Priorities

Functionally end homelessness

One of the most pressing and visible issues in Manchester is homelessness. Homelessness not only impacts those experiencing it, but it also affects peoples’ feeling of safety in their homes and neighborhoods, and it affects businesses as well. Here’s how I plan to address it:

  • Establish a goal. Our goal should be to functionally end homelessness in Manchester — not just address its symptoms. A functional end to homelessness means that it should be rare, brief, and non-recurring.
  • Align efforts. We need to enhance and better align the efforts of existing collaborations between homelessness programs operating in the city by consistently bringing them to the same table, identifying shared measures of success, and incentivizing better collaboration.
  • Enlist more partners, including the business community and additional faith-based partners, to be part of the solution.
  • Share and evaluate data. We need to enhance the existing Homeless Management Information System database of all homeless individuals by incentivizing homelessness programs that do not receive U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funding to share, in real time, their data to enable coordinated communication, case management, and customized solutions/wrap-around services for each affected individual based on their unique needs.
  • Go upstream. We can’t continue to put band-aids on the problem. We must also work further upstream to prevent people from falling into homelessness in the first place. This means addressing the interconnected factors that contribute to homelessness — housing, poverty, mental health, substance abuse, education, employment readiness, and lack of family and social connections.

Read my full plan to functionally end homelessness.

Increase housing affordability

With a rental vacancy rate of less than 1 percent and record low housing inventory for those who dream of purchasing a home, housing costs continue to climb higher and higher in Manchester. It’s a classic supply-and-demand issue: there just aren’t enough homes in the city for those who want to live here.

At “best,” this forces desperately-needed talent to leave Manchester or not move here in the first place. At worst, it drives more and more of our neighbors into homelessness.

To address our housing deficit, Manchester needs policies that incentivize and simplify the construction of new housing. As Mayor, I will pursue the following housing production policies:

To address this housing deficit, Manchester needs policies that incentivize the construction of new housing. As our next Mayor, I will propose housing production policies including:

  • Predictable and Transparent Regulatory Process
    • Discretionary approval processes (such as requiring zoning variances or special use permits for all or nearly all new development) can reduce new housing by deterring developers from ever submitting proposals for needed development. While flexibility in zoning and land use policies can be helpful, Manchester should ensure a predictable and transparent regulatory process for new housing. This means establishing rules that allow for desired development to occur “as-of-right,” without having to seek a variance or special use permit. This will provide developers with a clear understanding of what they need to provide to obtain permits and what to expect from City departments.
  • Impact Fee Relief
    • Manchester should examine our impact fee structure to determine whether it can be lowered without compromising the availability of sufficient infrastructure, and explore the fiscal impact of waiving or reducing impact fees for developments that meet affordability objectives or housing goals. Further, Manchester should consider implementing an impact fee payment plan for large-scale developments to support a more diverse field of developers in the city.
  • Streamlined Permitting
    • To help streamline what can be a time consuming and costly process, Manchester should initiate a comprehensive review of all steps in the development approval process to identify the factors that most significantly suppress new residential construction and redevelopment. We can then streamline the permitting process to stimulate development and moderate the price pressure on existing housing stock.
  • Reform Zoning to Allow More Housing Types
    • Because lower-cost housing types are not by-right under most conditions in the city, variances and/or conditional use permits that authorize deviation from existing regulations are required. The need to go through a special process to obtain the permits increases costs, lengthens timelines, and increases risks and uncertainty. To increase the availability of lower-cost housing and encourage a more diverse housing stock, changes to zoning are needed to allow the creation of these housing types in more scenarios than exist today.

Read my full plan to increase housing affordability.

Ensure public safety 

While homelessness and housing issues are intertwined, woven into that thread is the issue of public safety. In conversations I’ve had across the city, people have raised concerns about gun violence, gangs, and assaults.

But even if we added a hundred police officers tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve all the problems that we face. Every conversation about public safety needs to consider the ways this issue is connected to other issues we face, most of them upstream of the incidents that get the headlines. While we absolutely need to address public safety today, we must also be proactive and work on long-term solutions for tomorrow. Here’s how I’ll approach public safety:

  • Stop asking law enforcement to do non-law enforcement tasks. So many of the calls for service that police respond to don’t require a police officer — things like non-violent mental health calls and non-violent domestic disputes. We need to have social workers do social work so that police officers can do police work.
  • Work to prevent violence and other crime from occurring in the first place, through initiatives like neighborhood-based violence prevention programs that identify people who are at the highest risk of violence involvement (both as perpetrators and victims) and engage them in a way that produces authentic and genuine relationships and connections in order to then help those individuals address their complex needs.
  • Support law enforcement every single day by giving them the resources they need to do their job, AND hold them accountable when they get out of line. To me, that’s how you do policing, because we all want the same thing: for the police to show up quickly when needed, and to respect the rights of hard working, tax paying citizens.

Strengthen our schools

The Manchester School District gets a lot of criticism, and while we should expect great things from our schools, I think most of this criticism is misdirected. Because here’s the reality: we don’t have an education problem in Manchester — we have a poverty problem.

The barriers faced by some of our students — as seen by the high number of students on free and reduced lunch, who have limited English proficiency, who are homeless, whose parents suffer from addiction — are greater than those of any other district in the state. Manchester schools do very well when measured on progress instead of raw performance — meaning the kids who are in our schools make significant improvement. But helping students successfully overcome the significant barriers they face takes resources. At the same time, MSD spends less per pupil than any district in the state.

Constantly asking teachers and administrators to do more with less isn’t fair, and it’s not how we build a stronger Manchester. Here’s how I plan to strengthen our schools:

  • Make quality Pre-K available for every family in Manchester, so that all students start kindergarten ready to learn. Read my detailed Pre-K plan here.
  • Work to address the interconnected issues that impact students and families, including economic development, housing, food insecurity, transportation, and public safety.
  • Focus on equity to ensure students of all backgrounds have equal opportunity to thrive and that our students from historically marginalized groups feel safe, heard, and are able to be their authentic selves.
  • Give students the support they need beyond the classroom, including help developing social capital (access to mentors and role models), social and emotional learning opportunities, weekend food services, expanded school transportation options, English language assistance, and more.
  • Support teachers so they can focus on teaching. Much like we need more social workers to do social work so police officers can be police officers, we need to fill vacancies seen with in-school social workers, clinical mental health workers, school nurses, para professionals, and City Year volunteers so that teachers can be teachers. We also need to ensure our base pay continues to be competitive with surrounding districts so that we are able to attract and retain teachers.
  • Advocate for changes to the State Adequate Education Aid formula to ensure that Manchester receives the funds to which it is entitled.
  • Ensure the Board of Mayor and Aldermen give state funds appropriated to our schools to our schools, rather than keep them for the general city budget.
  • Work with the School Board to invest in our facilities, because all students deserve to learn in school facilities that are more functional and designed for 21st Century education.