state championship final 12 months — and an old style vibe. “Simply listening to folks reminisce concerning the instances when the children would simply run round and play within the neighborhood till the road lights got here on,” she says. “It’s [still] very, very very like that.”
Susan Moeller is a daily contributor to the Globe Journal. Ship feedback to journal@globe.com
New Hampshire
Here’s why the verdict in New Hampshire’s landmark trial over youth center abuse is being disputed – The Boston Globe
No hearing has been scheduled, but here are some things to know about how the dispute unfolded.
THE TRIAL
Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents of what is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades.
Meehan’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial. Over four weeks, his attorneys contended that the state encouraged a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence.
The state portrayed Meehan as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and delusional adult lying to get money. Defense attorneys also said the state was not liable for the conduct of rogue employees and that Meehan waited too long to sue.
THE VERDICT
Jurors unanimously agreed that Meehan filed his lawsuit in a timely fashion, that he was injured at the facility and that the state’s negligence caused his injuries. They awarded him $18 million in compensatory damages and an additional $20 million in enhanced damages after finding the state acted with reckless indifference or abused its power.
Jurors were unaware of the state law that caps damages at $475,000 per incident. When asked on the verdict form how many incidents they found Meehan had proven, they wrote “one.”
WHAT COUNTS AS AN INCIDENT?
That’s where it gets tricky.
In pre-verdict discussions without the jury present, lawyers for the state argued that all of Meehan’s claims arose out of a single incident of alleged negligence. Meehan’s lawyers insisted that each act of physical or sexual abuse be counted as a separate incident, even those that happened simultaneously.
“Merely raping a kid is bad enough, but it’s even worse, and a separate incident, if it also involves hitting him in the head or kicking him in the ribs or other things to get him to comply,” Meehan’s attorney David Vicinanzo said.
At one point, the judge considered including a list of the type of abuse alleged on each date on the verdict form and asking jurors to determine whether an injury occurred and whether the state was liable. But the state argued that providing such a list would be prejudicial to Meehan’s side.
Judge Andrew Schulman said he disagreed with both parties and if forced to define “incident,” he would consider all the acts that happened in a given “episode” to be one incident. That put him closer to the plaintiff’s view, but in the end, he said he would leave it up to the state Supreme Court to settle.
“Why go out and define something that there’s a 50% chance of being wrong if it doesn’t need to be defined in the first place?” he said. “They can deal with it, but I don’t think I have to.”
Attorney Martha Gaythwaite, representing the state, did not address the issue in her closing statement to jurors. Vicinanzo told the jury that Meehan was raped an estimated 200 times, beaten 200 times and held in unjustified solitary confinement for roughly 100 days.
“I want to emphasize to you that the numbers are very important,” he said.
In his verbal instructions to the jury, Schulman said that rather than asking jurors to list “incident by incident” decisions, he asked for “just the number of incidents for which you find liability based on timely claims.” The verdict form itself defined incident as a “(a) single episode during which the plaintiff was injured; (b) for which injuries the jury has found DHHS liable in response to previous questions; (c) on claims the jury found to be timely claims in response to question 1.”
In response to that question, the jury wrote “one.”
BUT WHAT DID THEY MEAN?
One juror explained it like this: “We wrote on our verdict form that there was 1 incident/injury, being complex PTSD, from the result of 100+ injuries (Sexual, Physical, emotional abuse),” the juror wrote in an email to Meehan’s attorneys. “We were never informed of a cap being placed per incident of abuse and that is wrong how the question was worded to us.
“The state is making their own interpretation of the ruling that we made, and that is not right for them to assume our position,” the juror wrote. “David should be entitled to what we awarded him, which was $38 million.”
In separate emails to the attorneys, the jury foreperson described a sleepless night of crying after learning about the cap.
“We had no idea,” the jury foreperson wrote. “Had we known that the settlement amount was to be on a per incident basis, I assure you, our outcome would have reflected it. I pray that Mr. Meehan realizes this and is made as whole as he can possibly be within a proper amount of time.”
In an interview with StateScoop last week, New Hampshire Chief Information Officer Denis Goulet said the state’s multiyear effort to retool its online citizens services, which include website redesigns and new accessibility features, started with evangelizing state agencies that were initially reluctant to participate.
“I was going to every agency and talking to them about how you flip around the perspective” Goulet said. “I told them straight up their opinion on whether their website is good or not doesn’t matter. It’s their constituents opinion that matters.”
Goulet said the New Hampshire Department of Technology has moved about 70% of the executive branch agency websites to a cloud platform and that they now share a common design. He said the standardized online appearance of the state government has garnered good feedback.
Goulet said the new website platform has expanded traffic-monitoring capabilities, which were put to the test during the COVID-19 pandemic when many state websites saw high traffic. He said that stress test eliminated worry of future crashes.
Goulet said the platform was also built to be “accessible by default,” but that adding new documents or applications to the platform and making them accessible requires additional work, so his office is training agency leaders how to do that. He said the Department of Justice’s release last month of final accessibility rules regarding state and local web and application content has been helpful.
“I’m getting [state agencies] calling me saying, ‘Alright, what are we going to do?’ That’s perfect. So I think we’re really going to up our game in New Hampshire based on just using that as a lever to help us make it important,” Goulet said.
Goulet said he hopes that within six months the state will have a new business services portal running. He called it a “transformational event” for New Hampshire.
“I really do think that for anybody that’s working on citizen experience or user experience, flip the perspective, go to the people who you’re serving to determine if you’re doing it right,” he said.
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