A tiny-home village with $1,000-a-month rents will allow teachers and firefighters to afford to live in the community they serve

• A lack of homes in Dover, New Hampshire has pushed prices up and made housing unaffordable for many.
• The Randolphs, a married contractor and architect, are trying to fix that.
• They are building 44 tiny homes that will cost between $1,000 and $1,200 a month to rent.

What happens when the people who keep a town running simply can't afford to settle down there?

It's a question that's increasingly haunting municipalities across the US with home prices still rising year-over-year, due to an acute shortage of housing. Many Americans have had to dedicate bigger chunks of their incomes to living expenses, potentially leaving them "house poor."

That truth is growing even more apparent in New Hampshire's Seacoast region, which is experiencing high rates of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing. But where there is misfortune, there can also be opportunity to address the situation, according to one husband-and-wife development duo.

The couple, John Randolph, a contractor, and Maggie Randolph, an architect, are building a community of 44 tiny homes across four acres in Dover, a city of over 33,000. Dover is about an hour north of Boston near the Maine border, according to the local ABC syndicate WMUR.

The 384-square-foot homes will be geared toward service workers who earn $40,000 to $45,000 a year.

The homes are meant for "your entry-level schoolteachers, your entry-level firefighters, the people that are fixing your car or taking care of your mom and cooking her dinner," John Randolph told the New Hampshire Business Review last fall. "They deserve to live in the area as well. They shouldn't have to live an hour away and then come serve you every day and then drive home."

Despite the diminutive size of the homes, they will come with all the accouterments of much bigger ones at a cost of about $1,000 to $1,200 per month, the couple told WMUR.

The entire project will cost $5.2 million, the New Hampshire Business Review reported.

The price per unit averages out to about $118,000. The average cost of building a new home in the state is about $307,000, which is more than $20,000 above the national average, according to NewHomeSource, an online marketplace that helps homebuyers find new homes.

The Randolphs are only able to keep costs this low due to a Dover affordable-housing initiative that allows developers to build more units than usually allowed under zoning rules at no extra cost, if they agree to keep rents under a certain price point — the Concord Monitor reported.

Usually, developers have to pay for the right to build each unit if they are developing market-rate housing, something that would have added nearly $600,000 extra to the Randolphs' final bill, the Monitor reported.

"A lot of affordable-housing projects are killed because of overhead costs," Maggie Randolph told the Concord Monitor.

By providing the higher-density housing, the couple hopes to help relieve pressure on the overall market. In the Dover region, the vacancy rate — a measure that reflects the availability of housing supply— is around 1%, USA Today reported.

The tight market has inflated home prices in the state, just as it has in most other corners of the nation. The typical cost of a home in New Hampshire was $400,600 as of January, according to Redfin. That's higher than the US median home price of $382,758 during the same time.

Beyond the shortage of supply, more and more people are moving to the Granite State, putting additional pressure on housing there.

The Randolphs — being in the construction business — are well-prepared to work on Dover's housing needs. In other places, public officials are tackling the problem head-on.

In Colorado, for example, ski towns like Breckenridge — where the ultrawealthy flocked to amid the pandemic — have gotten so expensive that the government is building housing that its snowplow workers can actually afford.