The Granite State has a major housing problem.

It’s no secret – the supply is low, new developments are slow to evolve and the spots that are available for rent and purchase are too expensive for many to afford. Thirty-five percent of people listed housing as the “most important problem” facing the state, according to a recent Granite State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire.

Candidates for New Hampshire’s second congressional district, vying for Representative Annie Kuster’s seat upon her retirement, all agreed the state needs a larger supply of homes and rental units and that housing costs need to go down.

Where they differ is how they’ll tackle the problem at the federal level. Democrats advocated for regulatory oversight on corporate landlords and tax incentives to encourage builders and municipalities to supply affordable housing. Republicans listed inflation as the No. 1 barrier and said that when that improves, the housing market will follow suit.

Conservatives also tied New Hampshire’s housing shortage to the state’s quality of life, saying it draws immigrants and other residents in droves from nearby states.

“With less government, less regulation, more freedom, more liberty, this ‘Live Free or Die’ mentality is attractive and compelling to more and more people. When other states get more burdensome and encroaching on people’s liberty and freedom, those people leave … and they’re coming to places like us, like New Hampshire,” said Republican candidate Vikram Mansharamani. “That, I think, explains part of the supply-demand imbalance in housing. We’ve done such a good job, so we’re victims of our own success.”

Maggie Goodlander

Maggie Goodlander, a Democratic candidate and New Hampshire native who made her career in Washington at the U.S. Department of Justice, wants to initiate incentives to help builders create new housing in the state and bring down costs.

The price for a single-family home in New Hampshire has jumped an average 82% in the past six years, she said, and she favors enacting a $10,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers and people who sell starter homes. As for increasing the housing supply, Goodlander said she’d work with state officials to get federal dollars to the local governments that need it. Infrastructure is necessary to make building more accessible in New Hampshire, she said.

“In much of the district, the non-existing public water and sewer infrastructure, that’s been a major barrier,” Goodlander said. “The bipartisan infrastructure act did a lot to allocate essential financial resources to improving this infrastructure. Not all of those dollars have actually reached the district.”

New Hampshire needs to build 60,000 new homes by 2030, according to the state’s housing needs assessment, and is hard-pressed to meet that goal, Goodlander said. In addition, the statewide vacancy rate – the amount of existing rental housing that’s currently available – is 0.8%. Strong markets usually show rental vacancy rates of at least 5%.

On the local level, Goodlander said she’d support existing proposals in Congress that would require municipalities to report how they use funds from one of the big federal programs, the Community Development Block Grant, which supports economic development, infrastructure, public services and other projects in local communities. Participating cities and towns would need to report back on how they’re using that funding to implement affordability-friendly zoning policies.

Bill Hamlen

Bill Hamlen, who’s branded himself as a commonsense conservative fighting to protect the New Hampshire way of life, said he’s “acutely aware” of the housing problem facing the state. He witnessed the cost and scarcity of supply when his daughter sought to rent an apartment here.

Like his fellow Republicans, Hamlen said his first priority is to take a stab at inflation and high mortgage rates. When mortgage rates are high, he said, it causes a sort of “gridlock.”

“People are trapped in their homes because they can’t afford to move to a new home,” Hamlen said. “They’d be giving up a low mortgage to take on a higher mortgage, and so that’s creating a type of gridlock that we haven’t seen since the 1970s.”

Second, Hamlen championed a moratorium on all new housing regulations that don’t have to do with safety. They can create what he views as an unnecessary burden, and he said the government should instead foster incentives for builders to reduce costs by adjusting zoning regulations.

He pitched modular and prefabricated homes as another possible solution. It’s often cheaper to build a new, small house than refit an older one, he said, and New Hampshire has several modular home builders.

“That’s an area where innovative materials and technologies are combining to produce new housing,” Hamlen said. “I find it absolutely fascinating what they’ve done. They have these big warehouses where they build all the parts and they’re put together ... Because we have so much lumber up in New Hampshire, it’s an area of innovation where it’s a local resource, so I think that’s fantastic.”

Vikram Mansharamani

Inflation, inflation, inflation. That’s what Ivy-League financial guru Vikram Mansharamani believes is the root cause of all of New Hampshire’s housing problems.

Containing inflation is one of the Republican’s priorities on the campaign trail, and that’s how he sees his role in Congress. He argued it’s not just a housing issue – it’s an all-encompassing cost-of-living issue that affects the price of food, energy, insurance and other goods. However, housing is one of the most common manifestations of inflation that he hears about on the road.

Like Hamlen and Lily Tang Williams, Mansharamani said high inflation has led to soaring interest and mortgage rates. He did offer more specifics than his fellow conservatives, proposing to reduce inflation by slashing unnecessary federal spending on programs like student loan debt relief and clean energy subsidies, which he said would be his first choice to cut if he’s elected.

“We need to stop printing money like there’s no tomorrow. We need to stop growing the American national debt levels like there is no tomorrow,” Mansharamani said. “We need to control this out-of-control spending.”

It’s the same case for renters’ issues and housing supply, he said. When the price of materials and labor goes up, developers and landlords have to charge more in rent to cover those costs. There’s not much the federal government should do in those cases outside of controlling inflation, but he said that’ll have a ripple effect on other aspects of the housing issue. He also acknowledged existing tax incentives for landlords to avoid exorbitant rent increases but didn’t say whether he’d support more regulatory oversight on that matter.

“That’s taking place mostly at the state level,” Mansharamani said. “I’m not sure the [federal] government should be picking winners and losers.”

Colin Van Ostern

Colin Van Ostern, one of two Democratic candidates, rolled out a housing plan last week that outlines three main goals: making homeownership more affordable, protecting renters and increasing housing supply.

He proposed several ways to harness the federal government’s power into action that would aid New Hampshire. If elected, he said he would work to slow rent increases by incentivizing large corporate landlords with tax breaks. They receive tax breaks already, but those that increase rent by any more than 5% in a year wouldn’t be eligible anymore. When asked how that can protect renters who lease from smaller landlords, Van Ostern said it’ll have a trickle-down effect of sorts.

“When you stop the largest, most corporate landlords from that sort of price increase, or when you limit it or restrict it, that tends to have an effect on the entire market,” Van Ostern said. “It is not a mandate, but it does mean that the power, the center of gravity on power, will start to shift back to renters and away from large landlords, which is too often the case today.”

He also pledged to increase regulatory scrutiny and enforcement support to crack down on algorithmic price fixing, increase funding for construction training programs to aid in housing supply, and support homelessness prevention efforts by expanding rapid rehousing programs and eviction assistance. It’s especially needed, he said, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that allows localities to criminalize encampments.

“We’re not going to have a solution where people who are battling homelessness are just being fined until they end up in jail, and then are living in jail,” Van Ostern said. “That costs far more than appropriate shelters does.”

Another significant portion of Van Ostern’s plan is to increase home supply, particularly in rural areas. He said he’d do this by boosting funding for programs that focus on housing in rural areas and those living under the median area income. He’d also appoint a staff member to help municipalities access federal money for infrastructure like water and sewage, which he said will lower barriers to building in rural parts of the state.

Lily Tang Williams

Lily Tang Williams, a Republican candidate running on a mission to protect individual freedoms, told the Monitor nationwide inflation is largely to blame for the housing crisis. It’s driven materials and labor costs up so high, she said, that there’s little incentive for developers to invest in new projects. The housing that does get built is too expensive for many buyers to afford – the median sale price for a single-family home was $538,000 in June, according to a report from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors.

It all boils down to supply and demand. Tang Williams said she believes Massachusetts residents and illegal immigrants are flocking to New Hampshire for its quality of life, driving up demand.

“We have lots of illegals coming here, even though we are not a sanctuary state, but some are here because Massachusetts [doesn’t] have enough housing for them either,” Tang Williams said. “It drains community resources.”

Tang Williams said that if elected, her main strategy to aid the state’s housing crisis would be to reign in federal spending. Instead of just “printing more money,” she said Congress needs to balance its budget. Tang Williams did not give specifics when asked where she’d make the first spending cuts but pledged to make budget decisions in the best interest of her district instead of listening to special interests. Bringing inflation down will be painful, she said, but Congress can’t keep kicking the can down the road.

As for renters, Tang Williams believes it’s up to states to work on keeping rent affordable. Her mission in Congress is to bring down inflation, interest and mortgage rates, which she anticipates will make it easier for state and local lawmakers to create effective housing policies and zoning laws. She doesn’t plan to push them on any policies to deal with renters’ issues – she trusts the legislature to handle it.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly or send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.