Coalition backs setting maximum housing lot sizes
The legislation (SB 84) would set a cap that in each town a majority of the property zoned for single-family residences must have lot sizes that are no bigger than 1 1/2 acres on parcels without public water and sewer.
Those with public water could be no larger than one acre and the size would be limited to half an acre on property that has water and sewer service under the bill.
The legislation would grandfather existing house lots larger than the proposed maximums.
State Sen. Keith Murphy, R-Manchester, said he's authored 10 different bills to try and promote more residential construction.
"If we are really serious about expanding, this is the bill to do it," Murphy told the Senate Commerce Committee Tuesday. "Everything else, including all my other bills, are really window dressing by comparison."
Prices dropped slightly from record highs in 2023
Brady Deshaies, a lobbyist with the New Hampshire Municipal Association, was the lone opponent during a one-hour hearing on this bill.
Creating artificial maximums will not necessarily lead to more housing because cities and towns lack the public works systems to support more development, he said.
"One-size-fits-all mandates that overrule the votes of the legislative bodies, the voters of the municipality, they will not necessarily lead to more construction because without that infrastructure, you can't build the housing," Deshaies said.
New Hampshire's median price of a home in 2023 crossed over $500,000, the ninth highest in the country. Prices dropped slightly and the median last November was at about $480,000.
Murphy, who has a master's degree in community planning, said some private companies won't locate or expand here because workers are unable to afford apartments.
"Make no mistake we are missing out on jobs and opportunities because of our anti-housing policies," Murphy said.
Nick Taylor, director of Housing Action New Hampshire, said a study of the state's zoning atlas concluded only about 15% of buildable land is available for the construction of starter homes.
Rob Dapice, executive director of New Hampshire Housing, said making changes to zoning ordinances to reflect these new lot maximums would not be a "heavy lift."
"The status quo has gotten us to the situation that we are in and it's time to rebalance the equation," Dapice said.
Matt Mayberry, CEO with the N.H. Homebuilders Association, said his group is willing to negotiate on these lot sizes, but said it's time for action.
"We are sick of talking about the need for housing," Mayberry added. "Let's actually go get it done."
klandrigan@unionleader.com
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The only thing Alina Habba is enforcing is Trump's vengeance
Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is going to need to 'lawyer up.' So will Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who investigated President Donald Trump's complicity in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There's a good chance former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whom Trump has flippantly accused of treason, also may need to. And here is a name that may surprise you: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. He's already ahead of them all. The governor, as Politico New Jersey reported on Aug. 7, retained two top-shelf lawyers – Parimal Garg, his former chief counsel, and Chris Porrino, who served as a state attorney general for former Gov. Chris Christie – after Murphy was served with a subpoena as part of an investigation into New Jersey's 'sanctuary state' immigration policies. Both lawyers work at the Roseland-based Lowenstein Sandler firm and will be paid $450 an hour, the report said. Leading this spurious inquisition is the acting U.S. attorney-in-limbo for New Jersey, Alina Habba, the eager-to-please former personal lawyer to Trump who has turned the federal plaza in Newark into a circus. She is – or was, at least, when she was secure in the job – probing whether the 'sanctuary state' policies interfered with Trump's immigration crackdown. But according to sources familiar with matter, the subpoena apparently was more concerned with the gaffe Murphy made before a left-wing group in February. Playing to the crowd, a puffed-up Murphy suggested to the audience that he might be sheltering an illegal immigrant at his Middletown home. He then dared the federal immigration authorities to try to get her. That annoyed Tom Homan, Trump's border czar and chief enforcer of the ICE raids, who called Murphy's remarks 'foolish' and vowed to look into them. An aghast Murphy spent the next week walking back his comments, explaining that the person in question had never been to his place, and that this unnamed person was, in fact, in the United States legally but was seeking permanent status. It was a form of crowd-pleasing fabulism that probably overtook Murphy in the heat of the moment. (If telling tall tales were a crime, most of the Trump administration would be on a supervised work-release program.) Murphy administration officials declined to comment on the subpoena and status of the investigation – if there is one. Alina Habba isn't enforcing the law. She's playing politics. Yet the subpoena over an absurd, custom-made-for-the-right-wing-echo-chamber 'investigation," and the fact that Murphy needed to go hire two top guns – at taxpayers' expense if at some point they have to do real work – is just another milestone of the absurd Habba circus as the state's top federal law enforcement officer. It's been a debacle since she took the job earlier this year. She began by politicizing the office, telling a right-wing podcaster that New Jersey is ripe for a 'red' takeover. The crime fighter spoke like a political strategist. Then she had Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested in May for allegedly trespassing at Delaney Hall, the federally leased detention center in his city, during an immigration protest, only to withdraw the charge and draw the withering scorn of the presiding judge, who publicly scolded her for her 'embarrassing retraction.' Opinion: Alina Habba politicized her job as US attorney. Team Trump politicizes her exit. Both U.S. senators from New Jersey refused to sign off on her nomination, and the state's federal District Court judges voted not to extend her interim rein. They made their vote of no confidence clear by replacing her with prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, a registered Republican. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. An angered Trump defended Habba and devised a work-around by firing Grace and installing Habba as the first assistant U.S. attorney, which would effectively put her in charge of the office without needing to get approval from the Senate or the blessing of federal judges. But this piece of creative shuffling has only created more confusion, as lawyers for several defendants are now seeking to get their charges dismissed on the grounds that Habba was not authorized to bring the charges under this new end-around role. And looming over this recent résumé is an ethics investigation into Habba's allegedly improper role in settling a sexual harassment claim of a former employee at Trump's Bedminster golf club. 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Habba is simply not qualified One clear reason Habba has collided with those guardrails is that she is clearly not suited for the job. The United States attorney for New Jersey is a powerful and prestigious job that was held by a long roster of venerable prosecutors: Frederick B. Lacey in the late 1960s, the first in a series of important mob-busting prosecutors, like Jonathan Goldstein, a Nixon appointee in the mid-1970s, and Robert Del Tufo until 1980. Chris Christie, sworn into office in 2002, was widely accused of targeting mostly Democrats, but there was at least a focus on rooting out political corruption, and he parlayed that record into the governor's office. Regardless of his motives, he put the political class on notice. Alina Habba? Is she the best that Trump can do for a state where he raised and later bankrupted his casino empire and where he retreats from the Florida heat? Or is New Jersey not really a front in his purported War on Crime but just another battleground in his war on institutional power? Charlie Stile is a veteran New Jersey political columnist. This column originally appeared on You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on Alina Habba enforces Trump's politics and not much else | Opinion
USA Today
11 hours ago
- USA Today
The only thing Alina Habba is enforcing is Trump's vengeance
U.S. attorney-in-limbo for New Jersey, Alina Habba, is the eager-to-please former personal lawyer to Trump who has turned the federal plaza in Newark into a circus. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is going to need to 'lawyer up.' So will Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who investigated President Donald Trump's complicity in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There's a good chance former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whom Trump has flippantly accused of treason, also may need to. And here is a name that may surprise you: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. He's already ahead of them all. The governor, as Politico New Jersey reported on Aug. 7, retained two top-shelf lawyers – Parimal Garg, his former chief counsel, and Chris Porrino, who served as a state attorney general for former Gov. Chris Christie – after Murphy was served with a subpoena as part of an investigation into New Jersey's 'sanctuary state' immigration policies. Both lawyers work at the Roseland-based Lowenstein Sandler firm and will be paid $450 an hour, the report said. Leading this spurious inquisition is the acting U.S. attorney-in-limbo for New Jersey, Alina Habba, the eager-to-please former personal lawyer to Trump who has turned the federal plaza in Newark into a circus. She is – or was, at least, when she was secure in the job – probing whether the 'sanctuary state' policies interfered with Trump's immigration crackdown. But according to sources familiar with matter, the subpoena apparently was more concerned with the gaffe Murphy made before a left-wing group in February. Playing to the crowd, a puffed-up Murphy suggested to the audience that he might be sheltering an illegal immigrant at his Middletown home. He then dared the federal immigration authorities to try to get her. That annoyed Tom Homan, Trump's border czar and chief enforcer of the ICE raids, who called Murphy's remarks 'foolish' and vowed to look into them. An aghast Murphy spent the next week walking back his comments, explaining that the person in question had never been to his place, and that this unnamed person was, in fact, in the United States legally but was seeking permanent status. It was a form of crowd-pleasing fabulism that probably overtook Murphy in the heat of the moment. (If telling tall tales were a crime, most of the Trump administration would be on a supervised work-release program.) Murphy administration officials declined to comment on the subpoena and status of the investigation – if there is one. Alina Habba isn't enforcing the law. She's playing politics. Yet the subpoena over an absurd, custom-made-for-the-right-wing-echo-chamber 'investigation," and the fact that Murphy needed to go hire two top guns – at taxpayers' expense if at some point they have to do real work – is just another milestone of the absurd Habba circus as the state's top federal law enforcement officer. It's been a debacle since she took the job earlier this year. She began by politicizing the office, telling a right-wing podcaster that New Jersey is ripe for a 'red' takeover. The crime fighter spoke like a political strategist. Then she had Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested in May for allegedly trespassing at Delaney Hall, the federally leased detention center in his city, during an immigration protest, only to withdraw the charge and draw the withering scorn of the presiding judge, who publicly scolded her for her 'embarrassing retraction.' Opinion: Alina Habba politicized her job as US attorney. Team Trump politicizes her exit. Both U.S. senators from New Jersey refused to sign off on her nomination, and the state's federal District Court judges voted not to extend her interim rein. They made their vote of no confidence clear by replacing her with prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, a registered Republican. An angered Trump defended Habba and devised a work-around by firing Grace and installing Habba as the first assistant U.S. attorney, which would effectively put her in charge of the office without needing to get approval from the Senate or the blessing of federal judges. But this piece of creative shuffling has only created more confusion, as lawyers for several defendants are now seeking to get their charges dismissed on the grounds that Habba was not authorized to bring the charges under this new end-around role. And looming over this recent résumé is an ethics investigation into Habba's allegedly improper role in settling a sexual harassment claim of a former employee at Trump's Bedminster golf club. 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Or is New Jersey not really a front in his purported War on Crime but just another battleground in his war on institutional power? Charlie Stile is a veteran New Jersey political columnist. This column originally appeared on
USA Today
11 hours ago
- USA Today
Alina Habba isn't enforcing the law. She's Trump's political weapon
4-minute read Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is going to need to 'lawyer up.' So will Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who investigated President Donald Trump's complicity in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. There's a good chance former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whom Trump has flippantly accused of treason, also may need to. And here is a name that may surprise you: Gov. Phil Murphy. He's already ahead of them all. The governor, as Politico New Jersey reported last week, retained two top-shelf lawyers — Parimal Garg, his former chief counsel, and Chris Porrino, who served as a state attorney general for former Gov. Chris Christie — after Murphy was served with a subpoena as part of an investigation into New Jersey's 'sanctuary state' immigration policies. Both lawyers work at the Roseland-based Lowenstein Sandler firm and will be paid $450 an hour, the report said. Leading this spurious inquisition is the acting U.S. attorney-in-limbo for New Jersey, Alina Habba, the eager-to-please former personal lawyer to Trump who has turned the federal plaza in Newark into a circus. She is — or was, at least, when she was secure in the job — probing whether the 'sanctuary state' policies interfered with Trump's immigration crackdown. But according to sources familiar with matter, the subpoena apparently was more concerned with the gaffe Murphy made before a left-wing group in February. Playing to the crowd, a puffed-up Murphy suggested to the audience that he might be sheltering an illegal immigrant at his Middletown home. He then dared the federal immigration authorities to try to get her. That annoyed Tom Homan, Trump's border czar and chief enforcer of the ICE raids, who called Murphy's remarks 'foolish' and vowed to look into them. An aghast Murphy spent the next week walking back his comments, explaining that the person in question had never been to his place, and that this unnamed person was, in fact, in the United States legally but was seeking permanent status. It was a form of crowd-pleasing fabulism that probably overtook Murphy in the heat of the moment. (If telling tall tales were a crime, most of the Trump administration would be on a supervised work-release program.) Murphy administration officials declined to comment on the subpoena and status of the investigation — if there is one. Alina Habba isn't enforcing the law. She's playing politics Yet the subpoena over an absurd, custom-made-for-the-right-wing-echo-chamber 'investigation," and the fact that Murphy needed to go an hire two top guns — at taxpayers' expense if at some point they have to do real work — is just another milestone of the absurd Habba circus as the state's top federal law enforcement officer. It's been a debacle since she took the job earlier this year. She began by politicizing the office, telling a right-wing podcaster that New Jersey is ripe for a 'red' takeover. The crime fighter spoke like a political strategist. Then she had Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested in May for allgedly trespassing at Delaney Hall, the federally-leased detention center in Newark, during an immigration protest, only to withdraw the charge 10 days later — and draw the withering scorn of the presiding judge, who publicly scolded her for her 'embarrassing retraction.' Both U.S. senators from New Jersey refused to sign off on her nomination, and the state's federal District Court judges voted not to extend her interim rein. They made their vote of no confidence clear by replacing her with prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, a registered Republican. An angered Trump defended Habba and devised a work-around by firing Grace and installing Habba as the first assistant U.S. attorney, which would effectively put her in charge of the office without needing to get approval from the Senate or the blessing of federal judges. But this piece of creative shuffling has only created more confusion, as lawyers for several defendants are now seeking to get their charges dismissed on the grounds that Habba was not authorized to bring the charges under this new end-around role. And looming over this recent resume is an ethics investigation into Habba's allegedly improper role in settling a sexual harassment claim of a former employee at Trump's Bedminster golf club. Trump — suddenly — cracks down on crime as his law enforcers spin political animus The irony is that Trump has made a great show lately of cracking down on crime. He authorized a military takeover of the Washington, DC, police department on Monday, vowing to wipe the nation's capital of crime and homelessness — despite a drop in crime rates in the city. He has hinted that he may deploy more federal troops to Democratic-controlled cities. Crime fighting doesn't seem to be his purpose in Newark. He's digging in his heels in support of Habba out of anger at being rebuffed by federal court judges. He feels his prerogative of picking his own people has been once again thwarted by unelected judges. His prerogative just ran smack into long-established institutional guardrails. And as always when he runs into guardrails or norms, he seeks to ignore them or blow them up. Opinion: Ciattarelli breaks with the president on immigration — but in a Trumpian way Habba is simply not qualified One clear reason Habba has collided with those guardrails is that she is clearly not suited for the job. The United States attorney for New Jersey is a powerful and prestigious job that was held by a long roster of venerable prosecutors: Frederick B. Lacy in the late 1960s, the first in a series of important mob-busting prosecutors, like Jonathan Goldstein, a Nixon appointee in the mid-1970s, and Robert Del Tufo until 1980. Chris Christie, who had no courtroom experience before being approved for the post in 2002, was widely accused of targeting mostly Democrats, but there was at least a focus on rooting out political corruption, and he parlayed that record into the governor's office. Regardless of his motives, he put the political class on notice. Alina Habba? Is she the best that Trump can do for a state that where he raised and later bankrupted his casino empire and where he retreats from the Florida heat? Or is New Jersey not really a front in his purported War on Crime but just another battleground in his war on institutional power? Email: stile@
