STOWE — Matt Hill walks out of a wood he is clearing above Stowe. He is logging to make room for six lots for new houses.
“No matter whether they’re out of state, in state, there’s people that are buying up these properties because they like Vermont,” Hill said. “It just astonishes me how many people want to build around here.”
Hill said he is surprised the high cost of building materials has not slowed the frenetic pace of building in town.
He said the work is good.
He commutes from neighboring Elmore, where he grew up and where he owns a few acres with his mother. He looked for an apartment closer to work in Stowe but said he could not afford it.
“Most of my guys live in outlying towns,” said Brendan O’Reilly, Hill’s employer and the founder of Grist Mill Builders in Waterbury Center. “Those are all about 35 minutes away.”
O’Reilly points out that this situation is not historically unusual in resorts. He recalls his first job as a carpenter, at 20, in Hawaii, where he slept in the house he was building.
“If I was not hanging my hammock in the house, I was not living anywhere near that coastal Hawaiian home,” said O’Reilly, 57.
Because he kept his 20 or so employees on the payroll through the pandemic, O’Reilly said he was able to keep his crews but that it’s hard to hire new carpenters.
At another of O’Reilly’s job sites, a multinational band of carpenters is working on a restaurant. All of them drive at least half an hour to work.
Marek Bal emigrated from Poland. Vermont reminds him of the mountains where he grew up. He lives in Johnson, half an hour away.
“It’s not easy,” Bal said. “We were thinking to move to Stowe, but it’s way too expensive. The housing market is crazy right now.”
Leonidas Ancan emigrated as a child from Chile. He drives from Berlin, which takes up to 50 minutes. He wants to buy a house.
“Definitely not in Stowe, since it’s very expensive here,” he said.
Adrian Small emigrated from Barbados. He lives in Morrisville, half an hour away.
“I would love to buy a place,” Small said. “Vermont is nice, but everything is so high in price.”
The rapidly increasing cost of living in Stowe is one factor making it hard for contractors to hire carpenters.
Before the pandemic, Tim Meehan said he could post a help-wanted sign out on Route 100, in front of his office, and get nine or ten carpenters to respond.
“Those days are long gone,” Meehan said.
Carpenters are so hard to come by in Stowe that Meehan is down to a three-man crew and an apprentice he hired through an internship program at Stowe High School. Having a small crew kept them safe during the pandemic, Meehan said.
Some Stowe contractors are making up for the shortage of carpenters by doing some of the work themselves.
Gordon Dixon said he had just gotten off a roof, where he had been framing for eight hours, before talking to VTDigger. He said his crew is down to two carpenters and him.
Dixon had eight a year ago.
“Two guys went off on their own,” he said. “Three retired. Another carpenter went off to a different company. We just took on a lot less work.”
Even so, Dixon said he’s booked out a year-and-a-half to two years.
It’s not just the pandemic that has brought about the shortage of carpenters.
Over the past seven or eight years, a generation of carpenters was lost to the opioid epidemic, Meehan said. He sees it in the missing talent among carpenters in their 30s.
“I had three over the years, employees that were having problems that we tried to work through and give second and third chances, and it just didn’t work, and they threw in the towel before I did,” he said. “So I think that caused a big gap in the workforce.”
Meehan also blames the extra $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits that run out in September for the shortage of carpenters.
And, he points to the abundance of construction in town.
“There is so much construction,” he said.
So much so that he sees employees start their own businesses.
And he points to the disappearance of affordable housing.
Meehan said most of the rental housing affordable to working-class people has been converted to Airbnb.
Add to that the fact that people moved to Vermont during the pandemic.
“Every second home that was a second home ended up being a primary residence for the last 18 months,” Meehan said. “Everyone that owned those homes from down country came here to escape the pandemic.”
“I’ve had employees call up within an hour [of seeing a listing for an apartment for rent], and there are already 15 people looking,” said Michael Roche, an arborist just over the town line in Waterbury.
Roche, too, said he kept everyone on the payroll through the pandemic. He used loans from the federal Payment Protection Program.
To address the housing shortage, Roche plans to sell lots in neighboring Duxbury to first-time homeowners between the ages of 25 and 40 who have not been able to buy land. The lots will have power, water and septic systems as well as internet connections. He plans to sell 2- to 3-acre lots for $65,000 to $70,000 each.
“People with money who move here, very often they can buy large parcels of land and lock it all up,” Roche said, “and that just makes it all the more difficult for our young people to find something that they can afford.”
