Half a Million and Climbing

New Hampshire’s median home price hit $530,000 in March. Gov. Ayotte responded by zeroing out the state’s two biggest housing production programs. In the Lakes Region, a teacher earning the median salary can’t afford a house in the district where she works. This is what a housing crisis looks like when the people in charge decide to stop treating it as one.

The headline from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors last week was designed to sound like good news: the median price of a single-family home in March was $530,000, up just 1 percent from the year before. The smallest year-over-year increase since May 2023. Price growth is “beginning to ease.” The market, in the industry’s preferred framing, is “stabilizing.”

Stabilizing at what? At a price that requires 56.6 percent of the median wage to purchase in Rockingham County. At 54.4 percent in Strafford. At 50.2 percent in Merrimack. At a level where a two-income household earning the state’s median of roughly $97,000 a year cannot qualify for a mortgage on the median-priced house without stretching past every conventional lending benchmark. At a price that has risen 78 percent since 2019 while wages have risen 28 percent. The market is stabilizing the way a car stabilizes after driving off a cliff — the acceleration slows, but the ground is still coming.

What makes this spring different from the last three brutal springs in New Hampshire real estate is not what the market is doing. It’s what the state is doing. Or, more precisely, what it stopped doing.

The Money That Disappeared

In the 2024–2025 state budget, New Hampshire committed $10 million to the Invest New Hampshire program, which helped developers build multifamily housing. It committed $25 million to the Affordable Housing Fund, which provided loans for projects serving low- and moderate-income residents. Neither program solved the crisis. Both were real money aimed at real construction, the kind of direct investment that puts shovels in the ground and units on the market.

In the 2026–2027 budget, Gov. Kelly Ayotte zeroed both accounts out. Invest NH: zero. Affordable Housing Fund: zero. Thirty-five million dollars in housing production support, eliminated. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute noted the obvious: the cuts “could constrain future projects and developments.” That’s a think-tank understatement for what it actually means. It means that in the middle of the worst housing affordability crisis in state history, the governor decided the state should stop spending money on housing.

The Ayotte administration’s defense is regulatory reform. The legislature passed “homes near jobs” legislation allowing multifamily construction on commercially zoned land. It legalized accessory dwelling units by right. It streamlined the permitting process to require decisions within 60 days. But zoning changes don’t build houses. Capital builds houses. And the capital just got cut.

Regulatory reform without financial investment is the policy equivalent of opening a door and removing the floor behind it. You’ve technically reduced the barrier to entry. You’ve also eliminated the path to getting there.

The Wage-Price Canyon

The gap between what New Hampshire workers earn and what New Hampshire houses cost is not a gap anymore. It’s a canyon, and it widened during every year of the pandemic recovery while Chris Sununu’s administration congratulated itself on the state’s economic resilience and Ayotte ran for governor on an affordability platform.

Since 2019, the median price of a single-family home in New Hampshire rose 78.3 percent. Median household income rose roughly 28 percent over the same period. That means house prices grew nearly three times faster than wages. In 1999, the median home cost $135,000. Today it costs $530,000. The trajectory isn’t a market cycle. It’s a structural exclusion — an economic gate that slams shut on anyone who didn’t buy before the pandemic.

The rental market offers no escape. A full-time worker in New Hampshire needs to earn $35.08 an hour — nearly $73,000 a year — to afford the average two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing. The statewide median rent for a two-bedroom hit $1,824. Across the state, just 13 percent of available two-bedroom units qualify as “affordable” by federal standards. In Belknap County, median rent for a two-bedroom climbed to $1,521 in 2024, up 44 percent from 2019.

A starting teacher in Concord, a firefighter in Laconia, a nurse at Lakes Region General Hospital — none of them can afford the median home in the county where they work. They can rent, if they find a unit, at prices that consume a third or more of their income. Or they can commute from somewhere cheaper, burning $4-plus gas on roads without public transit, paying for the housing crisis at the pump instead of the closing table.

The Concord Warning

If you want to see what happens when the housing crisis meets the education funding crisis, look at Concord. The state capital’s Board of Education just approved a 12.2 percent property tax increase for the coming year — more than double the board’s own stated ceiling of 5 percent — while cutting nearly 40 staff positions, many of them teachers. Concord High School alone lost the equivalent of 14 full-time staff.

The math behind that tax hike is a lesson in how New Hampshire’s funding formula punishes success. Because Concord’s equalized property values have risen — driven by the same housing price surge that makes homes unaffordable — the state calculates the city as less “needy.” Concord received $2.8 million less in state education funding this year. Rising home prices made the city look richer on paper. In practice, they made the schools poorer.

This is the feedback loop that nobody in the governor’s office wants to diagram. Higher home prices raise property values. Higher property values reduce state aid. Reduced state aid forces higher local property taxes. Higher property taxes make housing even more expensive. The crisis feeds itself, and the state’s funding formula is the mechanism that keeps it spinning.

Ayotte’s administration is simultaneously challenging the Claremont education funding decisions at the state Supreme Court — an effort to loosen the constitutional obligation to fund public schools adequately. If she succeeds, the formula that already punishes Concord for rising property values could be replaced with something even less responsive to local need. The teachers being laid off in Concord are collateral damage in a policy architecture that treats rising housing costs as evidence of prosperity rather than distress.

The Lakes Region Test

Drive Route 3 from Laconia to Meredith and the “For Sale” signs tell a story the statewide median doesn’t capture. In Belknap County, the median single-family home sold for $520,000 in 2025. The affordability index for the county ended the year at 59 — meaning the median-income household has just 59 percent of the income needed to afford the median-priced home. Anything below 100 is unaffordable. Belknap County isn’t close.

The Lakes Region’s housing problem has a feature that most of the state’s housing coverage ignores: it is a tourist economy trying to house a workforce that can’t afford to live where the tourists vacation. The servers, housekeepers, lift operators, and retail workers who staff the summer and ski seasons commute from surrounding towns on roads with no transit options. When gas was $3, the commute was tolerable. At $4.14, as of last week, it’s a line item that competes with rent. Some workers don’t show up. Some businesses can’t staff. The tourism economy that justifies Belknap County’s property values depends on workers who can’t afford to live within them.

The vacancy rate in Belknap County remains under 1 percent. Social services organizations like the Carey House and Belknap House in Laconia are backed up, unable to move new residents in because existing residents can’t find apartments to move out to. The pipeline is clogged at every stage: no affordable rentals for people transitioning out of shelters, no starter homes for renters trying to buy, no move-up houses for families trying to grow. The market hasn’t cooled. It has calcified.

2,000 Units on Paper

There is one project that could change the arithmetic in the Lakes Region, and it exists entirely on paper. Laconia Village, the proposed redevelopment of the 217-acre former Laconia State School site, would build roughly 2,000 housing units along with commercial, retail, medical, and civic space. The developer, Pillsbury Realty Development, paid the state $500,000 in earnest money in January and has 18 months to close on the $10.5 million purchase.

For a city of 16,800 people, the scale reshapes everything. If fully built out, Laconia Village would increase Laconia’s population by an estimated 20 percent. The plan includes townhouses, duplexes, apartments, cottage-style homes, senior living, and workforce units — the kind of housing diversity that Laconia needs and doesn’t have. Mayor Andrew Hosmer has called housing the city’s most critical need. School Superintendent Steve Champlin has said the district has capacity and would benefit from the enrollment. The city can absorb the growth. The question is whether anyone will fund it.

But Laconia Village is a decade-long buildout at best. The site is contaminated with asbestos. The 30-plus buildings left over from the former institutional campus need renovation or demolition. Water and sewer systems require major upgrades. A traffic study examining 22 intersections is still underway. The first units are years away.

And here is where the state’s budget decisions collide with the state’s housing reality. The Invest New Hampshire program and Affordable Housing Fund were exactly the kind of state investment tools that could accelerate a project like Laconia Village — gap financing for infrastructure, loans for workforce units, incentives for affordable set-asides. Those tools are now zeroed out. Pillsbury will have to do this with private capital, market-rate rents, and whatever federal programs survive the current administration’s budget priorities. The state that most needs this project to succeed has removed its own capacity to help it.

The Inventory Illusion

The realtors and analysts who frame the market as “cooling” or “stabilizing” are pointing to real data points: the 1 percent year-over-year price increase, the longest days-on-market since the pandemic, the modest uptick in listings. Houses stayed on the market an average of 44 days so far in 2026, up from 32 days in 2024. That’s movement in the right direction.

But the baseline against which that movement is measured is catastrophic. New Hampshire had roughly 1,400 active listings per month in early 2026. In early 2019, before the pandemic, it had 3,600. The state’s housing inventory is still less than half of pre-pandemic levels. Months of supply — the standard measure of market balance — sits at roughly two months. A balanced market requires five to seven.

The “cooling” narrative confuses deceleration with recovery. The housing market in New Hampshire is still wildly out of balance by any historical measure. The rate of damage is slowing slightly. The damage itself — the gap between wages and prices, the missing inventory, the affordability index at 59 — has not been repaired, and nothing in the current policy environment is designed to repair it.

A Generational Failure

There is a word for what New Hampshire is doing to its younger residents, and it isn’t “stabilizing.” It’s exclusion. Generational exclusion, compounding with each year that prices rise faster than paychecks.

A 30-year-old couple in Laconia, both working, combined income of $85,000, cannot buy the median home in Belknap County. The math doesn’t work at 6 percent interest on a $520,000 house with 10 percent down. The monthly payment — principal, interest, taxes, insurance — would exceed $3,800, consuming more than half their gross income. A generation ago, a couple with the same economic profile, adjusted for inflation, could buy a comparable house with a conventional mortgage and have money left for groceries. The state in which they were raised has priced them out of the state in which they work.

This is the pattern that Dexter Dow examines in Generational Malpractice — the compounding effect of policy choices that transfer costs and risks downward, from older generations to younger ones, from asset holders to wage earners, from homeowners to renters. The housing crisis in New Hampshire is not a market failure. Markets are doing what markets do when supply is constrained and demand is high: prices rise. The failure is political. The state chose not to build. It chose not to fund. And when the bill came due, it chose to zero out the check.

Every dollar Ayotte cut from the Affordable Housing Fund is a dollar that won’t subsidize a workforce unit in Laconia or a starter home in Manchester. Every year the Claremont funding formula punishes cities for rising property values is a year that schools cut teachers while tax bills climb. Every month the state sits at two months of housing supply instead of six is a month that another young family does the math, gives up, and moves to Maine or Vermont or just stays in the apartment and stops looking.

The realtors will tell you the market is cooling. The data says it’s not. It’s hardening. The people who own homes are watching their equity grow. The people who don’t are watching the ladder get pulled up. And the governor — who ran on affordability, who talks about lowering energy costs and cutting taxes — just defunded the two programs most directly aimed at getting more housing built.

In the Lakes Region, the summer season is two months away. The tourists will come. They’ll rent the Airbnbs that used to be long-term rentals. They’ll eat at restaurants staffed by workers who drive 40 minutes from Franklin or Tilton because they can’t afford Meredith or Wolfeboro. They’ll admire the lake and the mountains and the real estate signs advertising homes at prices that exclude the people who make the region function.

The market is not cooling. The state is not stabilizing. And the generation being priced out is not going to forget who zeroed out $35 million in housing funds while the median home crossed half a million dollars.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.