When Michael Henaghan of Wilmington, Delaware, decided to escape the Covid-19 pandemic by moving to Wilmington, Vermont, he found much to love in swapping the city for the country.
“I once didn’t even know the person who lived across the hallway from me,” he said. “Now I feel like I’m actually a part of a community.”
Henaghan also can snowboard, hike or bike and still have time for his filmmaking job.
“I’m uploading and downloading large files, sending out raw footage and cuts,” he said. “Where we live, our internet is reliable — reliably slow.”
That’s why organizers of this month’s Southern Vermont Economy Summit were fast to enlist Henaghan and several peers for a “Covid Newcomers: Here to Stay?” panel on ways business, government and community leaders can recruit and retain more people.
Before the pandemic, Vermont’s population had been flat or falling since the 2010 census, spurring Gov. Phil Scott to deem the state’s declining numbers as his “biggest concern.”
The pandemic has spurred an influx of new residents unlike anything recorded since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with home sales to out-of-state buyers skyrocketing 38% this past year.
“One of the things this summit is trying to figure out is: What is Vermont doing well and where do we need to improve?” Keith Marks, the recently relocated executive director of Putney’s Next Stage Arts Project, said in introducing the panel.
The first suggestion from many: boost internet access.
“Growing up in Delaware and then living in Brooklyn, I just assumed everybody had it,” Henaghan told 75 summit attendees plugged into Zoom. “Moving here was eye-opening.”
New York City resident Heather Brubaker planned to visit her sister in Dummerston at the start of the pandemic for what she thought would be two weeks.
“By the time we departed, the city had really begun to shut down,” Brubaker recalled of a March 2020 trip with her husband and two daughters. “We left with five days of clothing and our passports and a water filtration device, and we never really went back.”
Now living in Putney, Brubaker appreciates the public school.
“My first-grader is in a class of 16, which, coming from New York, feels like a sort of miraculous student-teacher ratio,” she said.
But the internet has been less than magical for her husband, who’s employed by Google.
“When we started searching for housing, he would bring his computer to showings and check Wi-Fi speeds,” she said. “Knowing he was going to be working full time remotely, that was an absolute requirement.”
John Getchell, a 1986 Bennington College graduate, was a caterer in Washington, D.C., and later a contractor in Maine before learning Bennington’s pandemic-shuttered Blue Benn Diner was for sale.
“I have the luxury of being one of the very few people in the world who can say they bought themselves a diner for Christmas,” Getchell said. “We have good internet service. However, it’s really only from Comcast, so we’re kind of enslaved to a large corporation that has no competition.”
Getchell, who arrived at college on a Greyhound bus, has found current travel options even more limited.
“Bennington no longer has a bus station or train station,” he said. “It would be fantastic if public transportation both in and out of the state was more accessible.”
Zelda Beckford understands the commuting challenge. She relocated from California in the fall to become a vice president at Brattleboro’s New Chapter vitamin and supplement company.
“I was used to living by the beach,” she said, “and traded in my flip-flops for ski boots.”
But, confronted by a glut of home-buyers in the Brattleboro area, Beckford is renting almost an hour away in Amherst, Massachusetts. As she seeks a local place to live, she’s also hoping to find more fellow people of color.
“Coming from Los Angeles, there was a lot more diversity — moving here, I see there isn’t much,” she said of the nation’s second-whitest state. “Would I stay here and raise a family if I wasn’t recruited and didn’t have my position? I’d like to feel there’s an effort to bring more diversity.”
