The town of Jaffrey, tucked away in New Hampshire’s Monadnock region, spent years improving infrastructure and adjusting its zoning policies to support more housing.
That work earned the town of 5,000 residents recognition by the state government as a “housing champion.”
“It’s tough as a small community,” said Jo Anne Carr, the town’s development projects coordinator. “We don’t have big, splashy developments, especially in southwest New Hampshire.”
The state legislature enacted the Housing Champions program in 2023 to highlight and encourage housing-friendly zoning practices at the local level. The designation of “champion” gave Jaffrey and 17 other towns preferential access to $5 million worth of grants to help with development and infrastructure projects.
Jaffrey, however, didn’t stand a chance at getting funding. As a small town, it couldn’t compete with Concord, Salem and other population centers to secure grant money for a development still in the pipeline.
“They wanted shovel-ready projects,” Carr said. “I guess when you don’t have a whole lot of resources to distribute, you probably want to get the money out the door and help projects across the finish line financially.”
Republican Rep. Matthew Drew of Manchester contends the program did little to incentivize any housing at all. Since it awards grants to municipalities either as a reward for newly created units or as a reimbursement for project expenses, he said, it “doesn’t even pretend to be the little nudge that gets a project over the line into viability.”
He proposed legislation to repeal it.
Drew argues that Housing Champions is a subsidy of a subsidy, essentially passing money from the state, through towns, to private businesses.
“It’s a bad program,” Drew said at a hearing last month. “We can’t afford it, and we should end it.”
The Republican-led House of Representatives voted 185-166 to advance that bill on Thursday, favoring a regulatory approach over government spending to tackle New Hampshire’s housing crisis.
Meanwhile, Democrats — backed by many of the towns that have benefited from the program — argued that the housing crisis requires a more comprehensive strategy that includes investment. Funding assistance, they say, helps towns set the stage for more development and gives builders relief from rising construction costs.
“Obstacles to housing development are not just zoning,” Carr said. “It’s the infrastructure that will support the density, it’s the roads, whether or not the school districts have capacity.”
Opposite of Drew’s bill, Democrats have introduced legislation to allocate $5 million more toward Housing Champions. The Republican majority declined to fund the program in the state budget last year.
Concord’s development hurdles
The initial $5 million put toward Housing Champions was intended to assist nearly 2,300 new housing units across the state.
Some of those became entangled in the permitting process, grew too costly for developers or are unlikely to ever happen. Take Concord’s Steeplegate Mall, for example.
The developer wanted investment from the City of Concord, which held those talks behind closed doors. JC Penney filed suit over the project to demolish much of the current structure. Then, suddenly, plans for 625 units went cold.
Concord was awarded roughly $860,000 for sewer upgrades in the Heights to support that project.
Mayor Byron Champlin said the sewer project is necessary regardless — both to improve functions for current residents of the Heights, which has long had low water pressure, and to clear the path for other housing developments down the line.
“If another project comes along that would use up the capacity, it’s too late at that point to start to upgrade the sewer system,” Champlin said.
Concord leaders wore the “housing champion” badge with pride, welcoming it as recognition for the steps the city took to make its zoning more amenable to housing.
Others disagree. In October, the city planner, Anne Marie Skinner, quit her job, saying Concord put too many obstacles in the way of development. “Concord is so not a housing champion,” she said.
The city’s housing supply grew by 609 units — roughly 3.2% — from 2020 to 2024, according to the figures from the state’s annual housing supply report and the city of Concord.
Despite the money Concord received in Housing Champions funds, the city saw a dramatic drop in the number of new units between 2024 and 2025, from 172 to 44 — a 75% decrease.
In addition to the Steeplegate Mall, other developments have either stalled or not come to fruition over the past few years, which Champlin said can happen for any number of reasons.
“This is the nature of development,” he said. “Projects are proposed, projects start in the pipeline, and sometimes things happen that are outside the city’s control that impact whether those projects move forward are not.”
More recently, the city has used state funds for purposes other than housing development.
In November, the Concord City Council approved building a new $41 million police station that would be funded, in part, with Housing Champions funding, City Manager Tom Aspell told councilors. However, it turned out the money was primarily coming from InvestNH, a similar program designed to boost and reward development.
Champlin argued that as the city’s housing stock and population grow, the need for public safety also increases.
The city drew money out of the same fund to clear out a homeless encampment last year, which critics said pushed unhoused people to a different spot in the city without giving them a place to live.
Though that money was given to Concord, no strings attached, Champlin said he’d still welcome state funds that are restricted to certain uses — as long as the state continues to leverage financial incentives, which he sees as a stepping stool for the small towns that surround Concord.
“There’s a carrot-and-stick aspect to this,” Champlin said, “and what they’re doing is they’re beating us with sticks but they’re taking away the carrot.”
Where did the money go?
The $5 million for the state’s Housing Champions was split up into two types of grants and disbursed among just eight of the 18 municipalities that received the designation. Most grant applications were approved, and three of those municipalities — Manchester, Newport and Salem — won money from both grants.
One set of grants sent $1.5 million to four communities, with no strings attached, as a reward for adding a combined 373 units of workforce housing to the market in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Most of that money went to local housing or homelessness supports, according to an annual report published Jan. 30 by the Department of Business and Economic Affairs, which administers the Housing Champions program.
In Manchester, $150,000 went toward a city-operated shelter, and an additional $55,500 went to the city’s welfare department for eviction prevention and to help rehouse people experiencing homelessness.
Nashua added its $828,000 to a revolving loan fund that provides gap financing for housing developments in the city, while Newport will combine the $234,375 from its two grants to conduct a feasibility study on expanding its sewer system to support more housing.
Salem is the only town not spending this grant on a particular development or infrastructure project, using its $297,000 to hire a consultant to help update its zoning ordinance.
‘We need to be smarter’
The state recently recognized 10 additional “housing champions,” bringing the total to 28. Those communities were responsible for approving 45% of the units that were built in 2025, according to a state report.
Even if lawmakers sunset the incentive program, many of these communities are likely to keep shifting their zoning and policies to accommodate more housing — whether they pursue them on their own or are shepherded by state mandates.
Michael Scala, Rochester’s director of economic development, said he favors the “carrot” approach of incentives over the “stick” of statewide zoning mandates. His city was awarded a $411,000 Housing Champions grant that’ll go toward a new sewer and water system to aid in the development of 120 senior housing units.
It’s a drop in the bucket for major builds like this one, which totals more than $20 million, but Scala said grants can help ease financial pressures on a project. He doesn’t want Housing Champions to end.
“I understand it,” Scala said, “but to me, it’s small dollars that get leveraged very well.”
Rep. Joe Alexander, a Goffstown Republican who chairs the House Housing Committee, initially thought the money was well spent, too. As one of the architects of the program, he viewed it as a solid investment when the state was flush with pandemic relief money.
Times are leaner now, he said, and he’s frustrated that state assistance hasn’t led to the reduction of property taxes.
“The towns that are getting these monies for infrastructure, they’re using it for infrastructure, but it’s not lowering property taxes,” Alexander said. “I just think we need to be smarter with investments.”
Though the House passed the legislation to repeal the grant program, House Bill 1196, it could face an uphill battle in the Senate.
Republican Sen. Daniel Innis, chair of the Commerce Committee, agrees with the “carrot” approach that Housing Champions provides to towns, an alternative to state laws that intrude on local zoning control. He sees it as more consistent with the “New Hampshire way,” and he would rather watch it for another few years before gauging the results.
“I’m not willing to turn this back,” he said.