A letter to the editor in the Forum earlier this month asked, “What kind of community do we want Hanover to be?” The choices seemed to be an aging enclave of exclusivity or a younger, more vibrant and economically diverse town.
The context was a warrant article for the May 12 Town Meeting that would have rolled back zoning changes approved by voters last year that allowed increased housing density in residential neighborhoods. The rollback was narrowly rejected, 816-792.
It is certainly a risky enterprise to draw conclusions about a community’s outlook from the results of a single Town Meeting vote, especially when only about 20% of the town’s registered voters turned out. But it is fair to infer that Hanover is sharply divided on the question of what it wants the future to look like.
The article was added to the warrant via a petition drive, marshaled by resident Randy Mudge, that met the threshold of attracting at least 25 signatures of Hanover’s roughly 8,000 voters. Town Clerk Tracy Walsh refused to disclose how many people signed it (how’s that for government transparency?), but the Town Meeting results suggest that the petition had widespread support.
Mudge and others who supported the article maintained that the town’s single-family residential zones simply could not accommodate development on the scale contemplated by the zoning change approved in 2025, which allows the construction of three- and four-unit buildings, without fundamentally altering their character.
This apprehension does not strike us as irrational. People who have lived in and loved a neighborhood for years surely have a legitimate stake in maintaining that which they value. And a new building that is out of scale with its surroundings can certainly constitute an unwelcome imposition, as when perfectly good homes are torn down by new owners and replaced by huge new houses that loom over their neighbors.
But . . . the town’s lack of affordable housing means that many of those who work in Hanover and would like to live there are priced out of the market, depriving the town of the economic diversity and vibrancy that young families can provide. As the Forum correspondent cited above put it, “Wouldn’t you want the people who teach our children, our first-responders and those who care for us as we age to live in our town?”
As opponents of the rollback were quick to point out before Town Meeting, the changes approved last year have not yet had time to work and how exactly they will play out is unknown; thus the fears were said to be overblown.
Another writer to the Forum, who lives in a neighborhood that “would be directly affected by future development,” said she supported the new density provisions: “Hanover residents cannot claim to support inclusion, diversity, housing affordability, environment sustainability and economic opportunity while making it extraordinarily difficult for people to live here,” she wrote.
That seems about right to us. Hanover has changed markedly over the past 40 years with the decline of the local retail sector, an influx of wealthy new residents, and the incursion of large scale building by Dartmouth College, which perhaps is the ultimate determinant of the town’s physical character. It is no longer the charming, quintessential New England college town it once was (or in retrospect seems to have been). As with all communities all the time, it is evolving into something else.
But that doesn’t mean that those who like things the way they are, and have been, necessarily desire gated-community exclusivity, either. Their views also deserve respect.
The creation of affordable housing is not always, or even usually, a “win-win” for everybody involved. Indeed, sometimes the interests of current residents are sacrificed to the compelling need to create housing for others whose interests are real but not articulated by them in an organized way in front of planning and zoning boards.
So it is no surprise that Hanover seems to be of two minds, or more, about what kind of community it is and wants to be.