It’s indisputable. We’ve got a crisis. A housing crisis, we call it. More people want to live in the Upper Valley than we can support. The Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission, in its 2023 assessment, predicted we’ll need over 5,500 more units by 2040, with over 1,200 of these targeted for Lebanon.
Migration, largely domestic, drives the growth. Our new neighbors move here for jobs created by major employers like Dartmouth, DHMC and Novo Nordisk. During COVID, they moved for open space and fresh air. Now, some move to escape forest fires and extreme heat. Future climate refugees, experts predict, will swell our numbers even more, with Northern New England identified as one of the best places to survive a deranged climate. Population growth, the planners tell us, is inevitable, and desirable. Without expansion, we are warned, we’d face economic stagnation or decay.
Embracing growth’s goodness, we build housing at record speed. According to Mark Goodwin of Lebanon’s Department of Planning and Development, Lebanon has added 889 new housing units since January 2020. Plus, the city has approved 1,482 more. When they’re all built, we’ll have a one-third increase in housing stock over 2020 levels. Already, in just the first half of this decade, we’ve built almost as much as in any past decade. We’re on track for a decade of growth that’s more than double what we’ve ever seen. With what’s built and approved, we’ve well-exceeded the 2040 target the regional planners gave as “general guidance” two years ago.
Yet we clamor for more. Lebanon’s planners talk about up-zoning North Lebanon’s Route 120 corridor to include residential uses. This would open the door to more mid-rise apartments and hundreds more rental units. Some in the planning community have reservations, but seem reluctant to speak out. To publicly question growth appears impossible.
It’s not just the number of new units that causes alarm, it’s the kind of units. Over 80% of the approved units are rentals, including mid-rise apartment complexes like the 474-unit Brickyard. Large, high-density developments, we’re told, are now the only affordable way to build housing. Single-family homes on individual lots are too expensive. The problem is scarcity: too many people competing for too little land, lumber and tradespeople.
Lebanon’s solution is to turn to for-profit developers. But some fear them. Developers clear-cut, build out and up, extract profit and then sell, passing on the costs of deferred maintenance to the next owner. After several iterations, we’ll be left with the albatross of degraded buildings, monuments to a city’s short-sighted solution.
Yet we rush to action because unaffordable housing is immoral. The present shortage drives property values, taxes and rents sky-high. We’re seeing more unhoused individuals, more whose housing costs outpace their income, and many more who simply can’t afford to live close to their Lebanon jobs. According to the 2025 Lebanon Housing Needs Assessment, Lebanon has more than doubled its high-income households (earning over $100,000) over the past decade, while the number of households earning less than $75,000 has dropped by 27%. We’re in danger of losing the social vitality of an economically diverse community.
So, it’s unethical to oppose new home construction. We dare not become an exclusive community, the privileged who protect their bit of paradise. To promote more housing, the New Hampshire Legislature overrides local zoning. Last week, Gov. Ayotte signed legislation that requires municipalities to allow residential development in commercially-zoned districts and an ADU on any single-family home lot. More such laws are on their way. Since 2010, when the Legislature mandated municipalities to provide their “fair share” of workforce housing, Concord’s message is clear: communities must house their growing populations. Most of us probably agree.
Yet beneath the twin drumbeats of growth’s economic and moral necessity, we feel unease. We’re crowded and we’ve lost nature. To house more people, we’re swallowing green spaces. In a West Lebanon neighborhood, a developer clear-cut five acres lush with milkweed, brush and trees to build 21 new homes. Across town, 35 acres will be cleared for the 474-unit Brickyard, fragmenting wetlands and a wildlife corridor. This will destroy cooling vegetation and wildlife habitat, in exchange for hardscaping that sheds water and reflects heat. Sure, it’s infill development, smart growth, the laudable solution to our housing crisis. But we also sense that it’s wrong and out of step with our real predicament.
Important as they are, economic and moral imperatives are the least of our problems. Growth comes with costs that Earth can no longer bear. In 2020, humanity crossed an unthinkable line: the mass of human-made stuff exceeded all living biomass on Earth. We’ve blindly blown past our right-sized place on the planet. We’re just one of more than 8 million species, but we’re crowding out the rest of nature. We’re losing birds, wild mammals, reptiles and insects at an unprecedented rate. We’re destroying the climate; we’re destroying the lacework of life.
We’re in overshoot, which occurs when a species’ population outgrows its environment. Earth Overshoot Day is the day by which we’ve exhausted all the resources that Earth can generate for the year. This year it arrived on July 24, eight days earlier than last year. For the next five-plus months, we’re stealing resources from future generations. We’re spewing pollution Earth can’t absorb. We’re now using 1.8 Earths each year.
Ecologists say that even experts can’t understand our nightmare. Even they underestimate the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future. Overshoot will likely cause the collapse of global supply chains, violent conflicts over shrinking resources, mass migration from climate change, and the hoarding of remaining wealth by a few. There’s no governmental body capable of addressing the crisis. A population decline during the second half of this century seems inevitable. The only question is, do we decline deliberately or do we crash?
Thinking about this too carefully can induce panic. We’ll feel anguished remorse. We’re all complicit. So, we disavow overshoot. We see it, we look away, and we proceed with business as usual. We march on, believing in growth’s goodness. We refuse to understand that these are unprecedented times. This week, the UN World Court issued a landmark decision that countries must protect the environment from climate change. Indeed, times have changed and they’ve changed severely.
From pandemics and natural disasters to Trump’s dismantling of almost everything, we daily experience unimaginable destruction. Some claim that the worldwide rise in authoritarian populist leaders is itself a symptom of overshoot. Overwhelmed by complexity, we embrace tribalism and simplistic solutions. Sensing resource scarcity, we want a strongman to protect us. Terrified by the loss of old securities, we defiantly cling to the past. The sad truth is that neither the political right nor left sees overshoot; neither offers real solutions. None of us wants to face the fundamental problem of limits, including limits on human rights and freedoms.
We’re playing a gigantic game of musical chairs. Already, there are hundreds of millions of losers worldwide, those facing starvation and loss of homelands. Our Upper Valley housing crisis is just the local example of an unsustainable global game. At some point, the music will stop and the vast majority of humanity will be left with no chair. But it won’t be just a game, with birthday cake at the end of the party and a do-over the next day. This is for life.
In times of crisis, morality changes. The old morality of individual rights no longer works. Because we’re trapped in a bad-ending game, morality must adjust to the vital needs of the larger human community. This means not just the community in front of us, but the community of the future, a community that exists within ecological limits. Survival ethics requires changing our morality and changing our game.
It’s hard to imagine such change. But humanity won’t survive unless, according to ecologists, we downsize the global population to 2 billion to 4 billion. This will entail fitting our local populations to regional renewable resources. How we get there is beyond my expertise. But for a start, we need state laws that empower communities to establish economic diversity and sustainability. Locally, we can fight up-zoning and find ways to protect housing from market-driven appreciation. We can debunk the assumption that human interests trump environmental limits.
Without this ethical shift, we’re marching off the cliff. It’s the legacy of our infancy. We never forget those early days of helplessness, screaming in our cribs, utterly dependent on the kindness of caregivers. We learn from the beginning to fit in and please. It’s how we keep resources coming. Over the years, the urge to please and belong extends to friends, employers, community, even the broader culture. We embrace business as usual, even bad business, to belong. We don’t ask uncomfortable questions or start awkward conversations for fear of being ostracized.
Let us hope we can find our collective capacity to tolerate our fear of ostracism. Maybe, when our hearts are shattered, we’ll find our courage to look reality in the eye and speak truth to each other.
Miriam Voran practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy in West Lebanon and Montpelier. She is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She lives in West Lebanon.