Protecting rural land from development and building new homes for New Hampshire’s growing population are two popular and worthy goals. It often seems, however, that these two goals conflict with one another and that we must choose one and jettison the other. I would like to argue that it is possible to reduce the tension between land conservation and home building and achieve some of both.

To save the state’s forests and small towns from suburban sprawl, New Hampshire has already protected lots of land from development. Federal conservation land, much of it in the White Mountain National Forest, exceeds 800,000 acres. State and local conservation land covers more than half a million acres. Almost 725,000 acres of private land have conservation restrictions preventing development.

That still leaves a lot of undeveloped land in New Hampshire that could be used as home sites, and yet we seem to face a shortage of new homes, especially at affordable prices. According to the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, the median sales prices of a single-family house exceeded $400,000 in July, an 18.2% increase from a year earlier. The average time on the market for new listings was only 18 days in July, down from 43 days a year ago.

No doubt these numbers will stimulate more home building in the year to come, but will it be enough? Possibly not, because too many towns in New Hampshire have enacted minimum acreage restrictions on building lots that make new house prices too high for many families. Put simply, a family might be able to afford a house on a half-acre lot, but not if the same house is built on two or four acres.

Local zoning ordinances contain minimum lot sizes for a variety of reasons, but a primary one is to protect groundwater from septic waste contamination. If a town doesn’t provide water and sewer service to much or all of its terrain, then houses need large enough lots to separate wells from septic fields. One growing town east of Manchester, for example, allows half-acre lots in a small residential zone served by its municipal water and sewer system. However, most of the town is not served by that system, so minimum lot sizes are 1.4 or 2 acres in other residential zones. Growth in this case means sprawl.

If New Hampshire’s towns are to offer affordable housing to young families and avoid eating up large tracts of rural land, then their town officials need to reduce the large-lot zoning restrictions that produce unaffordable housing and low-density sprawl. This means that towns need to invest in creating or extending public water and sewer systems to service compact neighborhoods.

Residents and town officials have an opportunity to make these investments now, but it won’t last forever. Interest rates on municipal bonds are at their lowest level in 40 years. If inflation continues as it has re cently, however, those municipal bond rates will eventually rise as the Federal Reserve pivots to inflation fighting. Now is a good time to borrow for local capital projects like water lines and sewage treatment plants.

With the bipartisan passage of the mammoth Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in the U.S. Senate, there is also the prospect of lots of federal grant money for local water projects. If passed by the House and signed by the White House, this act will provide $55 billion for water and wastewater infrastructure projects across the country.

For those who want to protect rural land from sprawl and build affordable housing for New Hampshire’s residents, promoting compact subdivisions by investing now in town water and sewer systems is a strategy that deserves consideration.

Richard England is an economic consultant specializing in property tax and land use issues and a retired professor of economics and natural resources at University of New Hampshire. He lives in Durham.