[B]URLINGTON — Describing a lack of housing, especially affordable housing, as the greatest impediment to the city’s growth and vibrancy, city councilors Tuesday unanimously adopted a plan they hope will remedy the problem.
The 22-step plan draws heavily from a 2014 city report that found Burlington has a 1 percent vacancy rate for renters and that renters — who make up more than half of the city population — spend an average of 44 percent of their income on housing. It also found that Burlington lags the surrounding area in building new housing.
“We have a serious problem with the affordability of housing in Burlington,” Mayor Miro Weinberger told the council Tuesday night.
“I think we have a great opportunity to do something to address that problem by supporting the creation of housing at all income levels,” while “enhancing” the city’s character and making it “more walkable, bikeable, sustainable,” Weinberger said.
The city developed the plan over the past 16 months, soliciting public input and revisions by the council’s Community Development Neighborhood Revitalization Committee. Many of the action steps have occurred or are underway, including a one-cent increase in the amount of property tax revenue allocated to the Housing Trust Fund.
That fund is used to provide seed money and grants for affordable housing projects. The increase, approved in the fiscal year 2016 budget, will nearly double the fund from $180,000 to $340,000, according to the housing plan.
Erhard Mahnke, of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, praised the plan but urged the city to make it explicit that declining federal support for housing projects will be focused on those with the greatest need: low-income residents and those who work in the city but can’t afford to live there.
Mahnke also said he hopes the city will make permanent the one-cent increase to the Housing Trust Fund, noting that the housing plan only refers to the FY16 increase. City Councilor Sharon Bushor, I-Ward 1, said she would like to see that increase enshrined in the city charter, so future administrations or councils will be less likely to walk it back.
“While we’re having the discussion … is one cent really all we want to invest in the Housing Trust Fund?” Bushor asked her fellow councilors. “If housing is our number one issue, then we really need to look at what general fund (money) we’re setting aside on an annual basis to address this.”
The housing plan also sets out goals for reforming the city zoning process in ways officials say could avoid a lengthy review process that can be held up by a single individual. A joint City Council and Planning Commission panel has been working on those changes since last year. The plan also calls on the city to review parking requirements for new development downtown, noting that a city parking study found many available spaces at public garages even at peak times.
City officials will also work with UVM and Champlain College to create more downtown and on-campus student housing to move many of the roughly 3,000 students living off-campus back into student housing.
“Multiple students living in housing originally built for families increases neighborhood parking pressures, creates lifestyle conflicts with long-term residents and drives up market rents,” according to the housing plan.
The plan calls for 1,500 units of on-campus or downtown student housing over the next five years. Approximately 300 of those units are part of Champlain College’s Eagles building at the corner of King and Pine Streets. Another 300 will come from the redevelopment of UVM dormitories when UVM Medical Center’s adjacent inpatient facility is reconstructed.
That leaves 900 units that the city and colleges will need to develop.
Burlington’s housing problem is also a regional housing and transportation problem, according to the plan, which calls on city officials to work with the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission and Chittenden County Transportation Authority to focus on “housing infill” around existing “transportation corridors.”
The plan calls on the city to expand its focus on “housing first” strategies, such as a “risk guarantee fund for landlords,” to reduce homelessness in Burlington. Housing first strategies are those that focus on finding homeless people find a place to live and then working on providing other support services.
Finally, the plan calls on the city to begin brainstorming ways to make Burlington more livable for its aging population.
City Councilor Joan Shannon, D-South District, said much of the housing plan appeals to her, but sounded a note of caution about the realities of building new housing in Burlington: “We can all agree that we are in desperate need of more housing until it’s going in next door to us, and then we often don’t like the form that it takes.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled City Councilor Sharon Bushor’s name.
