I want to begin not with a crisis statistic, but with a system, because what New Hampshire is experiencing is what communities across the country are experiencing. This is not simply a housing shortage. It is a system that can no longer match the needs of the people who depend on it.
This is not a failure of intent. Quite the opposite. It is a system full of people acting in good faith: local boards working to protect community character, state agencies working to stretch limited resources, nonprofits navigating complexity to meet growing needs, developers attempting to make projects feasible under difficult conditions, and families who want stability and opportunity close to home.
And yet, even with all of that effort, homes are not being produced at the scale, the speed, or the price that people need. The question is why.
A system without a design
What we call a housing system is, in practice, an accumulation of decisions, rules, and processes built over decades without a unifying design. It is an architecture assembled piece by piece, without a structure that ties decisions together or orients them toward future outcomes.
The result is a familiar pattern. Every actor holds a separate piece of authority, but no actor is responsible for making the whole system work.
There is a concept in political economy that helps explain this pattern: the tragedy of the anti-commons. In a commons tragedy, overuse happens because no one actor feels responsible for protecting the shared resource. In an anti-commons tragedy, underuse happens because too many actors hold the ability to block access, and no one has the mandate to bring the parts together.
Housing is one of the clearest examples of that second pattern in American public life. Across the country, land use is governed by more than 30,000 zoning jurisdictions. Each has its own rules, processes, timelines, and decision-makers. Zoning sits at the local level. Permitting decisions are made across thousands of jurisdictions. Infrastructure approvals live with state or regional agencies. Labor markets and housing demand move regionally, while tax policy is national.
When you try to line all of these elements up in sequence, they do not reinforce one another. They collide. The system was never built to convert national capital and regional demand into local approvals at the pace communities need. We have created a structure where almost everyone has a way to say no, and almost no one has a way to say yes.
What that looks like in practice
You can see this clearly in New Hampshire. The state has 234 cities, towns, and villages, and many rely on volunteer boards. Many zoning ordinances have not been updated in decades. The New Hampshire Zoning Atlas found that only a small share of buildable land has both water and sewer. Even on land with infrastructure, one-acre and two-acre minimum lot sizes often mean communities cannot build the types of homes that today's workforce needs.
Once you understand the structure, the outcome is no longer surprising. The architecture is showing through. According to Up for Growth's research, New Hampshire has fallen short by roughly 25,000 homes, a gap equal to about 4 percent of the state's housing stock. Scarcity is not just a market condition. It is a predictable output of a system built without alignment or a mandate to deliver.
And every actor inside that system is behaving rationally. Local boards respond to neighbors and abutters. State agencies respond to budget constraints. Developers respond to feasibility and risk. Homeowners and renters respond to uncertainty and rising costs. But rational behavior inside a fragmented system produces irrational outcomes for the public.
The accountability gap
If this is the architecture we have inherited, the next question is obvious: who is responsible for making it work? In the current system, the answer is no one.
Local governments control land use. They write zoning, set conditions, and decide whether a project can move forward. But they are not responsible for whether the broader region has enough homes for its workforce or whether the state meets its overall housing needs. Their authority is local, but the consequences of their decisions are regional.
States sit one level up. They oversee infrastructure, long-range planning, and workforce strategies, and many state officials understand the severity of the shortage. But they do not control the land use decisions that ultimately determine whether homes are built. They can support municipalities, offer incentives, and increasingly set minimum standards, but they cannot permit homes into existence.
Then there is the federal layer. Washington supplies large pools of capital through tax credits, project-based rental assistance, block grants, vouchers, and guarantees, but it has little control over the regulatory pipeline that determines whether that capital turns into homes. Developers, meanwhile, operate on a different axis entirely, responding to lenders, construction costs, interest rates, and local approval risk. They can only build when the path is feasible and predictable.
Each actor controls a fragment of the process. No actor is responsible for the result. That mismatch shows up in stalled projects, elongated timelines, weakened labor markets, and families priced out of the communities they grew up in. This is not simple gridlock. It is systematic underproduction.
The public is ready. The system is not.
Some still argue that the problem is political resistance, that people support housing in theory but not in practice. That story may have described an earlier moment. It does not describe New Hampshire today.
Voters understand what is at stake. They see their children priced out of the communities where they were raised. They see seniors who cannot downsize because the inventory is not there. They see employers struggling to recruit and retain workers because housing has become a constraint on growth. They see the spillover effects on transportation, education, and community life.
And they want action. Public support for more homes is broad and bipartisan. Voters support zoning modernization. They support practical tools like accessory dwelling units, small-lot reform, and adaptive reuse. In many ways, the public has moved faster than the institutions that are supposed to serve it.
The barrier is not a lack of urgency or a lack of ideas. It is a governance structure that cannot absorb public will and translate it into results. That is what inertia looks like: plans without production, funding without delivery, and a widening gap between what communities need and what the system can deliver.
Why the system has not changed
If the system underperforms so consistently, why has it not been redesigned? Because housing lacks what every other major domestic system has: a coherent national framework.
Health care, education, transportation, and agriculture all have recurring legislative structures that define goals, align incentives, stabilize funding, and connect implementation to outcomes. They are not perfect, but they have a spine. They have an organizing logic. Housing does not.
Instead, housing operates through fragmented appropriations, disconnected tax expenditures, and temporary supplements. These tools matter, but they do not add up to a system. They reinforce the architecture we inherited rather than building one that can reliably deliver homes.
We are trying to solve a national problem with a governance model optimized for fragmentation. And then we wonder why production falls short.
What federal leadership should mean
This is not about whether the federal government is involved in housing. It already is. The real question is whether that involvement helps the system deliver homes or simply subsidizes a system that cannot.
A functional federal role would not mean zoning from Washington. It would not mean sweeping preemption or a one-size-fits-all national blueprint. It would mean something more basic and more important: coordination.
Other major domestic systems have a recurring federal framework that sets goals, aligns incentives, stabilizes funding, and creates an ongoing structure for accountability and modernization. Housing needs the same kind of organizing function. A modern federal role would help connect resources to results, align incentives across levels of government, and create a structure for evaluation and course correction.
Local governments cannot solve a national shortage on their own. States cannot fix a fractured delivery environment without alignment and flexibility. The private market cannot bridge structural gaps when rules are unstable and approval paths are unpredictable. Federalism works when the architecture aligns the parts toward a shared goal. In housing, the parts too often work at cross-purposes.
What a modern housing framework would do
A modern housing framework would not replace local decision-making. It would help local decision-making function within a coherent system.
It would support enabling infrastructure and community-serving infrastructure, which are often the missing links for otherwise viable projects. It would support planning and permitting modernization so timelines become more predictable and transparent. It would strengthen local capacity so that towns and cities can manage growth instead of merely reacting to it.
It would also reduce uncertainty for developers, lenders, and communities alike. Stable rules and more reliable timelines create better conditions for mixed-income, workforce, market-rate, and affordable homes to be built. Predictability encourages new delivery models, including factory-built, modular, and smaller-format housing types that still struggle to scale.
Most importantly, it would define responsibility. It would create a structure in which federal flexibility and funding are tied to measurable performance: homes produced, barriers reduced, and timelines improved. It would give Congress, HUD, states, and localities a regular opportunity to assess what is working, refine what is not, and keep the system evolving instead of degrading.
Housing should be governed like the essential system it is
We cannot continue to patch a structure long after it has become clear that the structure itself is the problem. We are asking a system built to regulate growth to support opportunity. We are asking a system built to constrain land use to strengthen the workforce, stabilize families, and sustain community life. The mismatch is now impossible to ignore.
This is not a crisis of ideas. Communities have made their priorities clear. The challenge is alignment, follow-through, and the limits of a system built without a production mandate. Housing is not just a market issue. It is infrastructure. It is workforce policy. It is the foundation of community vitality.
And it should be governed with that level of seriousness. New Hampshire's shortfall is not a temporary imbalance. It is not simply a hangover from the pandemic. It is the accumulated result of a system built without alignment.
But systems can be redesigned. When they are, they move.
A different expectation
We should expect more from our housing system. We should expect clearer roles, aligned incentives, and accountability for outcomes. We should expect federal leadership that supports local success rather than leaving communities stranded inside a fragmented structure.
The stakes are too high to accept continued fragmentation as normal. If we align capital, planning, infrastructure, and governance, we can build a housing system that is worthy of the people it is meant to serve.
That is the work ahead. And it is work we can do.