Fear of Others Moving In. Conversation with Tara Paxton

In this episode, Tara Paxton joins us at the start of what she calls her "Act Two." She spent nearly thirty years on the municipal side of planning, most recently as planning director in Brick Township here in New Jersey where this past June, she finished working on Brick’s state's fourth round of affordable housing compliance. 

Now Tara is stepping away from municipal government to create something new: an educational and private practice (https://paxtonplanninggroup.com/) built around the gaps she saw up close for three decades. Tara has a term for the real obstacle she kept running into. It’s not “Not in My Back Yard” movement, but something she calls FOOMI, fear of others moving in and changing the familiar quality of life. 

Her solutions are not more regulation. It's education. She walks us through her plan to launch a new organization, modeled on Philadelphia's Citizen Planner Institute. The goal: teach residents the actual civics of planning. What a board can and can't legally do. Why "no" isn't always on the table. How to move residents from reflexively objecting to a project, toward contributing to shaping their town's future, one that meets the needs we all have at different stages of life.