Freedom Lives Where We Live

on zoning, belonging, and the quiet power of localism

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.

---

Housing is not just shelter.
It is a medium of freedom.
It gives shape to the way we choose to live and be with others.

Freedom is the power to decide how your life unfolds.
Not just where you go, but how you stay.

Freedom is the right to raise children in an apartment high above the street.
To grow old in a backyard cottage, just steps from your daughter’s door.
To start over in a room above a corner store.

Freedom is the dignity of walking home from work.
The option to live near friends, or alone, or three generations deep.
The opportunity to build something that fits the way you live.

We lose that freedom when every place starts to look the same.
When a zoning code tells you the only way to belong
is to buy more house than you need,
to drive farther than you would like,
to live apart from the people who make your life whole.

For too long, we have mistaken uniformity for equality.
We have drafted laws that enforce 
One version of family.
One kind of success.
One scale of home.

We were sold an American Dream as a product.
a detached house. a driveway. a lawn.
But maybe that was not a dream.
Maybe it was just the only thing left on the shelf.

True freedom begins when there are real choices.
Not just permission to stay, but the ability to belong.
Not just a place to sleep,
but a place to live as yourself.

Zoning codes are not neutral.
They are values made visible.
And when they tell us what cannot be built,
they also tell us who cannot belong.

The nation makes the promise.
The neighborhood makes it real.

So let us build in ways that widen freedom.
Let us welcome towers. 
Welcome townhomes.
Welcome ADUs.
and converted basements and apartments above shops.
Welcome households we did not predict.
Welcome lives we did not plan.

Freedom does not trickle from the top.
It rises block by block, in every local choice we make.
Because when we build more types of homes,
we make room for more kinds of people.

Freedom lives where we live 
and grows every time we choose to say yes.
When we protect the freedom to choose how we live,
we protect the very promise this country was built on.