The Housing Crisis & The Path Home

I live in a 740-square-foot apartment above my old restaurant with my girlfriend and my son. I’ve been here since 2016. We want more kids, but in this space, that would be difficult. So for nine years, I’ve been searching for an affordable home within a reasonable drive of my business.

I remember the last house in my town that sold for under $300,000. It was around 2018.

When I served on the Town Council, another young councilor and I were both looking to buy houses. We brought it up to the other members. Their advice was a shrug: “You’ll probably have to move north.” There was no outrage or sense of crisis. Just acceptance that younger people could no longer afford to live in the communities they served.

Every year, I’d watch it happen: a regular customer, a recent college grad, a neighbor would stop coming in. They weren’t leaving for a new job. They were moving to find a more affordable place to live. My friend who owns the café rents. My barber rents. My friend with the hair salon rents. None of us small business owners can afford to buy a home here.

This is the housing crisis, it is the single greatest determinant of your capacity to pursue happiness. 

Housing dictates where you live, the size of your family, whether you can stay near aging parents, if you can build equity, and if your community has a future. A stable home is the launchpad for a flourishing life. Its absence is an anchor of perpetual anxiety. In New Hampshire, over 50,000 households are spending more than half their income on housing. This crisis was not an accident of the free market. It was built by design, and it directly undermines the foundational security our economy is supposed to provide.

The “Supply and Demand” Myth

Politicians love to say the housing crisis is simple: we need more supply. Just build! It’s a comforting myth that sounds like economics.

Yes, we desperately need more homes. New Hampshire is short an estimated 30,000 housing units and that deficit is growing, but what kind of homes, where, and for whom? In New Hampshire, new construction overwhelmingly means large single-family homes or high-end apartments, units that generate maximum profit for developers, not stability for teachers, nurses, or retail workers. 

In 2023, New Hampshire only permitted 4,878 housing units total, including just 1,773 units in buildings with 5 or more apartments; the kind that create density and affordability. The market, when left to its own devices in a distorted system, builds for capital returns, not for community need.

The real bottleneck isn’t some abstract “free market.” It’s a thicket of government rules that strangle the market before it can function for the common good.

The Vicious Cycle: When Raises Become Rent Increases

Here is the cruelest twist in the housing crisis. When you are struggling to pay rent, the obvious, moral solution seems to be higher wages. But in a housing market with a fixed supply, raising wages without building more homes is like adding more players to a game of musical chairs without adding more chairs.

I witnessed this in real-time during the pandemic. My employees started receiving rent increases from their landlords. I gave them raises to help cover the higher cost of housing. To pay for those raises, I had to raise the prices on my menu. One of our customers, my barber, Dan, got the same rent increase notice from his landlord. To cover it, he raised the price of a haircut. Everyone, now paying more for tacos and haircuts, had less disposable income. We all worked harder, and technically made more money on paper. But who ended up capturing most of that new money? The landlords.

Economists call this phenomenon rent capture. When the supply of a necessity like housing is artificially constrained, more money in renters’ pockets does not create new apartments. Instead, it signals to property owners that the market can bear higher prices. The additional public support is partly transferred from tenants and taxpayers to landlords through higher rents. This is not a theory. 

Research on federal housing vouchers finds that when voucher payment limits are made more generous across an entire metro area, landlords capture a meaningful share of the increase. They do this through higher rents in the voucher market, with only limited changes in unit quality or neighborhood quality. In other words, expanding assistance without rapidly expanding supply can inflate prices and dilute the intended benefit for families who need help most. 

The lesson is stark: In a housing shortage, wage increases and housing subsidies, by themselves, become rent increases. We cannot solve this crisis by only focusing on paychecks. We have to fix the root cause: the severe shortage of homes.

My Intro to Zoning

My first introduction to zoning laws was the first day I sat on the Newmarket Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA). The ZBA is where a resident goes to request a variance to the rules around housing and development. The first case before us was a young man who wanted to build an apartment in his father’s barn. His father was getting on in years, and he needed someone close by to take care of him.

It seemed reasonable to me. The town planner talked about how this type of Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) was a great way to help seniors “age in place.” However, the zoning laws did not allow this ADU because the barn was not attached to the house. The other members of the board said, “Yes, we understand your need, but there is nothing we can do.”

That made no sense to me. Wasn’t the point of having a board to intervene in cases like this? I voted to allow him to build the apartment, but was outvoted by the other members of the board. The ironic thing to me, was that this guy could probably have gotten away with building the apartment in the barn without permission and no one would have noticed.

Origin of Zoning Laws

The idea of separating different types of buildings for public good is not new. The earliest modern zoning laws are traced to 18th century France, intended to keep polluting industries, slaughterhouses, and tanneries far from residential areas. It was a matter of public health.

But when this tool was imported to the United States, it was eventually twisted to serve a different, darker purpose: racial and economic segregation.

In the early 20th-century, American cities began using zoning not to separate factories from homes, but to separate people by race. The Supreme Court initially ignored this practice. However, in the 1917 case of Buchanan v. Warley, the Court struck down explicit racial zoning ordinances, ruling they violated the 14th Amendment.

This did not end the goal of segregation. It simply changed the method. The new tool was economic zoning.

The legal blueprint for modern exclusionary zoning was cemented in the 1926 Supreme Court case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. While Euclid did not directly address race, it provided the perfect, race-neutral legal weapon. Cities and, later, suburbs could now mandate large lots, single-family homes, and expensive building materials. The effect was the same as an old racial covenant, it kept “undesirable” people out, but now the mechanism was income.

As housing historian Richard Rothstein wrote in his Spring 2021 American Educator article, “Suppressed History: The Intentional Segregation of America’s Cities,” local and federal officials promoted single-family zoning to “reserve middle class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower income families of all races could not afford.” 

The intent to separate people by race was preserved, only the justification changed.

Zoning did not just shape our neighborhoods. It created artificial scarcity that drives our crisis. In many American cities, up to 75% of residential land is zoned so that it is legal to build only detached single-family homes. In New Hampshire, the zoning atlas finds that some towns zone 87% to 99.9% of their buildable acreage for small lot single-family housing. It is a government mandated shortage of the very homes that foster diverse, resilient, and integrated communities.

We now live in a world where a landlord can say to a tenant, “Due to market forces, I am raising your rent.” Nothing has changed about the apartment. It did not get bigger or better, the only thing that changed is that demand for housing increased.

Yet this tenant cannot simply buy a plot of land, build an apartment building, and say, “The free market requires more housing, so I am building an apartment complex.” In most areas of our state, that type of multi-unit property would not be allowed. So the “free market” is used to justify raising rents, but the same “free market” does not exist to build the housing necessary to lower them.

Now ask yourself a question: Who is sitting on the planning boards and zoning boards making these decisions? By and large, it is homeowners; people invested enough in the community to serve on a town board. 

What incentive does a homeowner sitting on a land-use board have to increase housing? More housing could fundamentally hurt the value of their own home and, in the short term, offers them no real gain.

When we have public hearings to discuss potential new multifamily housing, often the people living in the neighborhoods where new housing is planned show up to object. The issue is, the potential renters who might benefit from this new housing typically do not show up to these hearings because they may not even live in that town yet. There is fundamentally no hypothetical tenant to be advocating for this new housing. The only person advocating for the building is the developer, who is frequently characterized as a greedy outsider.

Imagine if we treated other investments with the same restrictions we place on housing. Imagine if you wanted to buy a pickup truck and first had to ask all your neighbors for permission. Some might say, “I don’t like pickup trucks. They cause too much pollution. I don’t want to see an ugly pickup truck in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood of minivans, it would be out of character to have a pickup parked here.” That level of government control over what you do with your own property would never be tolerated. No one would stand for it. Yet these same types of arguments and controls are placed on housing, particularly the multifamily housing we desperately need to solve the housing crisis.

I strongly believe the founders of New Hampshire and the founders of these United States would never have allowed the planning and zoning laws we currently tolerate. They defy the very “Live Free or Die” ethos of New Hampshire.

My Intro to Zoning Continued...

Over the years I spoke to a number of residents who had been blocked from building apartments in their garages and barns because they were not attached to their houses. So when I eventually got elected to the Town Council I kept pushing to change the ADU ordinance.

Eventually, we had a public hearing. One of the residents who spoke against expanding ADUs said, “I’m concerned this could change the complexion of our town.” I don’t think he meant to be racist, but knowing what I did about the origin of zoning laws, I could not help but wonder what exactly did he mean? Another Town Councilor who did not support expanding ADU access said, “Imagine if we told the people on Maple Crest (a nearby residential neighborhood) that their neighbors were going to build an apartment next door...”

I didn’t say it out loud, but all I could think was, “God forbid homeowners in our town have to live next to renters! Those renters might even be black or brown people. (Who are statistically more likely to rent.)” The unconscious classism and racism was palpable. 

The reality is in New Hampshire, zoning and permitting rules often make affordable housing financially unworkable without government subsidy because they increase costs and delays while limiting the number of units that can be built.

The Forgotten History of Federally Built Housing

In an emergency, the U.S. government has repeatedly stepped in to construct housing directly. The most significant early example is the United States Housing Corporation (USHC). Created in 1918 during World War I, the USHC had a clear, urgent mission: to build quality homes for war workers flooding into industrial cities. In just over a year, it planned and partially constructed thousands of housing units in communities across the country. These were not barracks. They were well-designed neighborhoods with homes, schools, and community centers, built to a high standard with the belief that wartime workers deserved dignity.

For nearly half a century, the United States understood something we have forgotten today: housing is infrastructure. From the 1930s through the 1970s, the federal government invested directly in building homes for seniors, working families, and low-income households. These were not tax credits or speculative financial tools. These were real homes, constructed with public dollars, owned or operated by public or nonprofit partners, and offered at rents ordinary people could afford.

This era began with the 1937 Housing Act, which created the nation’s public housing program. Federal dollars flowed to local housing authorities to build deeply subsidized homes intended to remain affordable over the long term. Contrary to the stereotypes that emerged later, many early public housing developments were solidly built and offered stability for working families.

As the population grew, federal housing programs expanded. Senior housing was added through Section 202 in 1959, allowing nonprofits to build very affordable homes for older Americans. Programs such as Section 221(d)(3) and Section 236 offered below market financing and mortgage subsidies to developers who agreed to maintain affordability. Together, these programs produced roughly 700,000 units nationwide and shaped the housing landscape for decades.

In 1974, Congress created Section 8, including a New Construction component that provided long term subsidies to build affordable apartment buildings. Over the next decade, project based Section 8 supported the development of hundreds of thousands of units, with production reaching the tens of thousands in many years. For a brief period, the United States had the capacity to produce affordable housing at national scale. Then, in 1983, Congress repealed the authority to enter into new Section 8 contracts tied to new construction and substantial rehabilitation, and the production system was effectively shut down.

The 1980s: When the Federal Government Stopped Building Houses

In the early 1980s, federal policy shifted away from building new subsidized homes. Housing and Urban Development commitments for federally financed units fell from 435,362 in 1976 to 60,590 by 1982, and Section 8 new construction and substantial rehabilitation were terminated in 1981. As a result, the national pipeline for new affordable housing shrank dramatically. Programs that built real, publicly accountable homes were replaced with complex tax credits for private developers. The goal shifted from creating homes for people to creating investment opportunities for capital. Affordability requirements became temporary. The pipeline of stable, foundational housing for working families dried up.

The federal government walked away and told the “market” to handle it. But the market, shaped by the exclusionary zoning we had created and a mandate to maximize shareholder profit, only builds what is most profitable, not what is most needed. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since: a national shortage of millions of homes. The U.S. is now short an estimated 3.8 million homes. We privatized the foundation of community and are shocked that it’s now unaffordable.

The Consequences: A Community Unravels

The housing crisis doesn’t just hurt individuals. It dismantles the ecosystems of stability within communities.

People delay having children or have fewer than they want. (I’m one of them.) Birth rates fall. New Hampshire’s birth and fertility measures have fallen sharply since 1990, with the general fertility rate down about 27% and total births down about one third. The fundamental human joy and challenge of building a family is deferred.

For decades, the path to adulthood and community investment included a modest starter home: a small Cape, a duplex, a townhouse. It was the first rung on the ladder, where you built equity, stability, and ownership in the literal and figurative sense. You became a stakeholder in your block, your neighborhood, your town.

That rung on the ladder has been sawed off. Zoning laws across New Hampshire make it illegal to build these kinds of homes in most places. We’ve mandated large lots and single-family detached homes, which only developers of luxury properties can profitably build. The consequence is a generational lock-out. 

Young adults stay in expensive rentals longer, unable to save a down payment. They delay marriage and children. Many simply leave the state, taking their energy, talent, and future spending with them.

Perhaps the most overlooked tragedy is what happens to our elders. Many own their homes outright but are cash-poor and house-rich. Rising property taxes and maintenance costs on a now-too-large house eat into fixed incomes. They’d love to downsize to a smaller, accessible apartment or condo in their own town, to stay near their doctor, their church, their friends, their life’s memories. But those options often don’t exist.

So they face a cruel choice: bleed their savings dry to stay in a home that no longer fits, or leave the community they helped build. In New Hampshire, nearly 32% of households with adults age 65 or older are housing-cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of income for housing.

Business Erosion

My restaurant suffered twice. I lost young customers who moved away. The customers who stayed had less to spend because their rent consumed nearly everything. A 2022 analysis highlighted by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that lower income renters who spent more than 30% of their income on housing had about $600 a month left after paying rent and utilities. That $600 has to cover food, transportation, health care, child care, taxes, and the basic bills that keep life running, including insurance. That does not leave much room for anything extra, including a burger at my restaurant. A town where residents cannot afford to spend locally is a town where businesses cannot thrive. The cycle of community vitality is broken.

How We Engineered the Homelessness Crisis

America’s homelessness crisis is not a natural disaster. For much of the twentieth century, there was an understanding that housing was a foundational need, and that when the market failed to provide it, the public had a role in increasing supply. 

The turning point was the 1990s and programs like HOPE VI. Sold as a reform of distressed public housing, its stated goal was noble: replace concentrations of poverty with mixed-income communities. The diagnosis was correct: isolating extreme poverty undermines any neighborhood, but the prescription was often catastrophic. Nationwide, HOPE VI demolished about 98,592 public housing units. While new units were produced, only a little over half were replacement public housing, and many of the new homes served higher incomes than the families who had lived there before. Too often, the program functioned less as a rebuild and more as a retreat from public responsibility. 

This change was fundamental. The federal government largely stopped building housing and instead relied on vouchers and market incentives. The theory was that private landlords would fill the gap. The reality is that a voucher is not a home. It is a coupon for a home that does not exist. In a housing shortage, vouchers cannot magically create new units. They push low-income renters into a brutal competition for the same scarce apartments.

The consequence is the crisis we live with. We transformed homelessness from a temporary emergency into a permanent condition. The system that once absorbed seniors on fixed incomes, people with disabilities, and families in temporary crisis was dismantled. 

We now spend enormous sums managing the symptoms through shelters, motel placements, encampment enforcement, and crisis services. Meanwhile, a large body of evidence shows that for high need cases, permanent supportive housing can reduce costly use of shelters, jails, emergency rooms, and other crisis systems. We are paying for expensive temporary solutions instead of building homes.

The lesson of HOPE VI is not that mixed-income housing failed. It is that we abandoned the “building” part. Community First Economics demands we finish the job we walked away from: building mixed-income, publicly-funded housing at scale, treated as essential infrastructure. Homelessness is not inevitable. It is the direct, predictable outcome of engineered scarcity.

How the Housing Crisis Manufactures Division

One of the most corrosive effects of the housing crisis is not just economic, but social. It manufactures a scarcity mindset that pits neighbor against neighbor and turns community against newcomer.

When people are fighting for a secure, affordable home, they are living in a state of chronic anxiety. They see every new family as a competitor for a scarce resource: a roof over your head. This is not a moral failing of individuals. It is the logical, human reaction to a system of artificial scarcity.

Politicians and demagogues exploit this manufactured anxiety with lethal precision. They point to a strained shelter system or a crowded classroom and declare, “The problem is them. If we just kept them out, there would be enough for us.” The rage should be aimed at exclusionary zoning, Wall Street landlords, and decades of federal disinvestment, and instead they blame immigrants, refugees, or anyone labeled an “outsider.”

This is the ultimate political sleight of hand. It transforms a crisis of policy into a conflict between people.

The Community First solution dismantles this toxic logic. By treating housing as a foundational right and committing to build abundant, affordable homes for all who live and work here, we end the mindset of scarcity. When people feel secure in their own foundation, they are far more likely to extend a hand, not raise a fist.

The Vision: Connected Communities

Bad policy built this crisis. The escape route is built with better design for connection. Imagine neighborhoods with a humane mix of housing, the antithesis of exclusionary zoning: Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs or “granny flats”): behind existing homes, providing rental income for seniors or a first home for a young couple, while keeping extended families close.

Duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes: on single lots, creating more homes without changing the neighborhood’s feel.

Small-scale apartment buildings: near main streets and transit.

Pocket neighborhoods: of cottages or congregate housing for seniors.

This kind of mixed-density, mixed-income, mixed-age neighborhood is how we knit the social fabric back together at the street level. It allows teachers, nurses, seniors, tradespeople, and young families to live near one another. Let’s design neighborhoods to promote casual, daily interactions: on the sidewalk, at the corner store, in shared green spaces. Places where we build understanding, trust, and the spontaneous networks of mutual aid that define a true community.

The Tools: A Global & Local Toolkit

We don’t need to invent solutions from scratch. We can look to places that have successfully treated housing as essential infrastructure. 

The Vienna Model: Social Housing as the Standard

For over a century, Vienna has pursued a simple but radical idea: high quality, publicly supported housing should be normal, not a last resort. Today, about 43% of Viennese households live in subsidized housing, split between municipal housing and nonprofit or limited profit housing associations. These homes are not limited to the very poor. 

They are available to a broad cross-section of residents, including teachers, nurses, students, and seniors. The system is built to keep housing costs moderate, often near a quarter of income, and recent research reports that Viennese households spent about 26% of their income on housing in 2022. It is a system that says the right to a stable home matters more than a developer’s right to maximum profit.

The Cooperative Housing Model: Co-op City, New York

In the Bronx stands one of America’s most successful large scale housing cooperatives: Co-op City, home to about 50,000 residents. 

Residents buy shares in the cooperative corporation that owns the entire complex, which has more than 15,000 apartments. RiverBay Corporation is governed by an elected resident board, which means democratic control and stewardship focused on the long term. Built under New York’s Mitchell-Lama Program, it offers an alternative to both the private rental market and traditional homeownership, a third option that puts community control first.

Singapore's Homeownership Model

In Singapore, about 77% of resident households live in public housing built by the Housing & Development Board. Most of these apartments are sold on 99 year leases, which allows households to build equity while keeping land under long term public control. 

The government’s land policies, including the Land Acquisition Act, made it possible to assemble land and plan entire new towns with schools, services, and transit. The result is a hybrid model: publicly planned and built, with widespread homeownership inside a regulated system. The core insight is that when homeownership is broad and attainable, people have more stability and more reason to invest in their communities.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs): An American Innovation

A nonprofit trust owns the land and leases it to homeowners, who own the building. When they sell, they get a fair return on their investment, but the resale price is capped, so the home stays affordable for the next working family. This breaks the speculative cycle and locks in affordability across generations. 

In Burlington, Vermont, the Champlain Housing Trust owns and manages over 3,000 permanently affordable homes, including 684 shared equity homes. National research during the housing crash found that community land trust homeowners were about ten times less likely to be in foreclosure proceedings than homeowners in the conventional market.

Japan's Flexible Zoning

In Japan, zoning is national and relatively simple. The country uses 12 standardized land use zones, and most residential zones allow a range of housing types, from detached homes to small apartment buildings, by right. This legalizes much of the ”missing middle” and lets neighborhoods adapt as demand changes. 

In 2014, Tokyo permitted about 142,417 new homes, more than the entire state of California that year. Tokyo has not been immune to price cycles, but over long stretches its housing costs have generally been more stable than many peer global cities, helped by steady homebuilding.

A Community First Approach for New Hampshire

This vision requires specific, actionable policies. We can adapt proven models to fit New Hampshire.

Zoning reform: Build on the 2024 zoning reforms. Use incentives and model codes to legalize duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and small courtyard apartments in residential areas. Regulate for form, safety, and real community impacts, not for exclusion.

State funding for critical infrastructure: Many municipalities cannot add housing because they lack water, sewer, and wastewater capacity. Create dedicated state funding streams for these systems, with priority for projects that unlock mixed-income housing near existing town centers.

Statewide pre-approved ADU plan library: Following models like San José, partner with architects and code officials to publish a curated catalog of ADU designs that already meet building code requirements and local zoning standards. Homeowners choose a compliant design, approvals move faster, costs drop, and reform turns into real homes.

Launch cooperative housing initiatives: Provide technical assistance, seed funding, and favorable financing for resident owned housing cooperatives. Focus on converting existing apartment buildings when owners sell, and on developing new ”missing middle” cooperatives that keep costs stable long term.

Invest in community land trusts: Provide robust state funding and technical support to expand community land trusts in every region, building a growing stock of homes that cannot be flipped to corporate landlords.

Build and train at the same time: Expand vocational school and correctional education programs that build modular homes, tiny homes, or components for affordable housing. Participation should be voluntary, wages should be real wages, and training should lead to recognized credentials and job placement. This builds housing, builds skills, supports reentry, and can reduce recidivism.

Unlock the existing stock with care: Offer low interest loans and grants that help homeowners add ADUs or convert underused space safely, including support for permitting, septic and sewer connections, and accessibility upgrades.

Create a New Hampshire Housing Corps: Establish a state level public developer, inspired by the United States Housing Corporation, to finance and build mixed-income, mixed generation housing on publicly owned land. The goal is permanently affordable, beautiful housing that is integrated into existing communities.

Expand New Hampshire Housing into a New Hampshire Housing Corps

The New Hampshire Business Finance Authority has shown that New Hampshire can use smart public finance tools to grow the economy while protecting taxpayers. Under state law, the BFA’s total amount of state guarantees currently in place is capped at $200 million plus interest. 

In practice, the BFA helps finance major facilities by purchasing or financing a building and leasing it back to the company with a path to ownership. For example, reporting on the SIG Sauer deal describes a structure where the BFA purchases a facility using bond financing and then leases it to SIG Sauer for ten years, with the company able to buy the property at the end of the term. A similar lease with an end of term purchase option has also been used for BAE Systems. (It should be noted that the BFA is focused on creating jobs regardless of the industry those jobs are in.) 

So here is the obvious question. If we are willing to use this model to attract employers, why would we not use a similar model to build the housing those workers need in order to live here?

Our state already has the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority. It finances affordable housing development, administers key tools like housing tax credits, and already operates a nonprofit predevelopment loan program.

What we do not have is a housing scale version of the BFA model that uses broad loan guarantees and credit enhancement to unlock private lending for the kinds of homes our communities actually need. The goal should be to build on New Hampshire Housing and expand its toolbox into a true Housing Corps, capable of financing housing at scale with the same seriousness that we finance economic development.

Housing as the Foundation for Society

Civilization began when humans began living together in huts. It was safer. It was more efficient. People could share labor, protect one another, raise children, and survive hard seasons. We are not solitary animals. We are built for cooperation.

When we fail to build enough homes, we are not just creating a market problem. We are breaking the basic conditions that make community possible. Forcing people back into tents, exposed to the elements, is a flashing warning sign that our system is not working. Many people worry that someday society might experience a collapse. For someone forced to live outside because there is no housing they can afford, society has already collapsed.

Housing is the primary physical platform for education, healthcare, family life, economic mobility, and social connection. Fixing housing is a prerequisite for rebuilding social trust, solidarity, and a truly welcoming community. You cannot build a “we” if everyone is desperately fighting for themselves.

A Community First housing policy asks a simple question: What does a thriving human life require, from young adulthood to old age? Then it builds the homes, the physical spaces, to make that life possible.

It’s about restoring the cycle: making room for the next generation while honoring and keeping the last. It’s about building towns where people feel a sense of belonging, at every age and stage. Where a young couple can imagine a future, a family can grow in stability, and an elder can be surrounded by a lifetime of connections.

That’s the kind of community where the pursuit of happiness is a shared journey, not a solitary scramble. That’s the only kind of community with a true future.