Affordable Housing in the Upper Valley

This report outlines a roadmap for performing research that will help Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) address its staffing shortage by outlining affordable housing solutions in the Upper Valley. DHMC currently is unable to fill 900 of its 9,000 jobs, in part due to housing issues. In order to better understand this issue and to propose potential solutions, our research is two-fold. First, we have assembled and analyzed three ongoing affordable housing programs across the country: the Gunnison Valley Housing Program in Colorado; the Bella Montaña Program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; and the University Glen Housing Project at California State University, Channel Islands. In order to compare these case studies, we have generated categories pertaining to program size, timeline, and other factors. The second piece of our research was designing of a potential instrument to survey hospital employees. The purpose of this survey is be to gain information about the most important factors for employees in housing, bearing in mind what is realistic for the Upper Valley. Our report includes more detail about how we designed our survey; the complete survey instrument is presented in the appendix.