Special Project: Invisible Walls

“Invisible Walls,” a joint project of the Granite State News Collaborative, NH Business Review, Business NH Magazine and NH Public Radio, describes how exclusionary zoning laws have reinforced areas of persistent poverty, impacting many aspects of community life, including crime, public health, affordable housing and access to economic opportunity in Manchester. The team used Manchester as a case study, but the same sorts of exclusionary zoning practices present in Manchester are common across the state, and likely have had similarly-broad effects.

Invisible walls

A century of exclusionary zoning has helped divide Manchester by income and race

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The drive no one should have to make — and the effort underway to end it

If you live in Manchester or Concord, you probably don’t think twice about finding a doctor. There is a specialist within a few miles for almost anything you need. But if you live in Colebrook, or Lancaster, or any one of dozens of small communities spread across New Hampshire’s North Country, the picture looks very different, and the gap between those two realities is wider than most people realize.

Laser eye surgery and cataract surgery return to Berlin after years without local access

Androscoggin Valley Hospital (AVH), a member of North Country Healthcare in Berlin, performed its first cataract surgery in recent memory on August 20, 2026, a milestone made possible through the hospital’s partnership with North Country Ophthalmology, a physician-led alliance of board-certified MD ophthalmologists that began seeing patients at AVH in January.

NH seafood is worth the investment

When most people think about New Hampshire’s seafood industry, they picture the quintessential fishing village with commercial boats landing lobster or cod.

Lisa Madden, 2026 Outstanding Women in Business Recipient

Lisa Madden was drawn to a mental health career from personal experience. When she was a young child in the ’60s, Lisa would accompany her father to visit her Aunt Peggy, who was developmentally and mentally disabled and had been institutionalized in Massachusetts when family members could no longer care for her.

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