Building Paths to Affordable Housing, Keeping Ossipee’s Families Home

As a Realtor, Morgan sees firsthand how the housing crunch affects our local workers, young families, and those on a fixed income every single day. 

High property taxes are one of the big factors behind this. New Hampshire decides how much help a town gets for its schools using "equalized valuation," the state's estimate of what all the property in town is worth on paper. The more a town's property is "worth," the less help it gets, no matter who actually lives there or what they earn. On paper, Ossipee can look like a town with money to spare, especially once you count lake camps, seasonal cabins, and vacation homes owned by people who don't live here year-round and don't feel the local tax bill the way full-time residents do. But that number doesn't know how many of our neighbors are retired, living on fixed incomes, or working multiple jobs just to get by.

That same gap between what property is "worth" and what people can actually afford shows up everywhere in Ossipee, not just on the tax bill.  State dollars and state formulas both tend to be calculated off property values, not off what residents can actually afford, so towns like Ossipee get squeezed twice. Towns need healthcare, construction and retail workers, those that make up Ossipee’s top job sectors, but locals are being priced out of the area. Working families are struggling to make ends meet and running out of options. There just aren't enough affordable housing options available.

Concord needs to treat this as a real investment, not an afterthought. That means putting real state dollars behind New Hampshire's affordable housing programs, using incentives to make it worthwhile for developers to build homes working families can actually afford instead of only high-end properties, and making sure state formulas account for what residents actually earn, not just what their homes could sell for. Ossipee should be a town its own families and workers can afford to live in.