“Housing” has been quite the buzzword for the past few years, so much so that I often roll my eyes and shake my head, depending on whose mouth I hear it from. There is a gentleman in a western suburb that I will call “J.” He was all over SB 400 two years ago and the months leading up to it. There is another gentleman in an even more western suburb that has been sounding the Regional Planning Commission alarm for over ten years and I will call him “L.” J and L should join forces because this whole “workforce housing” thing is what Nurse Terese would call “a Goliath” and it’s not going to just shrivel up and disappear. I suspect I am not alone in feeling somewhat desensitized to “housing talk,” but J vented to me today with a quiet, unknown detail.
J shared a link to a program called “1st Generation Homebuyer,” which appears to be under the auspices of InvestNH. He went on to say, “My kids (NH residents) can’t get home buying assistance, but refugees and asylum seekers get 10K down payment assistance. This is ridiculous.” He went on to say, “So angry,” and “Why have the NH House and the NH Senate allowed this?”
I replied to J with some comic relief, followed by an offer to “do some digging” if he had the bill numbers relevant to the creation of InvestNH. He quickly replied with a comment that InvestNH was pushed into the HB2 budget rider bill. I felt like I was just “buried in discovery,” but I started asking around and poking around.
Poking around, I went here and saw the following words:
“The program was authorized through the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee and the Governor and Executive Council in May 2022 through FIS 22-150. BEA oversees InvestNH, in collaboration with the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority. Awards and subawards through InvestNH are presented to, and authorized by, the Governor and Executive Council.“
It made me pivot from my original knee-jerk thought of “damn the House and Senate, there’s probably no roll call for either of them, but I want to know who sponsored the amendment,” to “did Councilor Wheeler vote the wrong way on another item?” If readers are expecting a long research paper at this point, I caution against being set up for disappointment because the purpose of this article is to call attention to an ugly detail that’s not being discussed at all the water coolers. A follow up article is definitely a possibility.
What I can say is that I shared J’s finding with Nurse Terese because this matter is the kind of thing that a good executive councilor should say NO to and by sheer luck, I got her at a moment when she was replying within the minute. She said “it’s because we don’t have (presumably good)people running or supporting those who do.
The 2024 candidate slate in every NH community is a ship that has already sailed, regarding inventory, but it’s not too late to support the good candidates, even if they’re not on your ballot. I recommend donating to and/or volunteering for the candidates worthy of the offices they seek and most readers already know who they are. Remember the primary is two Tuesdays from now, September 10. Meanwhile, I’m going to keep digging to learn more about who played a part in the formation of the 1st Generation Homebuyer pilot program. If you have solid advice on where to dig, please put it in the comments.
