- The Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority (CHRA) installed roughly 300 Minut Monitor sensors inside tenant apartments starting in late 2024, spending about $46,060 on the hardware.
- The sensors generated what the ACLU's complaint tallies as several hundred million individual data readings on motion, sound and nearby device signals — including more than 140,000 motion readings logged from a single unit.
- A class-action suit filed September 2, 2026 argues the monitoring violates tenants' rights under the New Hampshire Constitution; CHRA says the sensors exist only to flag indoor smoking and pinpoint noise complaints.
A single sensor inside one Concord apartment logged upward of 140,000 motion readings across roughly seven months — and the tenant living there says he never agreed to be tracked that closely. That figure, surfaced through a public records request, now anchors a lawsuit challenging how New Hampshire's capital city monitors residents inside its federally subsidized housing.
The case could decide whether public housing agencies can quietly turn always-on smart-home hardware into an unwritten condition of tenancy, trading a renter's privacy for a roof over their head.
What the Sensors Actually Track
The hardware at the center of the dispute looks like an ordinary smoke detector, but it wasn't built with public housing in mind. Minut, a Swedish company, originally marketed the devices to short-term rental hosts trying to catch guests throwing unauthorized parties. CHRA repurposed that same consumer product for tenants on long-term leases across its portfolio, which includes the Crutchfield Building, Parmenter Place and Kennedy Building, among other properties.
Beyond smoke and vape detection, each unit measures decibel spikes, physical movement and humidity, and scans for nearby Apple device signals to estimate how many people are in a room at a given moment, according to the underlying civil complaint. Readings are logged continuously and, tenants say, kept without any stated expiration date.
'There's No Consent Here': Why Tenants Are Suing
Attorneys representing tenants argue the arrangement leaves low-income renters with no real choice. "There's no consent here," said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director for the ACLU of New Hampshire. Because subsidized housing is often a resident's only affordable option, he contends, a signature on a lease addendum accepting the sensors can't be treated as freely given.
Tenants were required to sign those addendums when the devices went in, with no option to decline and a $300 penalty if a unit's sensor was damaged. CHRA told residents the devices contained no cameras and couldn't record conversations, but tenants say the agency never disclosed that noise levels would be checked every 60 seconds, around the clock.
One Apartment, 140,000 Data Points
The scale of what's collected is what troubles tenant advocates most. A public records request obtained by ACLU-NH staff attorney Maria Savarese turned up one unit where a single sensor logged upward of 140,000 motion readings over about seven months; a separate apartment recorded nearly 65,000 motion readings over a similar span, from the day a tenant moved in through early June.
Strung together, Savarese says, that kind of granular record can reconstruct a resident's entire routine — when they wake up, when they leave for work, when they come home, even movement near a bed late at night. Deputy ACLU director Nathan Wessler called the arrangement "the stuff of dystopian science fiction," arguing it amounts to a continuous, warrantless search of tenants' homes that would ordinarily require a court order.
CHRA's Defense: 'We Deeply Respect the Privacy of Our Residents'
CHRA disputes the surveillance framing outright. In a statement to the Concord Monitor, Executive Director Julie Palmeri said, "We deeply respect the privacy of our residents," adding that the agency's use of the sensors is confined to health, safety and lease-compliance issues. Palmeri said the devices don't capture sound, voice or motion directly — they register only whether noise stays above a set decibel threshold continuously for ten minutes — and that CHRA does not use the sensors' capability to estimate how many people are inside a unit, directly rebutting the occupancy-tracking allegations in the suit.
What CHRA hasn't done is commit to a fixed data-retention limit. ACLU deputy director Nathan Wessler argues that's by design, saying the agency has effectively claimed unrestricted discretion to keep tenant data for as long as it chooses — a characterization CHRA has not directly disputed.
What the Lawsuit Is Asking For
Filed as LaValley v. Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority on behalf of tenants Mark LaValley and Terri King, the class action was brought in Merrimack County Superior Court alongside New Hampshire Legal Assistance. It asks a judge to rule that CHRA's monitoring program violated tenants' rights under the state constitution, to order deletion of the data already collected, and to bar the agency from disciplining any tenant over a lease violation flagged by a Minut sensor while the case proceeds.
New Hampshire's constitution has included an explicit right to privacy since a 2018 amendment — a protection some legal observers view as broader than comparable federal search-and-seizure standards. Wessler frames the Concord case as a warning to landlords well beyond the city: any property owner deploying similar always-on sensors without giving tenants a genuine way to refuse should expect the same kind of legal challenge. For now, roughly 300 households living alongside the Minut hardware are waiting to find out whether a court agrees their homes were monitored without meaningful consent.
