Without them, certain rides would have been shuttered at times because of staffing shortages.

“It would impact the guest experience,” said park spokesman Jim Miller, aka “Santa’s helper.”

The park, which folds those housing costs into the price of its tickets, is among a growing number of employers undertaking bite-sized solutions to the state’s affordable housing crisis by providing housing for their workers.

That’s fortunate and necessary, with home prices in Coos County growing at a faster clip than the state overall.

The median prices for single-family homes in Coos County rose 91% between 2019 and this year. Statewide, it went up 57%.

Over the past year, the median price for homes in Lancaster, the county seat, 115 miles north of Manchester, jumped 25% — or $55,400 — more than twice the dollar amount and rate of growth for Coos County or New Hampshire.

Available apartments in the Lancaster area are scarce.

“We have zero availability,” said Ericka Canales, executive director of the Coos Economic Development Corporation. “Apartments, you are so lucky if you find one, and it’s gone in five minutes if it’s even advertised.”

Hospital housing

When Weeks Medical Center in Lancaster landed a dermatology nurse practitioner from Kentucky, “she was worried about finding housing,” recalled Weeks President and CEO Michael Lee in a video call.

The medical center rents out about 10 houses and apartments, some to workers from the Philippines.

New employees hired for “hard-to-fill” positions receive six months free rent or a $1,500 monthly housing allowance.

“Sometimes these highly sought-after health care workers, they’re fresh out of school or their situations, they don’t have much money for first, last and current months’ rent, nor do they have money for mortgages, for a mortgage down payment and the closing fees and all of that,” Lee said. “We subsidize them when they come in.”

The Kentucky woman stayed for free at a Weeks-owned house for more than a month, before someone mentioned a house in the community was coming up for sale.

She bought it and put more than $6,700 in leftover housing allowance money from Weeks toward her new home.

Getting someone for that position is like finding “a unicorn in a highly competitive market,” Lee said.

The CEO has thought about having the hospital pay to build new housing, but there are more pressing priorities, including a remodeling of its emergency department.

“Five years ago if I had known, probably we would have done something differently,” Lee said.

The hospital granted an easement for a driveway to a housing development near its Colebrook clinic in hopes of securing future units.

Lee recalled telling the developer, “When you get closer to being done, let us know and we would really like to potentially rent some units from you.”

In another case, the hospital invested $100,000 into the renovation of the historic Parker J. Noyes building in downtown Lancaster. The hospital can rent two units there.

“I think the key is knowing what’s going on and (what’s) being developed and see if we can keep a couple of units at each place that’s being developed,” Lee said.

Lancaster improvements

For the past half century, Peter Powell has been selling real estate in the Lancaster area.

“It’s changed a lot,” he said.

Main Street, which he said was tired in the 1970s, is “pretty vibrant” today, Powell said.

“It really has a great character,” he said. The town counts more than 3,200 residents, and is Coos County’s second largest community, behind Berlin.

If you stop in one of the town’s coffee shops, “you are apt to see faces you haven’t seen before,” Powell said.

The pandemic drove many to the Lancaster area.

“There was a tremendous surge of demand,” which pushed up home prices, Powell said.

“I’ve been in this business for 50 years. I’m amazed how much things sell for (today) relative to our history,” he said.

Main Street’s resurgence goes back more than a decade.

Powell credits Gregory Cloutier, who worked in the paper and hydropower industries, for helping to inspire others.

“Greg loved Lancaster and dedicated himself to keeping Main Street vital and alive, which led to the purchase of the Rialto Movie Theatre in 2011,” read Cloutier’s 2022 obituary.

“Additionally, he purchased and restored a burnt out building in 2014 where the Polish Princess now resides,” it read. “In 2017, he purchased the old Lancaster National Bank building. It reopened with the Copper Pig Brewery and an Art Gallery.”

Powell said other development has since sprung up downtown.

“Success breeds success and encourages others to make investments,” he said.

Costly but worth it

Occasionally, staff at Weeks asks the folks at PAK Solutions whether they have a spare apartment for a health care worker to rent.

The Lancaster plastic bag manufacturer owns several buildings on Main Street and elsewhere in Lancaster.

Its tenants include workers from Weeks, state police and PAK Solutions itself.

Renovating two apartments in one building cost more than $400,000, close to the price of a home, according to Sharon Kopp, PAK’s community outreach director.

“It’s just a crazy, crazy expensive construction, astronomical,” Kopp shared at a housing conference in Manchester recently.

“They’re not making any money on these transactions, but they’re making it a better community,” Kopp said.

“Main Street is absolutely beautiful now and it’s continuing to grow, but they’re bringing up not only individuals but families as well,” Kopp said.

PAK also has a purchase and sales agreement to buy a Lancaster mobile home park, which it plans to expand, she said.

The company has received praise from Canales for “taking on a whole other business model in housing that wasn’t there before to support the community and the need,” she said.

New business models

Like many other communities, Coos County is “a whole new world after COVID,” she said.

“Prior to COVID, we had tons of (housing) inventory,” she said. “Through COVID, we lost so much housing inventory with people coming up and buying a second home or getting into the Airbnb market.”

Canales wants to take pandemic funding the state received and give it to property owners to renovate underused buildings into apartments.

“We’re trying to put together a workforce housing fund in Coos County,” Canales said.

She is looking to grab a share of InvestNH funds, a $100 million pot targeted to boost the state’s housing stock, as well as money from nonprofits.

“From the original InvestNH process, a lot of people came out of the woodwork and had these multi-use properties or other properties,” she said. “They want to help. They’re not your typical developer.”

Requests have come from “everywhere from Colebrook to Berlin to Gorham to Whitefield to Lancaster,” Canales said.

Renovating would take less time than building from scratch, she said.

“That makes sure there’s revitalization and not blight,” Canales said.