As New Hampshire Home Prices Hit a Record $575,000, Goodlander Introduces Bipartisan Bill to Cut the Delays Driving Up the Cost of Building a Home
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Goodlander’s bipartisan Build More Homes Act, co-led with Republican Congressman Jefferson Shreve, would put pre-approved home designs that save builders time and money under the microscope, so more communities can use what works Concord, N.H. — Today, Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (NH-02) introduced the bipartisan Build More Homes Act to attack one of the most expensive and least visible obstacles to building a home in New Hampshire: the months a homebuilder is often forced to spend drawing up plans and waiting for them to be reviewed before a single shovel goes in the ground. The bill, which Goodlander is leading with Congressman Jefferson Shreve (R-IN-06), directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct the first nationwide review of housing “pattern books” — catalogs of pre-reviewed, permit-ready home designs that let builders skip costly custom design work and get approved faster, while giving towns and cities homes that fit the character of their neighborhoods. This bill takes aim at some of the most preventable costs in homebuilding: architecture, review, and delay. “New Hampshire is in a full-blown housing crisis: 85% of households across our state are priced out of this cornerstone of the American Dream,” said Congresswoman Goodlander . “Nurses, teachers, firefighters, electricians, and hardworking people of all ages are being pushed out of the communities they love and the communities that depend on them. I’m using every tool I have to lower the sky-high housing costs New Hampshire families face and make it cheaper and faster to build the homes we urgently need. Our bipartisan Build More Homes Act is about cutting costs and red tape, and learning from communities like Lebanon that are already showing us what works.” A Full-Blown Housing Crisis New Hampshire’s housing crisis has never been worse. According to Housing is New Hampshire’s Future, the report New Hampshire Housing released last month: The median single-family home hit a record $575,000 in June 2026. A family needs to earn about $189,000 a year to afford it, and only 15% of New Hampshire households — and just 4% of renters — earn that much. The median rent statewide is $2,011 a month. A worker needs to earn $38.67 an hour to afford it, while the typical Granite Stater earns about $26 an hour. Prices across the Northeast have risen about 28% — gasoline 67%, food 31% — while median household income has grown only about 4% after inflation since February 2020. New Hampshire added 25,872 homes from 2020 through 2025, just 39% of what the state needs by 2030. The state is building about 5,174 homes a year; it needs more than 8,100 a year to catch up. What Builders Are Up Against New Hampshire’s homebuilders face rising costs at every step. President Trump’s tariffs have jacked up the price of lumber, and builders estimate recent tariffs add roughly $10,900 to the cost of a typical new home. His war in Iran has driven up the price of the diesel that hauls materials to every job site. Moreover, government regulation now accounts for $131,734 — more than 1 in every 4 dollars (26.4%) — of the average price of a new single-family home, according to a June 2026 study by the National Association of Home Builders . That’s up from $93,870 in 2021, the biggest jump NAHB has ever recorded between its studies. And 94% of developers say complying with regulations delays their projects, by about 7 months on average — exactly the kind of delay pre-approved designs are built to cut. Goodlander’s Build More Homes Act Pre-approved designs go straight at the “soft costs” of architecture, review, and delay. Communities with these p
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