Not at all. People move to NH for cheaper housing. Full stop. I have met one person in my life from Mass that commuted to NH for a job. I never met a person that moved to NH for a NH job.
That may have been the case a generation ago, but that is no longer the case. And if your scenario was hanging on by a thread already by 2019, it's changed completely since then. There are not only a growing number of "reverse commuters" who like doing their commutes with relatively clear traffic, but now a huge number of NH folks who used to be forced to travel daily to MA don't have to do that anymore. And both sets of those examples are beneficiaries of not having to pay NH income taxes. I used to have to make a token appearance at an office in the Merrimack Valley a couple of times a month. Not any longer. And there are literally thousands like me ... plus thousands of other folks who have indeed moved to NH from MA for "quality of life" issues. That includes relatively far north locales like Littleton and the Conways. I'm not even counting the Lake Winnipesaukee crowd, which comes from literally everywhere.
You don't understand taxes. Massachusetts is running at a revenue surplus. The state is pumping massive dough into transportation and education.
MA has a current state debt of $122B, which amounts to about $17,000 per person (and yes, I know debt is not always bad) while NH has a debt of $6B which works out to about $4,000 per person on the debt load. NH operates year to year with a basically balanced budget. There is actually no "revenue surplus" for the so-called Commonwealth, as revenue shortfalls in FY 2026 are $800M and approaching $1B, and the forcast for FY 2027 is for a $3.3B structural budget gap.
Boston is running at a $70M operating budget deficit for FY 2026, with approx. one-third of that amount directly attributable to the Boston Public Schools. If they are indeed "pumping massive dough" into transit and education, that's classic tax and spend that is not sustainable when revenues are coming up short.
Look at people that live in housing with a value beyond $700K in southern NH and ask them where they work. Most work in Mass.
It's funny ... the average price of a single-family home in our area - average, not top end - is already pretty much there. Most of the folks who live with me in Effingwoods have homes worth more than that (probably us too, but I'm not selling, so value is irrelevant). There are very few (if any?) commuters left who are wasting their time to drive an hour south to sit in traffic. I know more people (3) in town who partially commute to Portland, and one (1) person who is a Route 128 commuter down south. Many are self-employed, and most others are working in state. Portsmouth/Pease, as well as UNH and a couple of the hospitals within 15 miles of here are big employers. Several work for the State in and around Concord, which is a 40 minute drive (Manch is 30 minutes to downtown, or the office parks in nearby Bedford. Analogic just dragged its 500+ employees from Route 128 to Salem NH. No one is moving from NH to MA, unless it's some college kids who want to hang out in the city for bit, enjoy the nightlife while they're young ... but by age 30, guess what? Most come back.
You know nothing about Boston. Every hear of the Seaport, Huckleberry? It's a breathtaking success. It's filled with type A commercial and residential properties. The Back Bay is killing it. The Fenway is now incredibly hot. Used to be a dump. The financial district is in some distress because many type A tenants moved to Seaport. It's also been slow coming out of Covid. But we're talking about 30 blocks (at most) of the entire city. Financial district buildings are being repurposed to residential. Wait 10 years and check to see the cost of property in the financial district. Things will be very fine.
BTW, ever hear of the Boston waterfront. Read somewhere that it's popular.
You make some points, and you miss others (and BTW I'm willing to bet you I've spent more time in and around Boston than you ever have). The Financial District is in huge distress; I know that because I used to have a satellite office on High St. and that whole area is struggling. The Seaport has cannibalized the Financial District, and it remains to be seen if landlords will get approvals to turn former commercial space into residential space. Rents in the Seaport for employees are off the charts, and until a release valve for any demand further intown develops, you're talking large scale gentrification of South Boston, the South End/Back Bay, and even frickin' East Boston. Boston is great though, it's silly to argue otherwise, but other great cities have faltered in the past when there has been a paradigm shift. Boston is absolutely not immune to that possibility - COVID was a warning shot - if they don't get out ahead of things.
On a statewide basis though ... to go back to my prior point about the state politicians, Boston's gain has come at the expense of a lot of other smaller cities, again including NB/FR etc. but also including closer cities like Brockton, Lynn, Lawrence and Lowell (the latter of which is arguably the best off of that lot). Go spend some of those transportation bucks on commuter boating from Lynn Harbor to Rowe's Wharf or nearby, maybe revive interest in a city that's almost a hundred years behind in industrial neglect, but has some awesome waterfront possibilities. Sal Lupoli has done more for Lawrence in a generation out of his own pocket than Beacon Hill pols have done since the mill jobs packed up and left town early last century.
As Boston has thrived, and communities forming its suburbs have mostly enjoyed the knock-on effect from all that ... everything outside of Route 495 and west has struggled. The trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and public policy has been largely absent. The last time the folks on the Hill and/or Boston spent any time thinking about the world beyond Newton/Waltham or thereabouts was when the forward-thinking folks of the so-called Commonwealth decided to submerge four existing small towns in Central MA to create the Quabbin Reservoir, meant to provide drinking water ... for Worcester?? Nope, for faraway Boston.
Nothing says "howdy neighbor" like a bit of eminent domain erasure of small-town MA for the benefit of the city dwellers in the capital ... something that I'm going to say would have been far less likely if the state pols were sitting in Worcester and may have known some of those unfortunate, poorly placed folks.
Anyway ... folks in MA and Boston get to make their own decisions, and folks in NH get to make ours. Borderline "millionaires" north of Boston are moving up to NH and Maine at a slow and steady due to the hostility of their politicians to fund all of their favorite marginal budget line items. And as long as they leave their politics behind them when moving to NH, I'm absolutely fine with that. And if they're still somehow attached to their MA politics, then ME and VT are lovely alternatives. And while the Berkshires are also lovely, those with money and earning power aren't following Horace Greeley's advice to "move west, young (person)" ... and maybe that's the real reason that the Boston-focused pols won't extend a lifeline to folks living in the Pioneer Valley "frontier" lol???
