This area has drawn visitors to its natural beauty and peacefulness for longer than any one reading this has been alive. Long before there were interstates, long before anyone could work from a laptop on a dock, people from away found their way up here every summer, and some of them found a way to stay for good. That part isn’t new; which is part of what we’ve been exploring together in the history series if you’ve been following that. What’s new is how loud the conversation about it has gotten, and how much of that conversation happens at the transfer station, or at a showing, or over coffee, in the tone people use for a complaint rather than a question. And, what’s also new, to some degree, is the drivers of the movement of people into our region and where they’re coming from.
Here’s the biggest piece I think gets skipped, though, when people complain about how “crowded” with “summer people” our towns are now. Most rural places in this country are shrinking. Young people leave for work, the school enrollment drops until someone has to have the conversation about closing it, the general store holds on for a decade past when it should have folded and then finally joins a string of empty storefronts on what used to be vibrant main streets. That is the ordinary fate of a small, rural place in America right now. That’s not what we’re experiencing. New Hampshire has had more deaths than births, statewide, every single year since 2017. Whatever growth this state has, all of it, comes from people choosing to move here. And up here specifically, that choosing isn’t going to stop, probably ever. It’s slowed some since the pandemic years, the way anything returns to the mean after a big leap, but towns like Brookfield, Tuftonboro, and Moultonborough are still growing at more than double the state’s overall rate. Not every rural region gets to have this “problem.” I try to remind my neighbors of that sometimes, even though it also reminds them that I called Boston home for 15 years before moving here not too long ago — at least not too long ago as the locals count belonging.
For a long time the shorthand for who was moving in was easy, and mostly accurate. Massachusetts retirees. Connecticut families with a camp that finally became the only house. People who summered here as kids and made it permanent once the grandchildren showed up. That story hasn’t disappeared, but it’s stopped being the whole story. Statewide, adults in their twenties and thirties and early forties, the exact years people are building a career and starting a family, now account for more than half of New Hampshire’s net growth from other states. Not retirees. Not weekenders. People trying to build an actual working life somewhere with a hybrid schedule in one hand and a school enrollment number in the other. When people tell me why they are coming to this region, the honest answer is rarely about money. It’s family, more often than not; somebody’s parents, somebody’s siblings, a version of New England they didn’t want to leave behind entirely. New Hampshire’s tax picture helps too, obviously; no tax on wages, and as of last year, none on interest and dividends either, which matters more to someone living off investments than to a family living off a paycheck. Climate comes up more than it used to as well, New England increasingly framed as a place with less exposure to the kind of heat and water reshaping the Gulf Coast and the Southwest.
Now the part I actually want to say plainly, because it is a conundrum that is absolutely solvable if we talk about it collectively with an aim of understanding that some situations aren’t either/or problems, they are yes/and problems. The same qualities that make this place so attractive to so many are making it harder for the people who already live here to stay in a way that will continue to work for them for another generation. A median single-family home in New Hampshire crossed half a million dollars last year, up nearly eighty percent since 2019. To buy that home without being what the economists call cost-burdened, a household needs to earn around a hundred fifty-eight thousand dollars a year. Roughly three in ten New Hampshire households clear that. I think about the people I know, some of them older, some of them just starting out, whose plan was always to move up eventually; into something bigger once the family grew, something newer and easier to heat once the stairs got harder. That move-up market is the one that’s disappeared out from under a lot of people. Their current home is worth more on paper than it’s ever been, and that number does them almost no good, because everything they’d move into costs more than the equity covers. They’re not being pushed out exactly. They’re stuck in place, which is its own kind of squeeze, quieter and less talked about than the one that gets all the headlines.
It would be easy to make this a story about newcomers, and I don’t think that’s an honest, or the most interesting, one. This region never had much housing inventory to begin with. Steep land, protected shoreline, small town centers that were never built to expand much past their original footprint. Add real demand of any kind, retiree or young family or someone working three remote days a week out of a rented camp, to a supply that was already tight, and prices move the way they’ve moved regardless of exactly who’s doing the buying. It isn’t locals against newcomers. It’s a small, slow-growing, genuinely beautiful place meeting more interest than it has room to hold gracefully, the way it’s been meeting that interest, on and off, since it became a summer resort back in 1838 or whatever. We’re just meeting more of it than usual, from a wider range of people, at a moment when there’s less room to spare than there used to be.
I don’t have a tidy answer for what to do about any of it, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims to. What I keep landing on is that this has always been a place people choose. The question that actually interests me isn’t whether people will keep coming. They will; the numbers say so, and so does every October sunset that makes someone in a rental car pull over on 109 to take a picture.
The real question is what it takes for the people who are already here, who’ve shoveled the same driveway for forty winters running, to still have a place in whatever comes next. I’d really love to hear what you think about this, whether you’ve lived here from the day you were born or the signature on your new place is still wet.
Here’s to figuring it out together, because we all deserve this place, and each other.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
