Hachette Book Group
Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See by Richard D. Kahlenberg
Published in July 2023
Hanover, N.H., the small college town where I live and work, provides a faithful mirror to the broader story of housing in the U.S. that Richard Kahlenberg tells in Excluded.
Across the country, some of the places where the most socially progressive and politically liberal professionals live also contain some of the most restrictive housing ordinances.
Local zoning rules make it highly difficult (or impossible) to increase the supply of housing through densification. Building anything beyond a single-family home is disallowed by minimum lot size and setback requirements, covered parking regulations, and outright bans on multifamily units.
There is a cost and a history to restrictive residential zoning. Excluded traces the roots of housing regulations in racial prejudice and explains how, over time, zoning became a means of economic class segregation.
As schools in the U.S. are funded primarily through local property taxes, it is no surprise that school quality correlates highly with property values and homeowner wealth. With few exceptions, families that can’t afford to live in well-funded districts have little choice but to send their kids to underfunded schools.
Why do individuals who believe in equality of opportunity and who support policies to invest in public education often become the most vocal opponents of zoning reform?
As Kahlenberg points out, homeowners have legitimate concerns about the risk of eroding property values, heightened congestion and noise, and overtaxed city services.
Kahlenberg argues, however, that we have overindexed on protecting existing homeowners and failed to strike a balance between their needs and those of neighbors who would like to move to our towns. He points out that enacting missing-middle local policies has been shown to have many more upsides, including providing housing for a greater range of family incomes, with few of the most feared downsides (housing value drops, congestion, etc.) materializing.
How does the story of restrictive residential zoning and primary education play out in my college town?
The scissor graph at the bottom of this review shows the trends for home sale prices in Hanover and the enrollment at the town’s one elementary school. This is the elementary school (the Ray School) that my kids attended, and it is recognized as one of the top elementary schools in the state.
The graph shows that the price of homes purchased in Hanover has increased from $565,000 to over $1 million since 2000 (using 2024 dollars). At the same time, elementary school enrollments, a good measure of families with school-age children’s ability to afford living in the town, have decreased by 16 percent, from 520 to 438.
If these trends continue unabated, Hanover will devolve into a community of aging-in-place residents (those of us who were lucky enough to have purchased our homes years ago and have stayed put) and the very wealthy (including second-home owners who spend little time in the community). One of the best elementary schools in N.H. will become increasingly underutilized. And the people who work in Hanover (including at the college) will find it impossible to live in the town. I should say more impossible, as the town’s 2023 Sustainability Master Plan states that over 80 percent of the town’s labor force commutes from outside Hanover.
This May, Hanover will vote on an amendment to mostly repeal the House-Scale Residential Dwelling Overlay District, an update to the town zoning ordinance approved last May that sought to enable the construction of multi-unit housing on existing residential lots currently served by town water and sewer lines.
In effect, the residents of Hanover will decide whether we want to protect ourselves from the fear that increased housing density will degrade our quality of life, or embrace the hope that enabling multi-family units on existing single-family lots will provide new opportunities for families to move to our small college town.
After reading Excluded, I have become less concerned about the theoretical downsides of adopting local zoning rules that encourage new housing and more worried about the consequences of turning our town into an invisibly walled, gated community for the lucky and the privileged.
I hope that some of my fellow Hanover residents will read Excluded before we vote in May.
Where do you fall on the spectrum of excluded to included? Can you afford to live close to your college or university and to send your kids to good-quality public schools?
What are you reading?
Joshua Kim
Sources
- Home Sale Prices (◆ = median, ● = average; all adjusted to 2024$ using BLS CPI-U):
- 2000 med. ($310,500 SFH excl. condos): Hanover Master Plan Ch. 8 (Assessor/MLS) — hanovernh.org
- 2009–2023 (PrimeMLS closed sales): Snyder Donegan Real Estate annual reports — snyderdonegan.com
- 2024 med. ($1,035,000 trailing 12 mo.): Homes.com (PrimeMLS) — homes.com
- CPI-U: Bureau of Labor Statistics — BLS CPI Calculator
- Ray School Enrollment (Bernice A. Ray School, NCES ID 330360000155; annual data 2004–2024):
- NCES CCD via SchoolDigger — schooldigger.com/Ray School
- Cross-verified: NCES School Search — NCES CCD
- Notes: Housing % change from 2000 baseline; enrollment % change from 2004 peak (520). Grade span changed K–4 to K–5. Avg. sale prices run higher than medians due to luxury sales.
