Historic preservation pitched as a path to more housing

The 30 apartments tucked inside the former First Congregational Church in Concord still bear the mark of the building’s past life.

Towering over North Main Street and stretching back along Washington Street, arched windows and telltale architecture clue passersby into the building’s history, one where hundreds of churchgoers used to flock each week. Now, after a brief stint as a shelter, it opened last year as Circa Apartments.

A few hundred feet away stands a 200-year-old barn, which was recently refurbished into a two-bedroom living space. It’s encircled by half a dozen single-family homes that line the densely populated streets of downtown.

Such retrofits are hardly a new idea, but they are increasingly becoming a way to bolster the state’s housing market while preserving existing, and often historic, structures.

The intersection of housing development and historic architecture will be highlighted this weekend at the Old House and Barn Expo in Manchester. The two-day event, hosted by the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance, will address housing challenges and creative solutions, as well as trade gaps in specialties like window preservation and timber framing.

Jennifer Goodman, executive director of the Preservation Alliance, said the expo will seek to highlight restoration as a tool to add more units to the state’s housing stock.

Home prices continue to inflate in New Hampshire. The median price for a single-family home was $535,000 in 2025. The vast majority of households don’t earn enough income to afford that.

The expo will pitch fixer-uppers as a more accessible path to homeownership.

“Lots of people talk about the creation of new housing, meaning new construction,” Goodman said. Especially in New Hampshire, “with a lot of older building stock and a strong and growing appreciation for historic preservation,” Goodman thinks old can be made new again.

State lawmakers are supportive of these transformations, too. The Legislature passed a bipartisan slate of bills last year aimed at lifting zoning regulations to make that process smoother, championed by housing advocates. The most prominent ones remove restrictions on accessory dwelling units, also called in-law apartments, and allow for multi-family residential developments in commercially zoned areas. The latter was intended to clear the path for housing in unused office buildings.

The federal government also runs an incentive program for rehabilitating historic buildings. It allows for an investment tax credit of up to 20% for structures of all types, whether the use is commercial, industrial or residential. Several projects, like the Colonial Theatre in Laconia, were completed with assistance from that program.

Steve Bedard, a preservationist from Gilmanton, said older buildings — churches, offices, barns and the like — can be prime for residential living. He said it’s about using the infrastructure and materials that are right in front of you.

“Perfect opportunity to create living space in those office spaces,” Bedard said. “Your amenities are already there, basically, your septic and your water. It’s just a matter of renovating those spaces to make them comfortable.”

Doing so can also be more cost-effective, he added. The materials are already there, and when you’re working on a historic building, those materials have stood the test of time.

“You have a big advantage of that,” Bedard said. “You know it’s going to last. You know it’s going to be there. It’s not going to fall apart in 20 years.”

That doesn’t mean it’s not a complicated process, said Jonathan Chorlian, the developer behind the Circa Apartments. It’s easier in the sense that the shell of the building already exists, he said, but it gets complicated fast with hang-ups like asbestos, lead paint or structural issues.

Chorlian also remodeled the Sacred Heart Church on Pleasant Street into condos a few years ago, where he preserved “just insane churchy detail” while integrating modern kitchens, showers and conveniences.

He said churches are on the complicated end of the spectrum due to their unique architecture — for example, the tall ceilings required him to create several stories, slicing the churches horizontally.

“What I found on redevelopments is you really just gut things completely, almost always,” Chorlian said. “You can save some architectural stuff and reincorporate it, but you just want to go back to the shell, because you want to put the walls where you want them.”

Chorlian works on new developments, too, but he said he doesn’t like to see old buildings demolished. In his eyes, as long as they’re standing, they have potential.

“But if you tear down,” he said, “that ship has sailed.”

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