I lived & worked in Nashua, there are/were several big tech employers. I worked for a smaller company.

IIRC Oracle has/had a big office, BAE, Progress software.

But for sure, all my NH friends who lived north of Nashua all thought Nashua was a bad place and didn't really deserve to be considered part of NH.

The commute will always be horrible because most NH will shoot down a rail line or anything else to fix it that actually works. There's been work for years to try and get a train line that currently exists from Boston to Lowell extended to Nashua. Trains are socialist though so that'll never happen.

Rt. 3 in MA between Nashua and Rt. 95 in MA was expanded from 2 to 3-4 lanes per side while I lived in Nashua. It helped for a year or two but otherwise was a futile waste of money. I don't think any road project can work. The only solutions that I think could work is a big train line or companies moving out of MA into NH.

Even these days, Nashua is fairly typical of old New England mill towns that have gentrified to some degree. This mostly translates into having maybe a couple dozen square blocks of nice restaurants and shops in a walkable downtown but things get pretty rundown and/or strip-mallish as soon as you get beyond that area.

I'm not sure how much a train would even help. In my experience, having worked with many such folks over the years, many of those commuting down from NH are headed to employers in tech and elsewhere scattered all over the greater Boston area.

I was born in Manchester and grew up in Epping. My dad was a policeman in Londonderry when there were about three officers on the force.

Southern New Hampshire (I'd say Manchester and south, but especially Nashua) has grown so much in the last 30 years...we jokingly call it "Northern Mass." Most of the "small towns" from my childhood are no longer small by any means.

The reason for this is the abundance of jobs in the Greater Boston Area, which attracts New Hampshirites looking for those types of opportunities (good luck finding a non-remote tech job if you live north of Concord). However, it also has a backflow effect, encouraging Massachusettsans to move to southern New Hampshire.

The political culture is wildly different between Mass and New Hampshire. A common complaint from the elders here is how all the "Massholes" are moving to New Hampshire and want to tax everything. I can see how this growth has polarized New Hampshire politics, but left much of the rest of the state intact. I suspect this growth is the primary reason we moved from a conservative state to a swing state back in the 1990s [1] despite what the Union Leader suggests.

I'm fortunate enough to not have to be stuck in that commute, but I know many who aren't as lucky. For them, a high-speed commuter rail into Boston is probably the best long term solution. Of course, making the commute easier would encourage more out of staters to relocate here, further changing New Hampshire's politics.

To many, the Live Free or Die attitude we have is what makes New Hampshire unique and wonderful. We're proud. We get it. We don't want to be babysat by the government.

I have mixed feelings about it all.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Hampshire#Elec...

There are things that are sad about how that growth affected southern NH.

I spent huge amounts of time bicycling & motorcycling through NH when I lived there.

Southwestern NH (everything pretty much west of Nashua) stayed pretty nice other than the stuff along Rt. 101, the big box nonsense expands further west along 101 every year and it expanded shockingly between 2000 (when I first moved there) to 2009 (when I left the 2nd time).

But Southeastern NH.. it feels like one continuous zoning disaster all the way from Nashua to Portsmouth... almost every main road just turned into a horrible procession of traffic and stop lights and big box stores and generic American chain businesses. It's happened lots of places in the US but it's really bad there.

> good luck finding a non-remote tech job if you live north of Concord

There is a modest amount of tech work in the Upper Valley.

That said, cost of living there isn't much lower then Boston metro.

As a former MA resident who lived on the NH border I sympathize with not wanting to be MA but NIMBY is never the answer. Things change.

It's not the development, it's the people that follow it. People aren't complaining that Nashua is turning into Lowell or Leominster, they're complaining that it's turning into Cambridge. I'm sure there's a couple old racists complain about black people or something like that but there's always a few of those people. Most people seem to take much bigger issue with the newcomers lack of respect for individual freedom and property rights more than skin color or social class. People are worried that their culture will be gentrified out of existence. They're worried that in time will no longer be socially acceptable, maybe even illegal to live the way they've live and mostly like living. It's not the "backwards hicks" that are worried about this. It's the white collar professionals who are enduring the terrible commute and double taxation because they like NH for the "do what you want on your own property and nobody cares" factor are who are worried about this.

> NH can only be NH and not MA-lite...

What is the difference between NH and MA-lite, dare I ask?

About 40 years.