New Hampshire Republicans are slamming state Democrats for “rooting for housing prices to drop.”
The cost of buying a home in New Hampshire set another record in May, and prominent Republicans are defending the high prices, not fighting them.
The statewide median sale price for a single-family home reached $576,000 last month, up 6.7% from a year earlier—the highest figure ever recorded, according to data from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors. The number tops the previous record of $569,000 set in June 2025. In Rockingham County, the median climbed to $717,500, the highest ever recorded in any New Hampshire county.
The record comes as Granite Staters are losing ground on income.
New Hampshire’s inflation-adjusted average hourly wage fell 2.2% between 2024 and 2025—the first time in 12 years that private-sector wages have dropped in back-to-back years, according to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute.
The housing squeeze is rooted in a chronic shortage of homes, the product of nearly two decades of underbuilding since the Great Recession, according to the institute.
New Hampshire averaged just 1.8 months of housing supply in 2025, far below the roughly six months that signals a balanced market, and as of 2024 had added less than a third of the nearly 90,000 units the state needs by 2040 to meet demand.
Against that backdrop, State Rep. Ross Berry, a former Executive Director of the New Hampshire Republican State Party, took to social media to argue that high prices are a feature, not a bug of GOP policy—and that Democrats are wrong to want them lower.
“I just want to point out that Democrats are actively rooting for housing prices to drop … they are actually rooting for people to be underwater on mortgages and lose equity in their homes. Wild,” Berry wrote in a post on social media.
Berry has a history of inflammatory statements. In 2024 he resigned from the House after being removed as chair of the Election Law Committee over a scheme to mislead Democratic colleagues, then took to a conservative podcast to level unfounded accusations at State Sen. Donovan Fenton, the Keene Democrat who has pressed the case on housing affordability.
That fall, Berry questioned the integrity of the state’s voter rolls ahead of the election and was reappointed to lead Election Law despite his removal months earlier. Last spring, he faced accusations from fellow Republicans that he threatened members of his own caucus during the state budget fight—part of an intra-party rift that later surfaced in leaked messages showing another GOP lawmaker appearing to urge violence against Republican dissenters.
Berry’s framing that falling home prices would erode current homeowners’ equity sidesteps the reason housing advocates and economists want costs to ease: at today’s prices, younger workers, renters, and first-time buyers are increasingly shut out of the market, worsening the workforce shortage that employers consistently name as their biggest obstacle.
The sentiment isn’t confined to Berry.
In February, House Republicans voted 185-166, largely along party lines, to repeal the state’s Housing Champions program, a $5 million initiative that rewards towns for loosening zoning to allow more homes and address high housing costs.
The 28 communities recognized as Housing Champions accounted for 45% of all housing units permitted statewide in 2024. The repeal cleared the House but stalled in the Senate, where a handful of Republicans broke with their House colleagues to keep the program alive in April.
