How so? A simple look at suburban Boston and most of NH zoning regulations and you'll find them similar, the same, or actually more restrictive than here. Density of the geographic scale your imagining is not happening anytime soon here, and the type of development you are probably in visioning are the 5 over 1 condo typology. This is already legal in a lot of municipalities here in the 30% or 20% of residential land that allows for any type of multi-family home. It's the only type of multi-family that current zoning and building codes make profitable and so it's the only one that gets built. These is why there's a fear of density.

Let's talk about softer density. Things like duplexes and triplexes, small mixed use building, two or three stories. Lot size, floor area, and building footprint maximums, that manages scale and mass, instead of minimums that promotes larger out of scale buildings. Form base codes, instead of prescriptive ones so we can have a guiding principal of good scale and measured growth. All these where common once in NH (except maximums and form base codes, those are a new idea that attempt to correct the scale and mass issue in modern building development), before suburbs that's how we build, lots of old town centers still have these type of buildings, this is what give them their traditional New England look. But most wouldn't allow them to be build today. We have zoned them out of feasibility. We need to look around and say maybe we should allow them again, near our towns and cities cores, infill empty lots and underutilized parking lots that where ment for storing vehicles for suburbanite growth that never materialize after the economic bust in the late 1900s and the de-investment in smaller cities and towns. If we truly don't want to look like Boston and it's endless sprawl this is what we need to do, allow our towns to grow inwards instead of outwards.

Let's talk about public transit, we need to start serving ourselves. There's this perception that public transit is just for getting to Boston, the dreaded T extension! Some of our communities could use internally focused transit that is reliable, frequent, and practical. Say Portsmouth or Dover, instead of just COAST running routes between towns only and tryin to catch everything in a few lines, which makes service tedious and not practical. We need loop routes that serve the neighborhoods and brings people to services and goods in short intervals under 15 to 20 minutes. Something that is more than feasible in smaller cities like these two. With simpler commuter lines that go between cities and meet the loop buses at different stops or a central stop.