Amid housing crunch, Keene session spotlights small-plot developments

Community members leave stickers on their favorite infill housing ideas, for low to high density, during a community listening session about housing needs that the Keene Community Development Department hosted at the Keene Public Library. (Photo by Hannah Schroeder, Keene Sentinel)

Upon entering Heberton Hall in Keene on Tuesday evening (on Nov. 21), Keene Community Development staff gave residents several dark green and light blue stickers and directed them to three poster boards, each showing various examples of low-density, medium-density and high-density housing. There, attendees placed the blue stickers next to housing examples they liked and the green stickers beside ones they most preferred.

The sticker activity was one component of a listening session held by the city’s community development department, which solicited feedback from residents about the types of housing they’d like to see in their neighborhoods.

The event occurred amid a statewide dearth of affordable housing. An assessment released earlier this year by NH Housing, a public corporation that supports and finances housing solutions, estimated that the state needs around 60,000 more housing units between 2020 and 2030 based on estimated population growth.

The input city staff gathered from the session will help inform a zoning proposal, according to City Planner Evan Clements.

“We’re coming up with a zoning-ordinance amendment proposal … for an overlay district to kind of enable this infill neighborhood development,” he said, adding that most streets in Keene are required to be 50 feet wide, including sidewalks.

“The parcels in the neighborhoods that we’re looking at, the parcel is only an acre big. If you’re going to wipe out half of that putting a new road in, you’re not really achieving the amount of dwelling units that you want,” Clements added. “So we’re trying to come up with ways to minimize the infrastructure, get everything smaller. If it’s smaller, it’s cheaper.”

Mari Brunner, a Keene senior planner, talked to attendees while presenting hypothetical developments of small land plots.

“In the city of Keene, most of the land that’s really desirable for building on has already been developed,” she said. “What we have left over are infill sites … that could be redeveloped, or we have the leftover land that is kind of … a wonky shape.”

The poster showed four arrangements of housing on a hypothetical single acre of land. One presented a lot with nine 16-foot by 24-foot tiny homes centered around a small green space. Other ideas included a group of three triplexes, a townhouse concept and a “mansion apartment,” which would look like a single-family home from the outside but have nine units inside.

“These are meant to spark ideas … we have no specific proposal at this time,” Brunner said about the four concepts. “We are seeing this need for smaller-format housing. We’ve got a lot of people in Keene who live alone … We’re trying to figure out how can we encourage developers to meet that demand.”

On a table nearby, printed paper sheets displayed the same one-acre plot of land next to piles of paper cutouts of different housing types. Clements explained that it was meant to be an interactive activity for attendees to show the developments they’d prefer.

“We’ve got a couple different cutouts of building footprints,” Clements said. “And (we’re) letting people play around and put these building footprints on the site and see how that feels and looks and then kind of ask themselves, ‘Is that something I’d be comfortable showing up in my neighborhood?’”

Cameron Stewart, who lives part time in Keene, said he owns investment properties and is hoping to eventually develop them, but attended to show his support for developing new types of housing in the city.

“I’m hoping to just give my general input and support,” he said. “Ninety percent of the problem is we just need to build more.”

In October 2022, the city contracted with New York-based consulting group Camoin Associates to create a housing needs assessment for Keene.

The contract was paid for through state funding from the $100 million InvestNH housing fund, which distributed funds to developers to encourage the construction of multifamily housing and to municipalities to address housing shortages, according to previous Keene Sentinel reporting.

The final housing needs and assessment report stated that one-person households in Keene increased by more than 21% between 2011 and 2021, while four-or-more-person households decreased by more than 23%.

Vicky Morton, of Keene, said she is interested in preserving green space around homes and where these higher-density developments would be located, especially as a resident on the eastern side of the city.

“If we’re going to put nine families in less than an acre of land, you know, that might be a little crowded,” she said. She also said she wants more focus on improving existing housing for residents, especially in East Keene.

“If we’re going to be putting all kinds of new housing in Keene, we shouldn’t forget the housing that exists,” she said. “And how can we raise the level of that housing as well?”

This article is being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.