Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Alex here. Now, before I jump into this episode, I wanted to mention that you may have noticed a bit of a change in branding with this now being called the Rethink Local podcast. Instead of the Upper Valley vibes, that change just reflects that. I want to cover a few things that are a little bit outside the Upper Valley.
[00:00:20] Most of what we do here will be focused on the Upper Valley. And for those of you who don't know, that's the 60 or 70 towns in this region of New Hampshire and Vermont that are sort of a defined geographic area. But some of what we cover on this podcast going forward will be a little bit broader in Vermont. In New Hampshire and in New England, there are some really good local podcasts like Brave Little State or At jam, and I don't want to duplicate what they do, nor could I. And so this podcast is going to roughly follow some of the themes and topics that come up with the work that we're doing through Rethink Local and be more specifically focused, not just on life generally in the Upper Valley, for example, but more specifically focused on things related to how communities make decisions, how local governments work, how you can get more involved, stuff like that.
[00:01:13] For example, a future episode will probably be about how to think about public comment periods at Select Board or town council meetings.
[00:01:22] A few thoughts to ensure a town is really creating the space to interactively engage the public in an effective way.
[00:01:30] How to best use committees in a town, and also for the town officials, some tips to make sure they're following all the rules the right way. This topic came up recently because I just did a workshop with Rethink Local subcontracted through Vermont League of Cities and Towns with the Select Board in Hartford, Vermont. And it reminded me that there are some great topics here that might really be useful for people.
[00:01:56] And so the topic is sort of Upper Valley related, but it's also kind of broader. But it's on the same theme of looking at what's happening at the local level and talking to people and spotlighting issues and topics that are important for those of us who care about what's happening in our communities and want to see all of that work better. Okay, so onto this episode. So this is a little bit different. It's kind of a quick update type episode.
[00:02:19] And this is about the contract that I just started over the last couple weeks in Randolph, Vermont, where my company, a Vermont Benefit Corporation that is partnered with a 501C3 Rethink Local.
[00:02:32] Sounds familiar. Was brought in to provide planning and zoning services as well as explore some opportunities for shared services and more regional collaboration in the future. So I'll be serving as Randolph's Zoning Administrator under the title of Director of Planning, Zoning and Regional Partnerships. In the shorter term, we're going to be working on things like making sure we keep all of the business of the zoning office moving. As I start to understand how to streamline some of the current processes, create some additional ways for people to do business with the town a little easier online.
[00:03:06] In addition to paper, I'll be providing support to the Planning Commission, Development Review Board, Conservation Commission, and we'll make sure that all the kind of processes that people interact with with the town on the zoning side are a little clearer, easier, more up to date information, all that kind of stuff.
[00:03:25] In the longer term, there are some really cool projects to work on alongside the town's Economic Development Director, Mark Rosalbo, related to residential commercial mixed use development potential in Randolph, which is really uniquely situated in the region. For some of this, we'll be looking at updating the town's master plan, which in Vermont they're generally referred to as the town plan.
[00:03:47] And we'll be specifically looking at building more regional partnerships with other towns and stakeholders through things such as can the town provide zoning services to other towns on a contract basis. Now, housing is a major issue in most parts of the country and especially in our area. There isn't much available and what is available is pretty, pretty expensive. And the market doesn't really seem to allow the building of affordable housing like lowercase a affordable housing without developers piecing together funding from like 10 different sources to make things pencil out or towns regulating and creating uppercase a affordable housing.
[00:04:30] Jonah Richards of Village Ventures writes about this really well on his substack brick and mortar which is linked in the show notes.
[00:04:38] Anyway, what we do on the regulatory side makes a huge difference on how those markets work and how plans pencil out or don't. All of those market conditions are downstream of the existence of local regulations or not or what those local regulations say. Land use policy is one of the most important and impactful things a local government decides on.
[00:05:02] And for those of you not really in the weeds on all this stuff, you might not realize how much land use, housing transportation related policy is made right in your town by your local government.
[00:05:14] So let's walk through a scenario. Let's say you've got a small town that wants to create some additional units of housing locally and to make those housing units ideally as affordable as possible, but without adding really large Buildings or changing a particular neighborhood in too extreme of a way, let's say in this town, they don't really do anything.
[00:05:35] You just have your standard existing zoning. So that might mean if I own a large house, maybe 2000, 2500 square feet or more, in which, say, I raise three kids who've all moved out, and now I've got this big house to myself, if I wanted to downsize and live in something that was a little easier to take care of and a little more affordable without leaving the town that I've lived in for a long time, raised my family in, I would not necessarily have any easy or any options at all to do that. And we often see people get priced out of their homes, especially in some communities, seniors, for example, who are on a fixed income, but their property taxes keep rising, along with utilities and other costs. They don't want to leave the place where they have community, which we know is so important for people, but they feel like they don't have choices, and often they don't have choices.
[00:06:29] And by virtue of the lack of some policies that I'll talk more about in a moment, we often force people to break these bonds they have in their homes and in their communities, and as a senior, for example, move to maybe a random retirement community because they can't afford to stay in that big house anymore. But what if there were options for that person and many other people like them?
[00:06:52] So now maybe, let's say we get lucky and we realize that in both Vermont and New Hampshire, you can largely build accessory dwelling units by right, meaning you can add a unit to your existing unit and sometimes do that even if the new unit doesn't conform to all of the same requirements, like setbacks or lot coverage, that a principal dwelling, your primary house, might have to conform to.
[00:07:19] Now, if I know that I can then go out, I can hire some professionals, we can survey the land, make sure I have the right space.
[00:07:28] You know, we can look at our hookups to water and sewer or our septic and, well, we can get an architect and an engineer to design some house plans. You know, make sure everything kind of fits into the aesthetic of the neighborhood and conforms to whatever requirements there are for ADUs, and then get an approval and then start building.
[00:07:47] And, you know, many of you have probably seen these sorts of things.
[00:07:52] They often look like a sort of tiny house set up, and often there are rules, actually about how big those ADUs can be. Some places limit them to 50% of the size of the primary house.
[00:08:06] So that's an option in this scenario. And what people will often do is rent out the ADU and stay in their home.
[00:08:14] And sometimes what folks will do is actually reverse that. They'll build the adu, move into that themselves, the smaller space, and then rent out the bigger principal dwelling, which is often better financially.
[00:08:26] And that can sometimes allow people to afford to stay in their home or neighborhood and around and with their existing local community.
[00:08:35] But that's assuming that the town you live in, and often these rules are made locally, allows that sort of thing. And many places still don't allow this.
[00:08:45] But if they do and this option is available, it still cost you thousands of dollars to design and engineer the house. And then of course you have to actually build it, which as someone building their own house right now, I can tell you is definitely the hard part.
[00:09:00] But it could be even easier than that. I mean that's a great step, allowing those ADUs, but, but it could be even easier and less expensive up front. For example, in some towns, such as in Randolph, they make it even easier if you are building the ADU inside of your existing house. And no, this isn't one of those Russian dolls where you keep opening them and there's a smaller one inside though that's kind of an interesting architectural idea. But rather it's simply converting a single family house, for example, into a two family house or a three family house.
[00:09:33] And for big old houses you can sometimes easily create one unit per floor of the house, turning a big old Victorian into a big old Victorian that can house maybe six or eight people instead of two, one, two or three.
[00:09:48] And in a town like Randolph, you don't actually even need a zoning permit to do that work because you aren't changing the footprint of the building.
[00:09:56] And so it's really, really easy. That saves homeowners thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in consultants fees if you had to prepare site plans and pay people to go to boards and all that sort of stuff.
[00:10:09] So that's a really nice second step that can make a big difference. But did you know you could go even further?
[00:10:15] And this just really. In the last five years, a new thing has gained in popularity which is often referred to as pattern zoning or pre reviewed homes. And, and what this is, and it's really cool, is basically the town designing and pre engineering plans for people who are turning X type of house into Y type of house, for example, turning a common housing style in a town like a big old Victorian house into a multi unit apartment. And then they keep those plans on file so that someone can literally just pop into town hall, look at some of the plans that have already been developed by architects and engineers and, and already conform to all the values and goals of the community, all the required zoning, building safety standards, and then they pay maybe 50 bucks or whatever, take those plans right out of town hall that day and take them to a builder and get started. There's no expensive design or consulting fees, or lengthy applications or permits or approvals, or attending board meetings or fighting for the right to do this. It's really efficient.
[00:11:19] That can save people many thousands of dollars and months of time right at the start of their project. And beyond just the money, it makes it so much easier that you might actually encourage someone to do that who wouldn't have done it otherwise if they know that option is available.
[00:11:35] And importantly, what this kind of thing does is unlock a whole bunch of important benefits.
[00:11:41] So like number one, people to be able to age in place and for seniors to afford to stay in communities they call home. Number two, it enables more multi general heterogeneous housing where you might have someone who's lived in town for 50 years living in the unit next to a young couple who just moved into town with a newborn baby. Number three, you create slightly higher density without changing the scale of a neighborhood.
[00:12:07] And ADUs, especially interior ones, they often don't look that different or different at all from the outside.
[00:12:15] Number four, you're creating higher density, likely already on existing water and sewer infrastructure and close to other utilities.
[00:12:24] Number five, without having to construct entirely new buildings and entirely new hookups to all the utilities, you're significantly lowering the cost of adding each additional housing unit to the town's housing stock. And that will organically help make the units more affordable without the need for specific affordable housing regulations or really complicated funding models.
[00:12:50] Number six, you preserve beautiful historic old housing stock and encourage people to kind of renovate and upkeep those if they're going to be starting to rent them out.
[00:12:59] Number seven, really importantly, you create more diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. And the list goes on.
[00:13:07] But that ADU example is just one example of the countless ways that at the local level, on just this one small issue of building ADUs, towns have a wide variety of options to make things more difficult by doing nothing and just basically passing on outdated, overly burdensome regulations that often were specifically designed many decades ago to create exclusionary neighborhoods to the other end of the scale of finding creative ways to make things simpler, safer and less expensive, and by doing so, encouraging the exact kind of activities that Help meet most towns stated goals of having a vibrant, resilient and awesome local community.
[00:13:53] And there are dozens, I mean really hundreds of things like this, things that towns do have influence or often direct control over and which can make enabling other people to help meet our community's goals, like small scale developers, easier or harder, depending on exactly what's written into the regulations. So part of my role in Randolph in this position is to think about things like this. Not exactly yet though. I'm just really getting up to speed on the existing processes, making sure we're keeping things moving through the office, starting to think about ways to streamline applications so we have electronic and paper options.
[00:14:33] And in the medium and longer term we will be looking at all sorts of interesting things to just ensure our land use regulations are indeed meeting the community's stated goals. And further, that we know what those communities goals are through an up to date and action oriented town plan.
[00:14:52] And make no mistake, all of these things are immensely important.
[00:14:57] The town master plans, the zoning ordinances, the budget discussions, the street closures for the concert series, the regulations that govern how small businesses open, the number of parking spaces required per unit, the fire codes that dictate where stairs go and basically determine why the layout of every single apartment building in the US looks the same of a long windowless hallway with stairwells at the end. All of that stuff matters immensely. And all of these things are decisions that can be made or not made.
[00:15:32] And often many of those decisions are at the local level.
[00:15:37] And perhaps even more important, what matters is all the effort that a town puts in or doesn't put in to engage the community in evaluating, exploring, looking at new options in that process.
[00:15:50] The way a town goes about figuring all this out and then the decisions made, I mean these processes will have massive multi generational repercussions.
[00:16:02] So to be clear, the stakes and the promise of good zoning and land use is not just about can a new apartment go here or there, or whether 10,000 more goes to the bus system or not, or any of those details really. It's about the bigger picture. The fundamental dynamics that shape how humans live in the deepest possible ways. How we form connections and relationships with other people, how we relate to getting to work and recreation in the arts, how we live in local government. We are literally making decisions that construct the framework that people's lives sit on top of.
[00:16:38] All the discussions out there these days about people's lack of identity and meaning and feeling disconnected or lonely or angry or searching for community and how that influences our politics Our dating and family lives, our jobs and economy.
[00:16:55] All of these things that our society is really struggling with right now.
[00:17:00] All of these things are downstream of the way in which people live, what their home looks like, how close they are to other homes and what those look like, what can go where and why.
[00:17:13] All of these things are connected to how we live at home.
[00:17:18] Isolated cookie cutter suburban homes specifically designed for nuclear families and accessed by personal cars on long highway drives. That was a choice that was made in the US and that led to a certain way of living and even led to certain broader cultural and social ideologies after a few generations of people really living that way. But think about how car centric much of the US is compared to many other developed nations around the world. And that only happened because of specific choices that were made by people in power. There's nothing natural about that development.
[00:17:54] Human beings in those positions of power made decisions very intentionally about what direction things would go in. But we can make our own choices based on our own goals today.
[00:18:07] And part of what my work more broadly is all about is to remind all of us, you and me included, that we have way more agency in how the world around us works than it might seem like. And we can make choices that have real impacts, not just on us, but on our descendants for many generations to come. So for those who work or volunteer in the field, especially for those in elected positions who may not have studied this stuff, you know, more like a professional planner might have through school and training, this is a reminder that the stakes here are about the highest they can be for the local level.
[00:18:43] And that fact demands the highest level of rigor and creativity and proactivity for all the things that we do. It demands taking these decisions really seriously and committing oneself to doing the hard work with a perspective to how these things play out over periods of time longer than any one of us might be in a particular job or term.
[00:19:07] And for those of you who don't work or volunteer in local government currently, this is a reflection for you that these things don't happen by accident. They are decisions that people in your towns and your state make on a regular basis. And often a lot of those elected leaders are elected with less than a 10 or 15% turnout, or they're serving on a board that has vacancies that they can't find anybody to fill.
[00:19:32] Often these decisions are being made with a very. Without a very good sample of what people think who actually live in the community.
[00:19:43] Often it's a very, very small group of loud people I mean, without any exaggeration, often the percent of people who are giving feedback to their local town council or select board on a regular basis, just in a small or medium town, is less than 0.1% of a given community, less than 0.1%.
[00:20:07] Now, if you were to take antibiotics to kill a bacterial infection, there are more bacteria left over from that than there are people who typically provide feedback to their local boards and commissions on a regular basis. It's a really small group, and this really small group is often not demographically representative of the broader community, and they often apply pressure that moves the needle in directions that end up not really being representative of the broader community's goals.
[00:20:42] Especially outside of large cities, these processes are incredibly accessible. And every single community in the country has different ways that you can get involved and help make this stuff work better.
[00:20:56] I talk a little bit about that in the Rethink Local podcast episode, episode three, called I Voted now what?
[00:21:04] There are vacancies on boards. There are retiring employees with nobody coming in to replace them, and in some places, regulations sometimes haven't been carefully examined in decades of time, and they're just no longer serving the interests that we have today of creating inclusive, resilient, diverse communities that are really great places to be a foundation for people's lives.
[00:21:28] Now, you don't have to change the course of your whole life to help push a little bit on these levers. If you can find just five hours a month, you can usually plug right into a local committee or board or nonprofit or other stakeholder locally that's working on these things. And trust me, they will be really excited to have that five hours per month of your time helping them out.
[00:21:51] So that's what I really just wanted to cover today.
[00:21:54] Land use is a deeply important layer to how communities can or cannot form. And it's all of our responsibilities to think about those deep layers when we're in the positions to do so. I'm really grateful to Randolph's town manager and select board for providing Rethink Local and me the opportunity to help the town achieve some of its goals in this regard. And I think it's going to kick off a really. A bunch of really cool projects and partnerships and things that will benefit Randolph and benefit the region in the long term.
[00:22:25] And for those of you who do work in this field, I appreciate what you do. And this should just serve as a gentle reminder that the stakes here are really high. And our duty is to people now and people that will live in our communities in generations after any of us are in our jobs or positions. And for those of you who were maybe interested by some of what you heard, but aren't yet directly involved in some way, I encourage you to check out the ways that you can get more involved and to help lend your time to building resilient communities where you live. And as always, if you aren't sure exactly what to do but you want to get more involved, please just drop me an email and I'll help you out. Thank you for listening.
