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As the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates Vermont’s affordable housing crisis, new research on flexible housing models suggests that the state could benefit from rethinking how to build homes. But advocates wonder whether creativity is enough to help the people who need housing now.
In recent years, co-housing developments have gained popularity. Homesharing advocates have explored accessory dwelling units as a way to encourage shared living arrangements. And tiny homes have become so popular, they’ve inspired an annual festival that promotes the small-living lifestyle.
Housing advocates say the current system doesn’t suit the needs of Vermonters struggling to afford a place to live. But they are also skeptical that accessory dwellings and tiny homes are an adequate substitute for affordable housing.
**Podcast transcript**
This week: As the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates Vermont’s affordable housing crisis, new research on flexible housing models suggests that the state could benefit from rethinking how to build homes. But advocates wonder whether creativity is enough to help the people who need housing now.
Doris Bedinger: Can you see that? Is that working?
Last month, our reporter Erin Petenko got a Zoom tour of the Burlington Cohousing East Village, a cooperative across the street from the UVM Medical Center.
Doris Bedinger: I’m gonna walk and show you out my patio door since we’re sort of at a lull right now.
Don Schramm: Besides the beautiful garden that Doris has created, you can also see some of the solar panels…
Erin Petenko: The concept of cohousing is essentially that you have your own small space — a bedroom, maybe a small kitchen, something like that. And then you have bigger shared spaces that the community pitches in and builds together.
Don Schramm: Our 20 solar panels will produce over $16,000 of electricity every year. Way to the right, that’s that’s another neighbor’s garden over there. Beautiful garden…
Erin Petenko: The three people I talked to were Don Schramm, who was one of the founders of the cohousing community, Doris Bedinger, who is one of its residents, and John Patterson, another resident.
Don Schramm: Right there is — you can’t really see it, but we have an electric car charging station. And the power for that is coming from our solar panels.
Erin Petenko: I have to admit, the first time they described it to me, what came to mind was a very small New England village, maybe one that was at the very beginning of people settling in the area — where it was so cold that you didn’t want to have to walk very far. And you didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time building your home, so you just try to build everything as close together as possible. And if you can share things, save yourself the time of building repeat facilities, you can just all share one kitchen or one outdoor space, or one place where you put all your chickens together.
Don Schramm: One neighbor started a chicken project. At the moment we have 14 egg producing hens, who are known as the ladies. We also have a couple of beehives that this year have produced an amazing amount of honey. Like, over 120 pounds of honey. There’s a lot of things going on for sure.
Erin Petenko: Yeah, sounds like it.
And…why? Why set out to build a facility like this?
Erin Petenko: It is, in some ways, a little bit of a way to save yourself some expenses of having a neighborhood or community. Because you’re pitching into a shared gardening area, or to share your heating costs.
Doris Bedinger: All our common spaces, our kitchen. Our utilities are so cheap because we share them. We’ve got a super efficient boiler system, we share trash expenses, we share landscaping expenses, and snowing expenses. So all those shared expenses, keep it affordable for everybody.
Erin Petenko: But it’s also a different way of thinking in terms of your social life. It’s a way to build a deliberate community around your home.
John Patterson: Where we lived before, we liked the place fine. But there was little contact between people, everybody was so busy with their lives. And the whole idea of being part of a community where people actually paid attention to one another and looked out for one another was great.
Erin Petenko: The concept is that you share the work and the chores of the shared spaces with your neighbors, then you get the benefit of having them there in the building, a kind of family, almost. Or just having a community of neighbors that you can hang out with, have events with. One of the residents described how she just leaves her door open all the time, and people can wander in and out on her floor, having that community around you.
John Patterson: It’s no small thing when we live in a community that tries to operate by consensus. To try to take account of what something means for somebody else, which is something that often it seems in contemporary America, we tend not to do. You know, “What can I get for me now?” But that’s not the way that we try to think. And everything from the way that our buildings are designed, the way that our gardens produce, kind of reinforces that. [phone rings] That’s our phone.
What led you to Burlington Cohousing in the first place?
Erin Petenko: It was a bit of a winding journey. I started with a new paper that has come out on envisioning a different type of architecture, designed to help with affordable housing in Vermont. And from there, I started to ask myself, well, why do homes in Vermont look the way that they do? Why do we have this concept of a typical family living in a home with its own yard and its own fence? And are there people in Vermont that don’t live that way — that has come up with some other idea or solution to fit their own needs? And that led me to a lot of different places, including cohousing communities, but also tiny homes, to side apartment units to home sharing.
And what is kind of the grand problem that these alternatives are all trying to address? What is the issue with the conventional housing system as we’ve known it?
Erin Petenko: The conventional housing system as we’ve known it is kind of expensive. Homes across the nation, including in Vermont, have gotten bigger, and have more space for fewer people. But that also means that they’ve gotten more expensive to live in. There are a lot of people who simply cannot afford to buy their own home, or even afford a conventional apartment, because there are just so many people relative to the homes that are available.
And Vermont has to deal with the fact that it has an older housing stock, which means that some of that housing is not really suitable to live in, or suitable for the needs of modern Vermonters. And at the same time, it’s really pricey. It’s a lot to build new homes, because we’re in New England — it’s cold, and you have to do all these things that keep people from freezing in their houses.
So I think a lot of the people that I talked to asked the question, Well, can we not do the conventional single family, large standalone home, and, you know, make something that’s more affordable to live in?
Let’s talk about some of those more flexible solutions that you’ve been looking into. You mentioned home sharing and these sorts of accessory units. What does that look like exactly?
Erin Petenko: Home sharing has been around for quite a while, actually. It’s not even necessarily a new idea, although I think that it may have new relevance as the housing becomes more and more expensive in Vermont. But Homeshare Vermont, the concept is that people who might have some extra space in their home, but need help around the house — whether that’s because they’re getting older, or because they have a really busy schedule, or they have some living situation that could use an extra helping hand — they partner those people up with people who are looking for housing and who are willing to do that extra share of chores, or that extra share of companionship.
I spoke to Kirby Dunn, the director of Homeshare Vermont. And she said that when she first started, she did it because she had an aging mom that she was taking care of, and she needed an extra hand around the house. But now she’s been doing it for a decade. And she mostly just does it because it’s great to have someone there to be a companion. She said she didn’t know how she would have gotten through the pandemic without it.
What does the actual physical arrangement look like when we’re talking about home sharing?
Erin Petenko: Well, with home sharing, it can really vary depending on the home. Sometimes it can just be an extra room or an extra little section of the house. But what Dunn said is that they encourage people, especially if they have the ability, to have a separate apartment that is attached or semi attached to their home. So people can live in their own space, share some of these facilities with you, but also still have their own private place where they can kind of control their own living situation.
Joel VanderWeele: It’s the sort of thing that used to be very common. Like, it wasn’t considered a low status thing to live in a boarding house for a while as a young professional.
Erin Petenko: Joel VanderWeele is an architect for Union Studio, which designed the Side Hustle House. He saw people in his friend circle who were struggling to afford their own home, so he and his co-workers conceived of this “Side Hustle” home that would be adaptable to people’s needs, and hopefully affordable to start building.
Joel VanderWeele: It’s a difficult situation because home ownership is such a deeply rooted idea in American culture and economics. It used to be sort of a foregone conclusion that you reach a certain age — in the past, it was between 25 and 35, probably — and you buy a little starter house. And now those starter houses that were built in the ‘40s and ‘50s for the boomers are 50% more expensive tracking with inflation. And incomes have not gone up in the same way as housing costs. What used to be a rite of passage is now unattainable for many, many people. And so they’re looking for other solutions to get their foot in the door of homeownership.
Erin Petenko: The architects of the Side Hustle House have taken that kind of concept of having these semi connected spaces that grow and change over the course of the home to create a modern dwelling that responds to people’s affordable housing needs.
Joel VanderWeele: So you start off occupying not that much space. And as your family grows, or as your income grows, or whatever, you occupy a greater percentage of the home. And then as you’re aging in place, you can go back to occupying a smaller percentage of the home and renting out the space. Or, we’ve seen people who have a home health worker who helps them out for aging in place. And so if we can create a solution that can accommodate all those different stages of life, that creates more durability and long term affordability.
Erin Petenko: Do you think that the current housing stock, especially more modern housing, is not very flexible?
Joel VanderWeele: I would say so. And I would say that part of it is the housing that is being built is too big. And that’s not one person or one industry’s fault. But housing size has gone up like 50%, since the ‘60s, like in terms of square feet, but the household size in terms of number of members occupying the household has gone down by about 20%, I think, and so that creates a really difficult problem. Because a four bedroom house is not something that a huge percentage of people need. But it is a larger share of the homes that are being built. So we have not enough homes for the number of people who need them. But arguably too many bedrooms and many unoccupied bedrooms in homes that are too large for the household.
Erin Petenko: The concept of having a separate space, or connected or semi connected spaces, is really fundamental to Vermont. It was very common for Vermonters to have what they would call big house, little house, back house, barn.
Joel VanderWeele: So they would build a small house when they first moved on to the property. And then as their family would grow out, they would build a bigger house where everyone could live and use those smaller original spaces as kind of side apartments for relatives or people in the community that might need it. And so if we can create forms that are comfortable and familiar to people now that support arrangements that had been used in the past, but have sort of aren’t talked about as much like home sharing, or roommates or renting out a room or whatever, that creates more options for people within a widely accepted architectural form.
So it’s sort of a way to pretty efficiently implement one of these accessory dwelling units, but designed in a way that fits in with what New England houses are already all about?
Erin Petenko: Yeah, he was partly inspired by the concept of the traditional New England home, and the outward design is kind of designed to fit into the local architecture too, which might help with some of the reluctance in the community to build affordable housing.
Got it. You mentioned tiny homes as one of these types of flexible solutions that have become more popular in recent years. How do tiny homes fit into this? Actually, I guess I should ask what is a tiny home, and how do tiny homes fit into this?
Erin Petenko: I don’t know if there’s a precise definition. I guess you would just say that a tiny home is a home that is deliberately small but still standalone. It’s on its own yard space or property, so it’s not an apartment where you are dividing up a space with a bunch of other people. It’s one singular small space, often a trailer or some sort of mobile unit, that people then add the needs of their whole house into.
I spoke to one tiny house dweller, Erin Maile O’Keefe, who has not only been living in a tiny home for a while now, but also helps to plan the Tiny House Fest that comes to Vermont every year.
Erin Petenko: As someone who does not live in a tiny house, and I can’t really say I know any other people do, what is it like?
Erin Maile O’Keefe: You’ve got to keep it clean all the time. If you make a mess, you’re tripping over it…
Erin Petenko: She said that, when she first had to make the move, she had to do it very deliberately, and had to go through and think for herself: What do I really need?
Erin Maile O’Keefe: Really, the reality is I had to grow, I had to move to a smaller pot. I had to prune myself in order to fit into a smaller space.
Erin Petenko: And she had to “prune” her lifestyle and her material possessions. But she believes that that pruning helps her to live a more fulfilled lifestyle in the tiny home.
I mean, that sounds great on an individual level, how does it fit into this broader conversation about creating more affordable housing?
Erin Petenko: Tiny homes aren’t necessarily cheaper to build or design than apartments are. Because they are designed to be standalone, I think that they end up costing a little bit more in terms of your heating and your plumbing and your other infrastructure needs. But they are a very cheap way of getting the foremost experience of having your own space — of having, you know, a lot of outdoor space around you, which some people might want.
Erin Maile O’Keefe: The possibility of escaping a huge mortgage is massive, in terms of young people being able to get into housing. So how do you build something that you can afford right now, but sized appropriately for your budget, and then add as you go along? If you are living in an apartment, and you want to make the move to a more natural living space, but you can’t afford a full home, maybe you could afford a tiny home.
Erin Petenko: So maybe not the be all end all solution to Vermont’s affordable housing. I do not think everyone in Vermont should move into Tiny Homes. But it’s kind of fitting into this idea of, “let’s have all these different options available to people so that they can choose what best fits their needs, rather than forcing people to live in this modern concept of a single family, two parents, two kids kind of housing situation.”
All these things you’ve listed out, all these flexible housing ideas — you said some elements of this have been around for a while. But it sounds like the idea that these could be applied to the housing crunch in Vermont is a relatively new idea. And I wonder how people who have been working on this problem for a long timethink about these types of more creative solutions.
Erin Petenko: Yeah, I spoke with Chris Donnelly, who’s the Director of Community Relations at Champlain Housing Trust.
Chris Donnelly: I was going to say, we’ve been building tiny homes for years, we just stack them all together in one big building.
Erin Petenko: CHT is one of the largest housing trusts in the country, and they help to build affordable housing in the community, and help people to afford it through grants and other programs. And he said that when he hears about these kinds of solutions, he has to be very skeptical, because he is working with the reality of on the ground of seeing the struggle and the need that people have, that is very, I guess you could say immediate, and very simple: People just need a place to live.
Chris Donnelly: To put it in scale, the median priced home in Chittenden County is $327,000. You have to earn $90,000 a year just to afford them. So even if you brought the price down to, you know, $275 or $250, you’d still need to have an income of $70 or $75,000. That’s more than most people earn.
Erin Petenko: Yeah, I think the median income in Vermont is around $60,000, median household income.
Chris Donnelly: And then you have to save $20,000. You have to have savings. People just say — I hear this a lot — “Why don’t people just, instead of renting, why don’t you just buy something, if you’re paying the same amount of money for a mortgage as it would be for the rent?” But there’s no way to save money when you’re paying all that money for rent.
Erin Petenko: It’s definitely a national problem. And it’s actually kind of funny to me — when I first moved to Vermont, I thought the housing was really cheap, because I had been trying to afford an apartment in New Jersey for a couple of years and failing to, and suddenly I could actually afford to live in my own apartment. But cost of housing relative to people’s incomes in the area is very high. And that’s true nationally. That’s true whether you live in California or New York or Texas, or Florida, is that housing costs have gone up to the cost of people’s income.
A large percentage of people in this country are spending more than 30% of their income on housing, which — more than 30% is considered to be unaffordable, because you need your money for other stuff too.
Chris Donnelly: In this country, our housing policy’s backwards. So we subsidize people like me that own a home: I get a guaranteed subsidy, because I can deduct my mortgage on my taxes. So anyone that owns a home that pays interest on their mortgage can deduct that, most people can. When you rent a home, only one in four people qualify for any assistance. Then, people that are renting are typically lower income. So we’re giving public dollars, sort of subsidies, to people that own — all of us, all the owners — and then we’re only subsidizing one in four of the people that are renting, one in four of the people that qualify. Yeah. A little bit backwards. Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox…
So it’s more like, if we could really just subsidize the existing ownership and rental structure in a way that works for people, then that could be a solution too.
Erin Petenko: Yeah. He also said that when he hears terms like “tradition” or “community design,” he feels very wary. Because he hears those terms being used by people who are trying to exclude people from living in affordable housing solutions, like apartments, because they are afraid of change in their community or lower income people moving into their community.
Chris Donnelly: The use of character in terms of architecture has been used as a way to zone out people that are undesirable. And we see that in multifamily housing. Certainly, I’ve seen it in suburban areas where — worse than redlining — money was not available to black and brown people to buy homes. In Vermont, the word character has been used in zoning regulations as a way to say, “well, that’s just not what we’re like here in terms of the architecture,” and then that segregates our communities.
That’s really interesting. So he’s saying that the people who are trying to kind of engineer these solutions so that they fit with a certain aesthetic or design that’s common to New England, might actually kind of be trying too hard.
Erin Petenko: Yeah. And I also, as I spoke to many of the people for this story, they pointed out that there’s this false notion of traditional Vermont as a place of the single family standalone home. When the reality is that Vermonters have always used these kinds of flexible housing solutions, and different ways of thinking about affordable housing to solve the affordable housing problem. It’s not like these Vermonters trying to build their first homes, living out in the cold 1700s winters, were building these big, big houses with white picket fences. That’s actually a relatively modern concept that’s only about from the mid-century of the 1900s.
So from what you’ve laid out, there are all these different types of flexible housing scenarios, these creative solutions that people are putting forward as possible ways to ease the affordability issue. You’ve got people like Chris Donnelly, who are saying, you know, we really need to just address the immediate need here and fund the subsidies better. Does it seem like there’s one dominant way forward?
Erin Petenko: I think my perspective is, there’s no one dominant way forward. We can definitely have increased subsidies for affordable housing via apartments, and subsidized buildings and living units, while at the same time trying to adapt these other ideas and maybe adapt our own housing stock to fit more flexible needs.
Joel VanderWeele: So there are different camps.
Joel VanderWeele, the architect from the Side Hustle House.
Joel VanderWeele: There are people who argue about affordable housing, and only talk about subsidized affordable housing. There are some people who argue from a market based side that it’s all about supply and demand and deregulation is the way to go. I think they’re all sort of right. I think all of those solutions can be brought to bear to this problem. Not any one of them is going to solve a problem on its own. And so I think that from design to financing, to zoning regulations to federal housing programs, I think all of it needs to be used at the same time. Everyone needs to push forward in their own lane and not get in the way of the other lanes, because what people think of as necessary for their own housing situation is different for so many different people.
Erin Petenko: That can help to capture a really broad swath of people — from people who are on the verge of homelessness, to people who are just millennials who are sick of living with their in laws, to people who are living on a fixed income in retirement and need some help around the house, to large families that need a certain amount of space for their their children — and make all of these different solutions work, hopefully with a combination of Vermonters getting together to work on all those. And not only make the houses themselves flexible, but also make Vermont society and the way we think about the concept of a home a little bit more flexible. To remove ourselves from the defined notion of what a home has to be.
Thanks, Erin, for your time. I appreciate it.
Erin Petenko: Thanks for having me.
