To Matt Walsh, Concord’s housing market is a mixed blessing.

In 2023, New Hampshire’s capital city was 10th on the list of most popular markets on Zillow. It shows Concord is attractive – people want to raise a family in the city and post-pandemic trends mean smaller cities closer to outdoor recreation are more popular, said Walsh. It also means that like most places across the country, a housing shortage is spiking home prices and squeezing renters, with costly median prices.

City leaders, developers and residents alike can agree that to solve the state’s current crisis municipalities need to allow more new housing to be built. Concord has 570 units that are currently under construction or have been recently completed.

About 780 more units across 10 projects have been approved but construction has not yet started. Another 985 are in the planning process. That’s 2,300 units more or else in the pipeline, which excludes a mixed-use development with up to 1,000 units that stalled due to negotiations with the city over zoning.

“I’ve met more people in Concord recently that are buying houses or building houses… they’re coming here because of climate change,” said Walsh, Concord’s deputy city manager of development. “I’ve met more Californians than I’ve met in a long, long time.”

In the current market, a median home price of $500,000 is emphasizing the need for a “missing middle” of housing. Potential first-time buyers are currently priced out of home ownership, remaining stagnant in the rental market. The lack of turnover means that apartments are scarce – the current vacancy rate is less than 1 percent – and when an apartment is available, rent is often expensive. Rental prices have increased by almost 30 percent, according to Walsh.

Throughout the last year, and looking ahead, Concord residents will see a variety of new developments come to completion.

The Isabella Apartments opened its doors this summer at the site of the former state employment security building. The John Flatley Company, a Massachusetts developer, built 64 market-rate apartments in the space, which was formerly owned by the city before it sold the site in 2022. One-bedroom apartments can be as expensive as $1,700 a month.

On the other end of the spectrum on Pleasant Street, a house was converted into six one-bedroom apartments, providing permanent supportive housing for Concord’s Coalition to End Homelessness. Each unit comes with case management services, as all tenants are transitioning out of homelessness.

Earlier this spring, the Caleb Group, a Massachusetts developer, celebrated the opening of Penacook Landing Phase 2. The 54-unit project marks the end of a decade-long partnership with the city that involved a Tax Increment Financing district for site improvements, extensive environmental clean-up and Community Development Block Grant financing.

The new developments present a mix of affordable income-restricted housing, and market-rate units.

At the October Concord City Council meeting, Walsh provided an update on recently completed and ongoing developments, presenting data on affordable rental units from New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority.

Of the 2,352 units in development, 425 units are affordable, according to Walsh. That accounts for 18 percent of all units.

The Davis Ridge Apartments comprises 48 of those affordable units. The latest development from CATCH Housing opened this week off of Sheep Davis Road with a visit from U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan.

Financing an affordable housing project requires a complex collaboration between the city of Concord, state funding and federal assistance, through the form of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, said Tom Furtado, the CEO of CATCH Housing.

The $13 million project utilized $8.8 million in low income housing tax credits and also received $1.8 million from the state’s Invest NH program, which was created with federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

Shaheen praised the collaboration as a model for other housing developments in the area.

“These kinds of projects, these kinds of partnerships, are so critical,” she said. “Projects like this help people recognize just how important it is to have more affordable housing.”

Funding aside, zoning can be another impediment to increasing the state’s housing stock. Shaheen looks to her own town of Madbury – where restrictive zoning like requiring minimum lot sizes or preventing multifamily developments – are barriers to development.

For towns and cities included in the central New Hampshire region – which included most of Merrimack County – a handful of towns, including Bradford, Deering, Dunbarton, Salisbury, Sutton and Webster have no income-restricted, or affordable, units. To Walsh, these places are “not doing their fair share.”

“When you hear discussion about changing zoning and other things, I don’t think those comments are necessarily reflected at us,” he said. “I think they’re reflected at other communities.”

Concord planned to revamp its zoning ordinances with a project Concord Next that has since been stalled despite having public information sessions about plans and draft codes in 2022. City leaders have since said this effort will be abandoned until the Master Plan is updated, which will take about four years.

One major Concord project stalled when city staff told developers of a proposed mixed-use project off Sewalls Falls Road on nearly 140 acres that no requests to rezone land would be heard until updates to the Master Plan were complete.

The project would bring nearly 1,000 units – over 700 rentals and 150 units designated as affordable housing. Yet, recent communication with developer New England Family Housing indicates that the city will consider their request to rezone a smaller portion of the land, which would include 194 units on 40 acres.

Walsh highlighted several other projects that are currently in permitting, including the former Steeplegate Mall and Regal Cinema – which the city is supporting with an adopted $25 million sewer upgrade for the Heights neighborhood. Further public-private partnerships are also under consideration, he said.

Several projects are also permitted and awaiting construction. Dakota Partners, a Massachusetts-based developer, recently completed the first phase of their Railyards project, bringing 98 units of housing to the South End of Concord.

However, the city is still awaiting word as to whether or not a different developer will take over the final phases of the plan, which includes building 96 additional units, according to Walsh.

The first phase of the project included 10 project-based vouchers, which provide rental assistance for people transitioning out of homelessness, and the second phase has been approved, just pending a construction schedule.

On Fisherville Road, 83 townhomes will be built for purchase and priced at market rate. On Old Loudon Road, 144 rental units for seniors have been approved. The project is pending construction with an estimated completion date of late 2026, early 2027 and will be priced at market rate.

To Walsh, the projects as a whole embody larger efforts by the city to build more housing.

“There’s a lot going on,” he said. “I don’t know if the community appreciates how much is going on in that regard.”