No Single Town Can Fix New Hampshire's Housing Shortage Alone

New Hampshire's deep attachment to local control is, in most respects, one of its genuine civic strengths. It is also, on the specific question of housing, a structural obstacle that no amount of goodwill among individual select boards is likely to overcome on its own.

Every town has a rational, locally sound reason to be cautious about new density: strained septic capacity, narrow rural roads, concern about school enrollment growth outpacing classroom space. Taken town by town, these are legitimate planning concerns. Taken together, across more than two hundred municipalities each making a similarly cautious individual choice, they add up to a statewide housing shortage that leaves nurses, teachers, and young families unable to find homes anywhere near the jobs the state needs them to fill.

This is precisely the kind of problem that requires action above the level of any single town, whether through state incentive programs, regional planning commissions with real authority, or zoning reform that sets a shared floor without eliminating local judgment entirely. None of these approaches will feel comfortable to towns accustomed to deciding land use questions entirely on their own terms. But the current trajectory, in which each town's individually reasonable caution compounds into a shortage none of them intended, is not a neutral status quo. It is a choice, and a costly one, that the state's economic future cannot indefinitely absorb.