In April, Olivia Taylor stopped looking for a new apartment in Burlington.
Taylor visited a dozen apartments over the span of a month, planning to move into a one-bedroom at the beginning of June. Every one fell through, she said. Units were being snatched up within hours of her tour.
Though Taylor had looked for a rental in Burlington’s tight housing market several times before, she had never encountered such difficulty. She has a stable job and a relatively flexible budget — benefits that many local renters lack.
“Every single person I talked to was like, it’s the worst it’s ever been,” she said.
For years, housing in Burlington has been in perpetual crisis. Despite perennial pledges from local officials to deliver solutions, housing options — and particularly, affordable housing options — have remained scant.
Now there are signs that rental vacancies in the city, and countywide, are reaching record scarcity. As June 1 — a common turnover date — approaches this year, prospective tenants have been left scrambling.
“I’ve explored, I feel like, every option,” said Laura Hardin, a student at St. Michael’s College who has been searching for a room in the Burlington area since February. She’s not able to return home to Florida for the summer, she said, and worries what she will do if she cannot find a place to live.
Over the past decade, Chittenden County’s rental vacancy rate has averaged about 2% — the lowest in the state and far below the national average, which has hovered just under 7% in recent years. That’s according to Brad Minor, a partner with the firm Allen, Brooks & Minor, which surveys the county’s vacancy rates twice a year.
In June 2020, according to Minor’s survey of 7,500 rental units in the county, vacancy climbed to 2.6% — a likely sign of the pandemic’s economic toll on renters.
But in the firm’s most recent survey, completed in December, that figure plunged to 1.1%. That was striking, Minor said, because vacancy tends to ease in winter when fewer people are searching for housing.
And now that spring has arrived, landlords and property managers are reporting unusually high demand.
“It’s the tightest I think I’ve ever seen it,” said Linda Wurth, who has managed the Olde Orchard Park apartment complex in South Burlington for more than two decades.
Wurth is renting out units sight unseen due to the pandemic, but that has not slowed interest, she said. “It’s a crapshoot. Wait a day and wait an hour, and it’s gone,” she said. “You have to make a split-second decision.”
When James McCormick, a landlord in Winooski, posted a single vacancy earlier this year, he received about 50 applications in two weeks, he said. “There’s definitely more influx now,” he said.
What’s going on?
What’s causing the contracting market? There are a range of explanations.
For one thing, state housing programs prompted by the pandemic are beginning to phase out, and eligibility for such social supports is being restricted. “As those rules begin to tighten up, as we come out of the pandemic, a lot of people are looking for housing in a very limited market,” said Travis Poulin, director of Chittenden Community Action, which runs rent and housing assistance programs.
In Chittenden County alone, social support agencies are working with several hundred people who lack stable housing, Poulin said. These individuals and families bear the greatest burden when vacancy declines, he said.
“We are working with people who are desperately looking for something that is stable and affordable and habitable,” he said.
Then, there’s the influx of out-of-staters, which has caused a boom in Vermont’s real estate market. Anecdotally, Wurth says she’s seen an uptick in applicants from outside Vermont for her apartments. “I think a lot of people beelined it up here,” she said, putting further pressure on local housing.
Minor said he believes the state’s rental assistance efforts, funded by federal Covid-19 relief dollars, have also kept vacancy down — a sign of the program’s success.
About 3.5% of Chittenden County landlords that Minor surveyed in December were receiving money through the rental housing stabilization program, which was designed to protect tenants from eviction. “We could have had a pretty big increase in vacancy if it weren’t for that program,” he said.
But for those who are searching for housing, the federal aid offers little hope.
“We have funds available,” Poulin said. “But the long and the short of it is that all the money in the world won’t necessarily impact the immediate availability of housing.”
Even if people meet eligibility criteria for subsidized housing in the county, providers such as the Champlain Housing Trust have lengthy waitlists. “The average wait we’re looking at is a year to a year and a half,” Poulin said.
Furthermore, Burlington homeowners are reeling from recent property reappraisal notices, which caused many properties to shoot up in value. Though the property-tax impacts are not yet clear for owners, there are worries that the burden of any potential price hikes will fall upon tenants, even further reducing affordability in the area.
“Somebody’s paying the extra money,” McCormick said of his own plans to raise rents, should his taxes increase.
For Taylor, the spring’s constricted housing market is the latest sign of a city that has become increasingly unwelcoming for renters. “It’s just really frustrating. It’s making me consider leaving Burlington,” she said.
Taylor, 28, hoped to move in with her partner this spring. They had been thinking about getting a dog. For now, though, she’s had to put off those plans.
“If this continues,” she said, “it’s just not a place that I want to stay.”
