A small senior living operator and developer in New Hampshire is creating a new affordable and workforce housing development meant to help house the company’s employees.
Durham, New Hampshire-based Harmony Homes Assisted Living is developing 44 cottage-style affordable housing units on its campus. Though the new cottages will be open to the public, staffers who work at the nearby assisted living and memory care community will get priority to live there, Harmony Owner and CEO John Randolph told Senior Housing News.
The $5.2 million development will be the first big step in what is poised to be a major evolution for Harmony – a campus with assisted living and memory care on one side and affordable housing on the other.
Harmony isn’t the only senior living operator eyeing workforce housing as a way to get over a staffing crunch. Other operators including The Springs Living have also forged ahead with their own versions of workforce housing developments.
With a footprint of 380 square feet and a 160 square foot loft, the so-called tiny homes will provide 540 square feet of space in total. The ground floors of the cottages are planned to have a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and a living area, while the loft could also function as a bedroom.
The cottages will be close enough to each other to create a sense of community among workers and residents, according to Maggie Randolph, an architect with GSD Studios and co-owner of Harmony Homes. Maggie and John met more than seven years ago while working on a development project before eventually getting married.
“It’s about capturing community and creating opportunities for residents to interact with their neighbors and feel the safety of each cluster because they know their neighbors,” Maggie said.
Employees who live in the new cottages will have to pay 30% of their monthly pay in rent. People in need of affordable housing can also live there, too; with monthly rates starting at around $600..
“We don’t charge for a second person if that person is not an income winner,” John said. “But if there’s a single mother, for example, then 30% of her pay is rent if she works for us.”
John Randolph expects that about 12 to 15 of the cottages will be occupied by Harmony workers. He hopes that adding housing will not only make Harmony more competitive in the labor market, but will help to unfreeze the senior living development pipeline in New Hampshire.
“We will have some of the cottages ready this summer,” John Randolph said. “We’re hoping to have them all occupied by Christmas.”
The project in New Hampshire isn’t the first time Harmony has developed housing for its staff. The genesis of the idea to develop workforce housing came before the pandemic. In 2019, Harmony doled out 21% raises to staff to improve its ability to recruit and retain talent at its assisted living and memory care communities.
“But we knew we couldn’t keep doing that over and over again,” John Randolph told SHN. “And we own 28 acres where one of our AL communities is located.”
So, the company built seven 600-square-foot apartments with childcare within walking distance from the senior living community.
Harmony operates a 24-unit assisted living community and a memory care community with 60 beds. The company has the land and bandwidth to build two additional skilled nursing facilities with about 50 to 60 beds, each.
“But, we’re not allowed in the state of New Hampshire to build right now because of how short-staffed the state is,” John Randolph said.
The Randolphs have been making the rounds at conferences and speaking events advocating for more workforce and affordable housing in the state of New Hampshire as the market demographics for a senior living put more pressure on developers.
“Maggie and I recently testified on several housing bills in the state senate,” John Randolph said.
So, with the senior living development market frozen, Harmony is planning to move forward with workforce housing developments. And their colleagues in senior living have taken notice.
“Other communities, not only in New Hampshire but in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and we’ve started to branch out as far as Georgia,” Maggie Randolph said. “They have reached out to us to see how this is working.”
One of the big ways that the Randolphs are guiding their peers is by explaining how they zoned the developments for workforce housing.
Harmony plans to open 51 affordable workforce units this year. But it plans to more than double that output every year soon in the future. John Randolph believes that to solve southern New Hampshire’s affordable housing problem, it will take developing thousands of additional units.
The operating margin for assisted living and memory care provides better cash flow, so the profitability of the affordable housing/workforce housing developments are in holding real estate as it appreciates over time. And that could be a long while, so the Randolphs are keeping their focus on New Hampshire, and specifically the southern part of the state.
“If you told me 2-5 years ago that we would be here, I would have laughed at you,” John Randolph said. “Five years from now, if we had another phone call in say five years, and we were in southern Maine and Massachusetts, would I be shocked? No. But, at this point, we’re not planning for cross-boarding expansion.”
Companies featured in this article:
