What’s Getting Built: 819 New Homes Moving Through Local Boards

Most people find out a subdivision is going in behind them when the trees come down. By then it has been through a dozen public meetings, all of them posted, all of them open, and nobody was watching. So I started watching.

This is the first of a monthly roundup: the residential projects moving through planning and zoning boards around southern New Hampshire and the Merrimack Valley. Not what sold last month. What is going to exist in two years. Four projects this month, 819 units between them, and every one is at a different stage: one conceptual, two mid-review, one finally cleared to build after nine years.

A note on what this is and is not. I am reporting what has been proposed and where it stands procedurally. I am not arguing for or against any of it, and I am not characterizing anybody’s neighbors or anybody’s future neighbors. If you want to weigh in on a project, the hearing dates are below and that is the place to do it.

Chester, NH34 detached rental homes on Haverhill Road

The structure is the interesting part. Workforce rental housing in this area almost always arrives as an apartment building. This is 34 individual small houses on 20 acres, grouped on the front half of the parcel, with the back left open. Different site plan questions, different look from the road, different thing to live next to.

It is also the first real test of something Chester voters did to themselves in 2024. The town adopted a Fair Market Rental Housing ordinance, and this is the first major application filed under it. Chester has very little rental housing compared with the towns around it, so whatever the Planning Board decides here effectively writes the rulebook for the next application that comes in under the same ordinance. Review so far has focused on traffic along Route 121, the safety of the proposed entrance, stormwater, and groundwater and soil data. There was a site walk on July 29 and the hearing was continued from August 5. Nothing is approved.

Litchfield, NH86 townhouses, a daycare and retail on Route 3A

This is the biggest residential proposal on the list and the one fewest people have heard about. It would be Litchfield’s first project built under the town’s mixed-use village provisions, in the Northern Commercial/Mixed Use district. The zoning allows four units per acre, which works out to 101 units on this parcel. The applicant is asking for 86, so this is not a developer pushing the ceiling.

The idea behind mixed-use village zoning is that housing, shops and services sit on one site instead of in three separate places. Here that means townhouses set back toward the golf course, a 10,000 square foot retail building and a daycare closer to Route 3A. No retail tenants had been named when it went to the board.

Traffic is the part that will decide how the neighbors feel. Primary residential access would come off a private gated road, commercial traffic would use Albuquerque Avenue, and a secondary connection to Route 3A would be restricted to right turns in and out, pending NHDOT. The applicant has proposed widening Albuquerque Avenue at the highway for dedicated turn lanes.

The April 7 vote is worth understanding correctly, because it is the kind of thing that gets misread in a neighborhood group. The board voted 6-0 to accept the application as complete. That is a paperwork finding, not an approval, and the applicant told the board that night it was not asking for a decision. The town’s staff review had already flagged a missing fiscal impact study, no phasing plan, open space short of the 20% requirement, potential left-turn conflicts from southbound Route 3A, and commercial buildings that do not meet Litchfield’s traditional New England design guidance. It still needs a state driveway permit, septic approval and an alteration of terrain permit. It has not appeared on a Planning Board agenda since.

Salem, NH464 more apartments proposed at Tuscan Village

This one is early. A conceptual plan for a West Village District puts a 392-unit apartment building at the center, with a separate 72-unit workforce and affordable building and a 120-room hotel alongside. Conceptual means exactly what it sounds like. Nothing has been approved and the Planning Board has not signed off on any of it.

What is worth watching is the direction. The workforce housing piece has already grown from 50 units to 72, and the developers have separately moved to drop a large block of planned lab and life-science space, pointing at how much of it sits empty regionally. Every revision to this project has traded commercial square footage for housing. Full build-out is now projected near 2,000 residential units on one property, which is less “outlet mall with a movie theater” and more a small downtown with everything that comes with it: traffic studies, abutter pushback, and Planning Board nights that run long.

Salisbury, MA235 units clear the last permit, nine years in

Big Block Development Group first came before the Planning Board in late 2017. The board approved the project unanimously in March 2020. The final permit did not arrive until July of this year. That is nearly nine years from the first hearing to a buildable project, and more than six of those years came after the town had already said yes.

That gap is the lesson, not the unit count. Approval is not the finish line. When somebody tells you a project “is approved,” the follow-up question is whether it is permitted, and after that whether anyone has broken ground. Plenty of approved projects never do. The town considers this one the centerpiece of turning Salisbury Beach into a year-round neighborhood, and it took until 2026 to get to the point where a shovel is legal.

What to do with this

Three things, depending on where you sit. If you own near one of these, you now know the hearing date and can show up. If you are thinking about buying in Chester, Salem or Salisbury, you know what is queued up nearby before you write an offer, which is more than the listing sheet will tell you. And if you are thinking about selling in the next couple of years, the timing of a nearby project is a real input, in both directions. New construction next door can cut either way depending on what it is and when it lands.

I will run this every month. If there is a project near you that you want on the list, tell me the town and I will track it.