Freedom means being able to live a life of your choosing.
To live where you want, move if you need to move,
start a family, and know you can raise them in a country
not torn apart by division and hate.”
- Pete Buttigieg, 2019
This isn’t a policy memo. Instead, it’s my personal reflection on freedom, housing, and where independence actually lives.
Federal investments are shrinking. The national conversation is louder than ever and somehow saying less. And yet the real work of making places people can afford, of welcoming difference still happens block by block.
We were taught to think of freedom as something national, even abstract.
But real freedom (the kind you can live inside) has always been local.
This poem is about housing, yes.
But more than that, it’s about building the conditions for choice
and protecting the freedom to live as yourself, wherever you are.
