As an advocate for both housing and environmental preservation, the proposal before the Keene City Council to reduce the minimum lot sizes in our rural zone from 5 acres to 2 acres has my heart divided. And as a City Councilor, I'll have to make up my mind at some point.
As I have pointed out repeatedly to anyone who will listen, there is a housing crisis going on and we need all the housing capacity we can get. But my primary concern is for those at the low end of the housing latter, and this change seems aimed squarely at the top.
Will the benefits trickle down? Maybe a little, but of all the housing policy changes we could make, I think that making it easier to build McMansions in the outer parts of Keene ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.
It concerns me that every house that gets built far out of town is car dependent and comes with a cost that we will have to pay in traffic, and all of those drivers are going to expect parking spots when they come into the city. And every house built out in the woods, every forest that's knocked over to plant a lawn, has an effect on the local ecosystem that extends well beyond the borders of its property.
On the other hand, if there aren't places to build houses in rural Keene, people will got farther out - to Sullivan or Westmoreland or Surry or Swanzey. None of our surrounding towns require lot sizes as big as five-acres, so its creating an incentive for people to go even farther out of Keene, commute a bit longer, and not pay taxes in our city.
And the City Council has already approved some expansion of housing in the rural area. Back in November, we passed a changed that enables "Conservation Residential Development" districts, which allows for development of clustered housing in the rural district on smaller lots, providing that certain conservation measures are met, such as the preservation of open space. I think that was a good approach that balanced housing need with ecological protection.
Where I'm coming down is on all this is that, I'm amenable to making this change from five acres to two, but only within the context of a broader effort toward conservation. There are some highly sensitive wildlife areas in Keene, especially to the north of town, and opening up those places to residential development would come with an environmental cost that I don't want to pay.
We need a plan to preserve what ought to be preserved, and to build where its appropriate to build. Recently, the Conservation Commission has been discussing the idea of a 30x30 program, in line with national and global efforts to ensure that 30% of habitat is under conservation by 2030.
There is still a lot to be figured out as far as what a 30x30 program might entail here in Keene, but one thing it would provide is a framework can be used to understand our local wildlife habitat conservation needs and have them integrated into the Master Plan update that we are due for in the next few years.
In general, I would be a lot more comfortable supporting the proposed change to Keene's rural lot sizes if I knew it came coupled with a solid plan for preserving the area's ecology. That might take longer than people would prefer, but I think we should take the time to get it right.