Synopses & Reviews
An exploration of the corrosive effects of overpriced housing, exclusionary zoning, and the flight of the younger population in the Northeast
Winner of the 2014 Bruss Silver Award and First-Time Author Award from the National Association of Real Estate Editors
Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local "character," protecting the natural environment, and maintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?
In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint façades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the “wrong” sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From the blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of “opportunity for all” in favor of “I was here first.”
Prevost links this “every town for itself” mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.
Review
“From the exploits of savvy gadfly developers upending ritzy Connecticut
suburbs with plans for high-density housing scattered amid posh
colonial houses to an aging New Hampshire town struggling with
deep-rooted prejudices, Prevost charts a national problem on a local
level. . . . [H]ousing policy analysts and populists will nod in assent
to her well-drawn critiques of the ‘fortress mentality’ that makes local
restrictions understandable from within and unconscionable from
without.” Publishers Weekly