On September 30, 2025, a woman named Helena Briggs stood up in the Hollis Town Hall community room and told the Zoning Board of Adjustment that she owns 2.5 acres on Runnells Bridge Road and cannot build a second house on it. Across the street, an applicant was asking permission to put four buildings and up to 16 units on a similarly sized lot. Briggs wasn't objecting to housing. She was objecting to the fact that the rules seemed to bend for one property and not the other.
She was right that something had bent. What she was watching, without quite naming it that way, was Hollis testing a state law nine months before that law technically existed.
A Law That Was Already in the Room Before It Was on the Books
New Hampshire's House Bill 631 was signed by Governor Ayotte in the summer of 2025 and took effect on July 1, 2026. It strips towns of the ability to block multifamily housing on commercially zoned land, as long as basic infrastructure like roads, water, and sewer service is available or can be provided. Legal analysts have called it one of the most significant changes to the state's zoning landscape in decades, and this year's legislature reinforced rather than repealed it, passing two follow-up bills that close loopholes towns might have used to slow-walk compliance.
The Hollis case at 82 Runnells Bridge Road, filed by Team Yarmo Investments on a roughly four-acre commercial parcel, was argued explicitly around this looming deadline. The applicant's attorney told the board plainly that the variance was only necessary because the law hadn't taken effect yet. Once July 1, 2026 arrived, the multifamily use she was asking permission for would simply be allowed, no board vote required.
That single fact reframes what the hearing actually was. It wasn't a normal zoning dispute about one property. It was a small town rehearsing, in public and on the record, a fight it was about to lose the ability to have at all.
Two Zoning Rulebooks, One Town
Most of what makes Hollis feel the way it feels, wide setbacks, long driveways, working farmland between houses, comes from a zoning baseline that covers the bulk of the town's land: two acres per dwelling unit in the agricultural and residential districts that make up most of Hollis. This is not a loophole-riddled ordinance. It's a consistent, deliberate low-density pattern that residents have kept in place for decades.
The commercial zone runs on different math. Under the ordinance's own language, a residential use there needs as little as one acre, and workforce multifamily density has been capped at four units per acre, a figure the board referenced directly by pointing to an earlier development called Bella Meadows as the precedent for how that number gets applied.
| Most of Hollis | The commercial corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| Zoning baseline | 2 acres per dwelling unit | As little as 1 acre for a residential use |
| Multifamily density | Not permitted outside workforce housing provisions | Capped at 4 units per acre |
| Who controls multifamily use | Town voters, through the zoning ordinance | State law (HB 631), as of July 1, 2026 |
| Typical build without a variance | Single-family homes | Multifamily housing by right, given adequate infrastructure |
That second column used to be theoretical. As of this summer, it isn't.
Why This One Parcel Kept Failing as a Gas Station
Part of what makes the Runnells Bridge Road case worth knowing about is that the property wasn't fought over because it was thriving commercially. It wasn't. Board members noted during the hearing that the site had drawn applications over the years for a gas station, a Dunkin' Donuts, and a convenience store, and none of them ever got built. One board member said flatly that aside from housing, the only realistic commercial use left for the lot was something like self-storage.
That detail matters beyond this one address. A lot of small commercial parcels scattered through towns like Hollis were zoned for uses the local market never actually wanted, gas stations and drive-throughs sized for a version of Route 111 that never fully materialized. HB 631 doesn't force those parcels to become housing. It just removes the town's ability to say no when a landowner decides housing is the only use that finally pencils out.
The Vote Wasn't Unanimous, and That's the Point
The board approved the variance 3 to 2, with the majority conditioning approval on the applicant meeting Hollis's workforce housing requirements, a trade the town has used before to accept added density in exchange for units priced for local workers rather than the open market. One board member, who had served on the zoning board for 23 years, said afterward that the two cases in front of him that night were among the hardest of his tenure, because he found the arguments on both sides equally sound.
The dissent wasn't really about whether housing belonged there. It was about scale, water availability, and whether 16 units on four acres made sense for a lot that sits in what one member called a very sensitive area. That's a useful distinction for anyone trying to read what HB 631 will and won't produce in a town like this. The law removes the town's veto over multifamily use itself. It does not remove every lever towns have over size, water capacity, and design.
Why a Narrow Supply Channel Matters Right Now
Hollis's housing market has not been loosening on its own. Over the three months ending in June 2026, homes in the 03049 zip code sold for a median of $932,000, up 8.4 percent from the same period the year before. At the same time, the pace slowed noticeably: homes took a median of 35 days to sell, more than double the 15 days from a year earlier, and only 19 homes sold in June 2026 compared to 23 the year before.
That combination, prices still rising while transaction volume and speed both cool, is the signature of a market where demand hasn't dropped but supply has stayed tight enough that sellers aren't feeling pressure to move faster or price lower. In a market like that, any new channel that can legally add units, even a narrow one limited to a handful of commercially zoned parcels, carries more weight than it would somewhere with looser zoning and faster turnover.
What This Means If You're Comparing Hollis to Other Towns
- If the appeal of Hollis is the acreage and the separation between houses, that character is intact almost everywhere in town. The 2-acre standard governs the vast majority of Hollis's land and HB 631 doesn't touch it.
- If you're evaluating a property in or near a commercially zoned stretch, particularly along Route 111 or the Runnells Bridge corridor, it's worth understanding that the zoning designation on paper may allow more than it used to, regardless of what's built there today.
- If you own commercially zoned land in Hollis that has struggled to find a viable business use, the Runnells Bridge Road case is a real, documented example of how that math can shift once housing becomes a legally protected option rather than a variance request.
- This isn't a law likely to be walked back. The 2026 legislative session added two more bills reinforcing HB 631 rather than repealing it, which suggests towns should plan around it as a permanent feature rather than a temporary mandate.
A Few Straight Answers
Does HB 631 change zoning on a typical residential lot in Hollis? No. The law applies specifically to land zoned commercial. The 2-acre standard covering Hollis's residential, agricultural, and rural districts is untouched.
Does this mean an apartment building is coming to Hollis? One is already approved, conditioned on workforce housing requirements, at 82 Runnells Bridge Road. Whether more follow depends on which other commercial parcels in town have similarly struggled to find a business use and have owners willing to pursue housing instead.
What happened to the original commercial plans for that property? Over the years, applications for a gas station, a Dunkin' Donuts, and a convenience store were all filed for the site and none were built, which is part of why the zoning board saw housing as the more realistic long-term use.
Zoning fights like this one rarely make it into the numbers most buyers and sellers look at first, but they shape what a town's housing stock looks like five and ten years out. If you're weighing Hollis against another Southern New Hampshire town, or you own a piece of land here and aren't sure what it's actually worth given all this, Purple Finch Properties can walk through the specifics with you. Get your free home valuation and a straight read on what your property, and this market, actually supports.