Jillian Andrews Dubois picked up her newspaper a few weeks ago and saw three side-by-side stories that painted a stark tableau.

One described how average rents in the state continue to burden the average firefighter or retail worker, another explained how a shooter at the state hospital last year had long struggled to find stable housing, and a third outlined that Concord officials had stalled the largest proposed housing project in the city by refusing to change the zoning on its site until after the city updates its Master Plan, which is years away.

“I do not understand why we are making decisions according to a Master Plan from 2008,” she said in a letter to several city councilors, the mayor, and the city manager where she objected to the city’s opposition to the housing proposal. “The housing crisis is a cruel game of musical chairs, and we need many more chairs.”

Dubois lives in the South End of Concord with her family. She said she doesn’t see a good reason for the city to be turning away housing projects that she thinks it badly needs, especially in favor of already abundant office space. The mixed-use project that would include more than 900 units of housing along the Merrimack River sits on more than 100 acres of land that is currently zoned for industrial uses only. City officials say an office park might be a better fit for the area.

“Has there been any interest in other types of development at that location? If no one wants to build a big company or factory or something there, then you can’t make them,” she said. “Those reasons might have made sense in 2008, but they didn’t really make sense to me for 2024.”

Facing pushback from the city about the size of the development and the amount of city infrastructure work needed to support it, Kevin Lacasse, CEO of New England Family Housing and a leader developer behind the plans, recently offered a drastically scaled-back version of the project that would build just over 170 condominiums on a portion of the land south of the Wheelabrator trash-to-energy power plant. But the city has said it won’t consider that, either.

City Manager Tom Aspell’s office has said Concord “will not entertain any additional requests to rezone the Monitor Way site, or for a public-private partnership, until the forthcoming Master Plan update is completed,” which wouldn’t be until at least 2028.

Lacasse and his development team have an agreement to buy 95 acres of land from the parent company that owns the Concord Monitor and five other newspapers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The agreement does not include the Monitor’s building and the newspaper has no role in the sale. They have a separate agreement to buy another 40 acres of land owned by the Concord Regional Solid Waste Cooperative, a group of municipalities that built the nearby Wheelabrator plant.

If the land does not get rezoned for housing, an industrial use of the land is allowed by right.

Dubois asked Concord’s leadership to reconsider the project given the city’s housing shortage. Several councilors, including those whose constituents live closest to the site, have said they don’t agree with the closed-door message the city manager and mayor have sent. They’re open to weighing a scaled-down proposal from the developer — especially if it includes affordable housing. This week, the developer said they are now committed to making a portion of the units in the new, smaller-scale plans “workforce housing,” though they have not yet determined how big a portion that would be.

It’s important to note that affordable and workforce housing both fall below market rate on the rent scale but are not interchangeable.

Councilor Brent Todd, whose ward includes the proposed development, said that if the developer puts through a detailed proposal, the City Council should consider it.

“City Council would be the only body that can enact that kind of change” in zoning, Todd said. They did so earlier this month, he noted, changing downtown height rules to make way for a project on Main Street. “A portion of the Monitor Way project could potentially move forward in the same light as that, depending on what the developers put forward.”

While he understands wanting to preserve industrially zoned spots in the city, he continued, “I think that the rezoning can be addressed.”

Michele Horne, who also represents parts of Penacook, similarly wants to keep the discussion open.

She said she wasn’t aware the city had shut down negotiations with the developer and doesn’t agree with it.

“I don’t feel like we should be putting things off for four, five, six years,” Horne said. “If the right project comes along, we have to be open to changing it.”

For Horne, a “right project” for her constituents needs to boost economic development and include affordable housing. But no one, she said, has asked her to save that land for new industrial uses, as the mayor has visioned.

“I didn’t have any constituents that were dead-set on keeping that industrial,” she said.

At-Large Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton agreed that the city should be open to rezoning, under the right circumstances.

“I believe that any new proposal related to this project should be brought back before the council for review,” she said in a statement. “I’d be interested in learning more about the viability of a greatly scaled-down version of this project that would prioritize affordable housing.”

In contrast, Ward 10 Councilor Jeff Foote agrees with a refusal of rezoning.

Monitor Way plans had curb appeal at first, he said, as any major housing proposal would.

“As they got into the weeds of it,” he said, “I don’t think it’s enticing as it once was.”

Foote pointed to the multimillion-dollar discrepancy between the city and the developer’s estimates for how much it would cost to extend Whitney Road along with other infrastructure improvements to support the project. “I think that was really why” the city shut down the zoning ask, he said.

In his mind, Foote said he couldn’t separate the project’s need for a zoning change from its infrastructure asks.

“Until we go through the master planning process, I’m not sure we can have those conversations,” he said.

The city has denied a records request from the Monitor for communications between the developer and City Councilors, claiming that they are not public records. The city has repeatedly denied records requests by the Monitor on those grounds, arguing that emails between councilors and residents are not public records unless they get passed on to the entire body, a position that is not held by other municipalities, including the Concord School District.

Unlike Dubois, Sewalls Falls Road resident Linda Schmidt was relieved to hear that the city had stalled Monitor Way.

The traffic on her road is already a “disaster,” she said, and she worries about how developing that land would impact wildlife. She doesn’t want city administration to consider any construction at that stretch of land along the river, scaled down or otherwise.