[B]URLINGTON — Advocates for affordable housing and land conservation wrestled Tuesday with how to collaborate better among themselves and with other social service agencies, as well as how to generate more public understanding and enthusiasm for their work.
While applauding the work that’s been done by the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, speakers at a VHCB conference in Burlington agreed more needs to be done, particularly in affordable housing. They noted that places like Burlington have a 1 percent vacancy rate for renters, with demand outstripping supply and keeping rents high. They also noted home prices make buying a home unaffordable for many, even where two adults are working, and that homelessness has increased.
The Legislature created the VHCB in 1987. Its mission is to help create affordable housing, conserve agricultural and recreation lands, forestland, natural areas and historic properties. Executive Director Gus Seelig said the organization has been able to help leverage more than $1 billion in public and private funding in 28 years for Vermont’s nonprofit housing and conservation organizations.
Since its inception, the trust has received more than $270 million in funding from the state through a dedicated part of the property transfer tax receipts. The group says it has helped keep more than 11,000 homes affordable in Vermont and conserved approximately 400,000 acres of farm, recreational and natural lands.
Many of the more than 200 people who attended the conference framed their work in a broader context, beyond their specific issue, as an effort to promote “social justice.” Instead of viewing me as a housing specialist, said one, view me as someone trying to improve the community.
For example, one of the conference speakers, Connie Snow, said she began the Brattleboro Area Community Land Trust almost 20 years ago as a matter of “social justice.” She is now executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust.
“The real estate market is not designed to serve those in need,” she said. A land trust, where housing can be provided less expensively, she said, helps “level the playing field.” Land trusts typically hold the land under a home and some restrict the amount of profit an owner can make when they sell the house, both of which keep the housing affordable for a longer period of time.
Speakers noted that issues like affordable housing and land conservation are intertwined with other parallel economic challenges, such as affordable health care and food, and can not be divorced from environmental challenges as well, such as climate change.
Because the issues overlap, speakers said collaboration between groups, including reaching out more to social service agencies, is key.
“Housing security and food security are one and the same thing,” said Katherine Sims, executive director of the Green Mountain Farm-to-School program in Newport. “Food security matters in how we learn, how we grow, how our kids are fed and how they feed their kids.” Healthy food and affordable housing, she said, go hand in hand and “can affect how long we live.”
Her organization connected 90 institutions with 40 local farms and facilitated the infusion of $350,000 of local food products going into local schools, the prison and the hospital.
As an example of the interconnection, Sims said the availability of affordable local food is dependent on viable, working farms. Conservation programs have allowed some farms to stay in operation that would have otherwise been developed, including through the purchase of development rights, and kept them more affordable for the next generation of farmers. One speaker, David Marvin, called it “liberating” to have his family sugaring property in a land conservation program. “Conservation focuses on stewardship,” he said, as opposed to maximizing a property’s economic value.
The keynote speaker, Nancy Stangle, co-founder of a land trust in Athens, Georgia, agreed that advocates needed to look beyond their one area of expertise. She said one can’t work on affordable housing without developing programs that include “the four biggest issues facing us: poverty, hunger, lack of drinking water and climate change. They are all interrelated.”
As in Vermont, preserving farmland is a focus of the Athens Land Trust, particularly to help African-American farmers, many of whom have had families give up farming generations ago because “it hit too close to home,” a reminder of slavery.
One of the goals of the conference, according to VHCB executive director Seelig, was to get housing advocates and land conservation groups in the same room to share goals and collaborate. Often, he said, they are working in their own “silos.”
“Most of the time the organizations we work with pursue a part of our mission, but not our whole mission,” Seelig said. “And it’s really important to get people to get together to understand how their issues connect, how the food we’re growing in Vermont needs to be accessible to people who have less means and live in affordable housing, how climate change affects everything we want to do to make buildings more energy efficient, how we need farms and forests as carbon sinks and how we can use conservation to help climate change. It’s not a long stretch from economic justice to environmental justice to how do we build strong communities, and that’s the thing most people (attending) have in common.”
Workshops at the conference included such topics as cleaning up Vermont waterways, a health-impact program and the resilience of the landscape with climate change.
Another issue conference attendees discussed was the “tension” Seelig says some see between trying to conserve land and whether that exacerbates the lack of affordable housing.
However, Brenda Torpy, a 30-year affordable housing advocate and the chief executive officer of Champlain Housing Trust, said the “real tension” was between those who view land “as an opportunity to extract wealth and profit” and those that view it as a “resource we should be supporting” to help improve lives.
Under Torpy, CHT won in 2008 the U.N. World Habitat Award for the Global North for its work on affordable housing.
Advocates also wondered how to generate more public support and understanding of the interconnected nature of housing, land conservation and other social, economic and environmental challenges.
The Legislature has frequently cut the anticipated allocation to the board because of other state budget needs. While grateful for the funding they have received and understanding other program needs, Larry Mires of the VHCB said an additional $40 million would have gone to the trust since 2000 had the board received the full allocation from the share the Legislature originally recommended should come from the property transfer tax.
Lawmakers, Mires noted, have the authority to decide each year what the allocation will be. In the past several years, the amount has been approximately $14 million, he said.
