D'Angelo: When Fear Writes The Zoning Laws

By Daryl D'Angelo, NH Journal

I think a lot of our modern zoning arguments ultimately come down to fear.

Not irrational fear, necessarily. Human fear. Understandable fear.

People are afraid their homes will lose value. They’re afraid traffic will increase. They’re afraid crime will rise. They’re afraid the neighborhood will turn into something unfamiliar.

Sometimes they’re afraid—quietly and awkwardly—of the kinds of people who might move in if housing becomes cheaper or denser nearby.

I get a lot of this.

For most families, a home represents decades of work and sacrifice. People pour their savings, labor, and hopes into creating some measure of stability. Of course, they become protective of the environment around them.

But fear has a way of slowly changing how we see the world.

Eventually, it convinces us that the promise of America was meant more for us than for other people. That government should somehow guarantee a particular outcome.

A rule intended to prevent real harms eventually becomes a system for controlling uncertainty itself. Not just factories next to schools or genuinely dangerous uses of property, but apartments, small homes, renters, newcomers, multi-generational families, corner businesses, or anything else that introduces change into environments people have grown comfortable with.

But the promise of America was never about guarantees, or limiting access, or stifling change. It was about giving ordinary people control over their own paths.

The ability to choose how to live their own lives. To arrive somewhere with limited means and still have a chance. To start small. To improvise. To take risks.

To become.

That promise becomes harder to keep when people lock environments into place around themselves.

And I do understand this impulse. Truly.

But every time we use laws to insulate ourselves from change, we make it harder for somebody else to begin.

Some young couple.
Some immigrant family.
Some tradesman trying to open a shop.
Some elderly parent needing a place to live near their children.
Some person who simply cannot afford entry into the kind of community we have decided should remain exactly as it is.

Fear is part of being human. It always will be.

But societies that organize themselves too heavily around fear eventually stop creating opportunity.

They start deciding who gets access to it.

Daryl D'Angelo chairs the NH Classic Liberal Party. She and her husband live in Amherst with their cats and dogs and chickens and forests and every other wonderful thing they can surround themselves with....

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.