Steadily and mostly behind the scenes, an affordable-housing strategy has preserved nearly 8,500 New Hampshire homes over 39 years. It has kept dollars circulating in local communities and inspired a successful national housing movement.
Now the N.H. Senate is considering legislation that would destroy it.
The nonprofit New Hampshire Community Loan Fund has helped 140 groups of manufactured-home park residents purchase their parks and manage them as cooperatives, or ROCs (resident-owned communities).
Not one of these cooperatives has ever failed or reverted to private ownership. Not one. That’s an extraordinary achievement, given that 75% of cooperative members qualify as low or moderate income and many are seniors on fixed incomes.
The recently introduced Senate Bill 210 threatens this form of affordable housing preservation by requiring more than half of the households in a community to vote in favor of an offer to purchase it. This is an unreasonable threshold that, if signed into law, will destroy this self-help program.
Read the rest at Community Loan Fund
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