Report finds decline in NH homeless population, but affordability crisis charges on

The last twelve months have brought heavy burdens to Concord’s unhoused population alongside incremental improvements to its housing landscape.

At the beginning of the year, U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan toured 84 low-income apartments preparing to accept tenants on the Heights. Around the same time, families began moving into their new apartment at the Railyards, another affordable development in Concord’s South End.

In February, a well-known member of the homeless community in Concord, Rodney Moody, died in his sleep at the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness’ overnight winter shelter. Mourners packed CeterPoint Church a month later.

In August, the city cleared out its largest encampments, in riverside Healy Park and under the Water Street bridge.

In September, the Coalition opened a new supportive housing center on South State Street, providing apartments with in-building resources and community to ten people in the city without housing.

At summer’s end, the city filled a long-discussed project director position, which local advocates hope will bring better coordination and direction to efforts to relieve homelessness.

On December 1, the coalition’s winter overnight shelter opened for the season. This year, the shelter and the Friendly Kitchen will collaborate to provide 24-hour warming spaces during cold or harsh weather thanks to extra funding from the city and county.

In a few weeks, an annual vigil to remember those who died while unhoused this year will bring the somber, flickering glow of candlelight to the statehouse plaza. It will be a particularly hard year for Concord.

Lives remembered beside Moody’s at that event will include Glenn Chrzan, who was found near an interstate in Manchester, seven weeks after he’d been discharged from the hospital, and Tim Russell, a 29-year-old working as a dishwasher downtown and on the cusp of regaining housing when he was found in his Memorial Field campsite.

The New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness released its 2025 report this month: Its findings paint a modest picture of progress while raising alarm bells at the looming threats posed by federal funding and policy changes and an intensifying affordability crisis. While the data informing the report is the most recent available, so much has changed in Concord since it was collected.

Both a single, point-in-time count conducted in January 2024, and a monthly analysis of state system data indicated a decline of around 8% in New Hampshire’s unhoused population in the last tear. Similar declines were observed in family and veteran homelessness.

Those numbers are relatively good news for the Granite State – counts from 2023 found that homelessness was growing faster here than in any state in the country.

The report notes, however, that rates of chronic and unsheltered homelessness in the point-in-time count continue to march upwards: more people have been unhoused for at least a year, and the rates of unsheltered homelessness have more than quadrupled since the 2020 count.

Point-in-time counts, required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and conducted nationwide annually, capture a single night in January when local agency staff and volunteers try to document the totality of each community’s unsheltered population in a given moment. They’re snapshots that can be swayed by daily factors like the weather and are widely considered undercounts.

Other estimates in the report are drawn monthly from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a database used by many service providers.

While they reached different totals, both showed a similar decline last year. Notably, though, neither figure captures the current moment.

The 2025 report analyzes data from 2024. The point-in-time count numbers are from nearly two years ago, back when Joe Biden had just won the New Hampshire primary in a write-in campaign and Concord Police’s social worker unit, which now has three full-time staff, didn’t exist yet.

More recent county-level figures indicate an increase in Merrimack County’s unhoused population over the last year to about 350, the vast majority of whom live in Concord.

The city’s homelessness steering committee, which brings together local officials, local service providers and first responders, reviews HMIS numbers at each ot its meetings.

In March of 2024, the committee laid out a five-part agenda. Better data collection and communication with the public topped the list. The other three – reducing unsheltered homelessness by 25% by July of 2025, making 100 units available to house people experiencing homelessness and functionally ending veteran homelessness in the city by the fall of 2024 – are still works in progress.

In the big picture, the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness’ report raises concerns about an affordability crisis hitting seniors and older adults the hardest – something echoed on the ground by local providers.

Even as other populations declined, the 2024 count saw a 23% increase in the state’s number of people over 65 who lacked housing. With the cost of living rapidly outpacing annual increases to social security benefits, seniors on a fixed income are especially vulnerable to fluctuations in their housing and other daily costs.

Closer to home, outreach workers have anecdotally raised alarm bells about an increase in seniors living out of their cars, getting quietly shuffled between local park and rides.

Looking ahead, a recent announcement by HUD about new limits on funding threatened long-term housing resources for people who’ve worked to find a more stable situation in the past.

After more than 20 states, not including New Hampshire, sued the Trump Administration over those proposed changes, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Monday those policy changes have been put on hold as the administration considers new language.

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