As Sally Metheany neared 80 years old, she decided to sell her house in Warner, bidding farewell to her garden beds in favor of renting a more manageable apartment along Main Street.

Her new abode in downtown Warner sits at the top of a set of stairs, and Metheany knows she won’t be able to live there forever. Yet with limited available housing options, she wonders whether she’ll be able to age in place in town.

“I’m trying to figure out my future about staying in Warner because that’s what I want to do,” she said.

Metheany’s concerns are shared by many older Granite Staters since the current housing market limits options for the elderly. But the same is true for first-time home buyers, or frankly, anyone looking for an affordable place to live. Statewide the median home price just hit $500,000 and rental vacancy rates remain well below 1 percent.

But with the help of pandemic-era federal funding, communities like Warner are looking for solutions. With a new Housing Advisory Committee, residents in town are coming together to talk about what they’d like to see when it comes to housing, zoning adjustments and revisions to outdated Master Plans to lay the framework for years to come.

Housing committee

The big old house in Warner no longer fit Ian Roger’s family’s needs, so they split it into two. The five-bedroom house was crafted into an upstairs and downstairs apartment. On the inside, the house he grew up in looks nothing like the place where he currently lives, but this subdivision was one of the few options Rogers had when he moved back to his hometown a few years ago.

Rogers’ story is akin to most Warner residents who grew up in town and boomeranged back years later. He moved away for college, went even further for graduate school and ultimately spent time living overseas in Japan. When he came back stateside in his thirties, his hometown seemed like a plausible place to reset.

Except for the fact that he couldn’t find any housing.

“It was an obstacle, or at least it felt like it did, in a way that didn’t 10 years ago,” he said.

His own saga piqued an interest in a new reality in town that he hadn’t seen before – many were struggling to find places to live, and those that found places, did so at a heavy cost.

“This really is a serious problem that affects people of any age, socioeconomic class. It affects their ability to seize opportunities, pursue what they want to be pursuing,” he said. “They’re either struggling to find the housing they need or that’s close to where they want, or they’re just paying up the nose for it and then that’s creating other financial hazards.”

Rogers is now addressing these concerns with the Warner Housing Advisory Committee. Last year, the group was established as an offshoot of the town’s planning board to provide recommendations on all housing-related matters, with a goal to rewrite the housing section of the town’s outdated Master Plan from 2011.

The town received a Housing Opportunity Planning grant from the state’s InvestNH program, which set aside $100 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to accelerate housing development in the state. With the funding, Warner, alongside other communities like Boscawen and Hopkinton, worked with the Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission.

Rogers co-facilitates the committee alongside Bill Hanson, who moved to Warner in 2019 with his wife Karen Coyne, the current planning board chair.

Since July, the group has met monthly in the basement of Warner Town Hall, asking residents to share their “housing story.” In the fall, a table at the Fall Foliage Festival asked people to do the same. At the end of April, the group finished collecting responses to an online housing survey, which garnered over 400 responses.

Through these personal stories, Rogers hopes Warner residents will understand the town’s housing limitations, the challenges it presents and potential solutions for existing buildings. Warner can add to its housing stock without the need for a large-scale development, he said.

“When people talk about housing in Warner, they imagine it is more large developments. And that is simply not true,” he said. “There are many different ways to create housing for people.”

Old conversations

David Bates isn’t new to housing conversations, and concerns, in Warner.

Ahead of Town Meeting in 2021, Bates filed a citizen’s petition to change the town’s zoning ordinance. He wanted to allow for detached accessory dwelling units and apartments to sit atop businesses in the town’s “commercial district.”

The next year, he tried again. This time, he proposed allowing for multi-family homes in the low-density residential and open conservation districts. He also suggested removing minimum square footage requirements and allowing multi-family workforce housing, without a special exception approval, which was required.

In the proposal to the zoning board, Bates noted that his suggestions “intended to open a path for more housing options in our town without materially changing the footprint of development or character of the town.”

But in a rural, small community like Warner, changing the “character” of the town is often what residents turn to when speaking out against new development.

After Exit 9 off Interstate 89 was developed to include a Market Basket, McDonald’s and other commercial entities on the edge of town, proposals for a three-story, 24-unit apartment building came before the planning board in 2022. The project sparked uproar in the community about over-development and the town’s definitions of “workforce housing” as dictated by the zoning ordinance, complicated the project.

At the planning board meeting in December of 2022, when the project was ultimately withdrawn after months of meetings and public hearings, board members noted that better definitions and classification of manufactured and workforce housing in the master plan would help them make future decisions.

The outdated document itself, acknowledges that regulatory hurdles can challenge workforce housing development in town.

“Taken collectively, provisions such as frontage and setback standards, road standards, landscaping requirements, application fees, and lot sizing as they stand currently contribute to an exclusionary effect that potentially prevents the economically viable development of workforce housing,” reads the 2011 Master Plan.

Although the Exit 9 housing development did not get off the ground, it still circled in conversations this week at a community forum hosted by the housing committee. Bret Ingold, a local landlord, shared that he didn’t realize that the rent he charged tenants in his properties, was deemed “affordable” until he saw the prices developers were proposing compared to market rate options.

These anecdotes are what the committee is looking to develop into an action plan. With resident stories and data collection on the types of housing in Warner and what’s permitted under the current zoning, the group will recommend changes to the town’s housing chapter of the Master Plan by July.

Community forum

On the wall of Simonds Elementary School gym, a map of the town’s zoning code was littered with colorful marks – with residents identifying where they thought new housing could go in town. Next to it, a piece of paper with colored sticky notes asked residents to share their concerns about housing in town.

On a rainy Tuesday night, Warner residents gathered at the elementary school for the first of two community forums on housing, hosted by the advisory group.

In small group discussions, Rogers and other facilitators asked residents why they were interested in talking about housing in town. Metheany shared she wanted to age in place. Ingold came with a few perspectives in mind – as a landlord, a builder and a business owner. Charlie Albano wanted to present a solution after talking about senior housing on the town’s economic development advisory committee for the last several years.

With Magdalen College set to close this month, the town could provide senior housing for residents at the old college.

“If it’s a college environment, I know some senior housing that could be most comparable to those housing units,” he said. “Then there’s a kitchen, an activity area. I would put that at the top of the list when thinking about that opportunity.”

While senior housing is top of mind for many aging residents in town, others focused on supporting farmers. The Kawasiwajo Community Land Trust is in the midst of a capital campaign to purchase Foster Farm, at the end of a dirt road on the edge of town. Now, the farmhouse is the trust’s pilot project as an affordable rental.

Ingold, who is involved with the land trust, hopes that this will be a viable solution to maintain local property and keep prices affordable in town. To him, other larger land trusts, like one in Burlington, Vermont, provide a road map.

“It’s trying to figure out alternative ownership structures for land and properties to keep it affordable,” he said.

These solutions, though, and ideas for what housing can look like in Warner will help drive conversations on the master plan revision.

From there, zoning revisions could come before residents at next year’s Town Meeting in March. It’s a long arduous process, but one that Rogers has felt the need to execute over time.

“We are trying to figure out the housing situation, figure out what people want and let people know that we are there to listen and are there to communicate in some form,” he said.