My Turn: What kind of community do we want to be?

A recent My Turn response to my April 23 column [“A town that cares about community should care about housing“] made several points I want to take seriously. The writer noted, fairly, that my original piece could be read as suggesting that anyone who raised questions about Hope Street or Stone Farm Lane was anti-housing or lacked community commitment. That was not my intention, and if that’s what came through, I want to correct it.

She is right that Greenfield already has meaningful housing projects in motion — the CSO expansion on Wells Street, the Wilson’s project, the Snow’s building, Hope Street, and possibly the Green River School. She is right that our town’s variety — rural neighborhoods, near-downtown streets, historic blocks — is itself a form of community wealth worth protecting. And she is absolutely right that the question of where we build matters. Not every open space is an appropriate development site. Forested land, prime agricultural land, and the rural character that draws people to certain neighborhoods are legitimate values, not obstacles to be dismissed. Careful review and genuine public input are not the enemy of housing — they are what make housing work.

I don’t dispute any of that. I never did.

What I want to talk about is something harder to name, and harder to fix with a zoning amendment or a Planning Board vote. It is the spirit in which we approach the challenge.

Greenfield is a town with real civic gifts. We built a community college. We built a library that has become a genuine point of pride. We support farmers markets, local arts, and an almost stubborn commitment to keeping independent businesses alive on Main Street. These things didn’t happen because everyone agreed. They happened because enough people decided to lead with generosity rather than suspicion, and to trust the community more than they feared change.

Something different happens when housing comes up. For years, readers of this paper have encountered a steady drumbeat of skepticism about nearly every proposal that reaches public attention — a relentless accounting of what might go wrong, what taxpayer funds are at risk, what democratic processes were allegedly bypassed, what neighborhood character might be lost. Some of those questions are legitimate and deserve honest answers. But when skepticism becomes reflexive, when concern hardens into a posture rather than a question, the cumulative effect is a kind of civic weather — a persistent chill that makes bold action feel reckless and neighbors feel like adversaries. That is not healthy for a community that needs to solve hard problems together.

I want to be clear: raising hard questions about public subsidies and planning processes is not a failure of community spirit. It is part of the work. The problem isn’t questioning itself. It’s when questioning becomes the only contribution — when every proposal is met with doubt, a reflexive distrust of the people behind it, and no clear sense of what we’re trying to build together.

The deeper issue, and the one I think my original column didn’t name clearly enough, is that the civic process we rely on is not designed to help people understand one another. Standing at a microphone for three minutes, signing a petition, or submitting a letter to the editor — these are not processes built for encounter. They register positions. And when all we do is register positions, we tend to harden them.

What Greenfield actually needs — on housing and on many other things — is a civic culture capable of genuine encounter. Not debate. Encounter. The kind where you sit across from someone whose fears are different from yours and you actually listen, and something in both of you shifts. That is harder and slower than a public hearing. It requires more: more humility, more patience, more willingness to be changed by what we hear. But it is the only thing that actually moves a community forward.

I believe Greenfield is capable of that. I believe it because I have seen it here, in this library, in this community college, in neighbors who show up without being asked. When Capt. John Whitney of the Greenfield Fire Department was diagnosed with a brain tumor last summer, the community rallied around his family with a force that overwhelmed even his colleagues. When Jorge Naranjo — the owner of Roberto’s Italian Pizzeria on Federal Street — was stabbed in his own restaurant two weeks ago, the response was immediate and fierce with love. These were not organized campaigns. They were instincts. They were Greenfield being Greenfield.

That same generosity of spirit — that same reflex toward one another — is exactly what our housing conversation needs, and exactly what gets crowded out when the civic air is thick with suspicion.

The question is not whether we need housing. We do, obviously and urgently, and everyone in this conversation knows it. The question is whether we can find the civic courage to stop performing our anxiety in public and start actually working through it together. Because the community we say we love depends on the answer.

Mitch Anthony raised three children, built a career in Greenfield, and is proud to call it home.