“There’s a lot of cities and towns that really get it. I won’t pick on the ones that don’t,” New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said, referring to affordable housing, on December 11, 2019. However, he quickly took back his word: “I was talking about the one that rhymes with Red-ford… Please, right? ‘We have too much multifamily housing in Bedford already.’ No, you don’t. No, you don’t” (Cousineau 2019). By singling out Bedford, Governor Sununu brought the municipality’s exclusionary zoning policies to the forefront of the state’s political discourse and set the stage for a heated public debate.
Exclusionary zoning is, at its most basic definition, “a policy that sets land use requirements, such as barring apartment buildings in a residential area or setting minimum lot sizes” (Edwards 2019). In reality, this often plays out as prohibiting low-income and BIPOC families from living in white, upper-middle class communities (Reeves 2017). Taking this one step further, Jean Anyon, in her book Radical Possibilities, argues, “one of the most important education reforms may be housing policy reform” (Anyon 2014). Desegregation of schools via the desegregation of communities is crucial to ridding education inequalities.
My interest in this topic first emerged from reading Jean Anyon’s Radical Possibilities, when I realized that the town I grew up in, Bedford, New Hampshire – which is infamous for having extremely strict zoning regulations – is guilty of asserting this racist policy. In this case study, I will reflect on my own positionality as a member of this community, look to other areas of the country for potential solutions, and propose how a grassroots organization could effectively approach the issue.
