By Granite State Report
New Hampshire House Bill 1196 does not pretend to solve the state’s housing crisis. It does something far worse: it quietly retreats from it.
HB 1196 repeals the state’s housing champion designation and grant program—one of the few mechanisms designed to encourage municipalities to participate in solving a crisis they routinely benefit from but rarely confront. The bill’s sponsors—Reps. Matt Drew, Kristin Noble, Tom Mannion, Mike Belcher, Leonard Turcotte, and Sayra Devito—are asking the legislature to accept scarcity as inevitable and disengagement as policy.
This is not fiscal responsibility. It is surrender.
New Hampshire is facing a historic housing shortage. Rents are rising faster than wages. Young families are leaving the state. Employers cannot hire. Seniors cannot downsize. Emergency rooms are backfilled with people who should be housed, not hospitalized. Against that backdrop, HB 1196 proposes that the state do less—specifically, that it abandon incentives for local governments to build.
That choice carries moral weight.
The housing champion program did not force towns to do anything. It offered modest grants and recognition to municipalities willing to take on the political risk of approving housing. It acknowledged a basic truth of New Hampshire governance: that local officials often face intense opposition for doing the right thing, and that the state has a role in sharing both the burden and the credit.
HB 1196 removes that support and pretends nothing will change.
But things will change. Towns already inclined to block housing will see repeal as validation. Officials who were on the fence will take the safer path of inaction. And the message to working families will be unmistakable: the state knows there is a crisis, and it has decided not to lead.
The sponsors of HB 1196 frame repeal as a matter of principle—local control, limited government, skepticism of incentives. That argument collapses on contact with reality. The state already intervenes when local control fails. It intervenes in education funding, environmental protection, transportation, and public health. Housing is no different—except that the consequences of failure are more visible and more brutal.
There is also something profoundly dishonest about repealing a program because it is “insufficient” without replacing it with anything at all. If the housing champion program was too small, the responsible response would be to strengthen it, refine it, or expand it. Repeal without replacement is not reform. It is abdication disguised as purity.
And let’s be clear about who benefits from that abdication.
Homeowners with secure housing will be fine. Municipalities that prefer exclusion will be relieved. But renters, young workers, seniors, and low- to middle-income families will pay the price—through higher costs, longer commutes, overcrowding, and displacement. HB 1196 chooses those outcomes knowingly.
That is the moral failure at the center of this bill.
New Hampshire’s housing crisis is not an abstraction. It is a daily stressor that shapes who can live here, who can work here, and who can stay here. A legislature that responds to that crisis by dismantling one of the few pro-housing tools on the books is not neutral. It is complicit.
HB 1196 should be rejected not because it is controversial, but because it is unserious. It reflects a governing philosophy that mistakes withdrawal for restraint and treats human need as someone else’s problem.
Leadership means confronting hard realities, not repealing modest efforts because they offend ideological sensibilities. New Hampshire does not need less responsibility from its lawmakers. It needs more.
HB 1196 offers none.
https://gc.nh.gov/bill_status/legacy/bs2016/billText.aspx?sy=2026&id=1506&txtFormat=html
