This commentary is by Seth Steinzor, a resident of South Burlington, a retired state employee, a poet, and author of “In Dante’s Wake,” a trilogy published in Vermont by Fomite Press.
Nothing better illustrates our economic system’s failure or our society’s moral bankruptcy than the facts that, on any given day this winter in Vermont, thousands of people had no home; a thousand schoolchildren were homeless last year.
We spend millions a year on shelters, emergency relief and rent subsidies. We require developments to include some few units of “affordable” housing so that the developer may mulct the market for as much as it will bear on the rest.
Nevertheless, many vulnerable people wind up on the street, including families, veterans, poor people, children, victims of domestic abuse and racial discrimination, and victims of our financial system, many of whom are either hard-working and poorly paid or have disabilities.
South Burlington recently fought another round in the endless battle that pitches environmental protection against real estate development. Years of deliberation produced new land use regulations that protect existing green space and encourage greater housing density in built areas.
Here, as elsewhere, the cost of a home has been rising steadily beyond what most people can afford. Affordable housing advocates fought the new land use rules, arguing that it is senseless to limit the supply of housing when demand so far exceeds supply as to create a relentless upward pressure on prices.
Those who prioritize environmental protection denied that the new rules in fact would have such a result, and argued that green space is essential to a community’s livability and health, and necessary to combat climate change, and that once it is gone, it is gone for good. The environmentalists won, this time.
This conflict between housing and environmental interests is a tragic byproduct of capitalism. In a humane society, the brutality of the marketplace would not govern access to basic goods like housing and a healthy habitat, or pit those needs against each other.
We can’t build our way out of the housing affordability crisis in Chittenden County. The market can’t provide enough housing for everyone who wants to live here. Limited supply and voracious demand inflate property values.
If we build more housing in the finite space available, we just feed the market; we don’t change it. Only a modicum of mitigation might be achieved that way. A small proportion of new construction will be “affordable” (just barely) to begin with and will rapidly inflate beyond that level. Much will be taken over by students at local colleges and universities.
Inevitably, we’re led to balance the struggle for affordability — capable of limited success but ultimately futile — against the more achievable objective of preserving the community’s livability and environmental quality by setting aside greenspace — but for whom? Either way, the community loses diversity, becomes increasingly the preserve of the well-to-do, and the developers do quite nicely. The losers get to sleep in their cars.
In short, as in San Francisco and Manhattan and other highly desirable locations, housing unaffordability and homelessness are beyond remedy unless we ensure that capitalistic considerations have no role in deciding whether a person has a place to live.
A wealthy person’s choice of where to own dwellings would be constrained. Priority for housing in any community would belong to people whose occupational or other real circumstances (e.g., existing family connections, medical condition, other community ties) require them to live there, but whose means to do so are unequal to what the market would demand.
That is, the opposite of the situation we have now: The wealthy buy property wherever they want and all others live wherever they can — under a bridge, if necessary.
How do we get from a society based on the principle of “screw you, Jack; I’ve got mine” to one that truly values all its members? Regarding housing, we might do some things that point in that direction, such as:
- Eighty-six the F35s and reoccupy the many lots they’ve rendered uninhabitable.
- Adopt meaningful rent control.
- Find an alternative to the property tax as the financial basis of local government and education, so that real estate prices could be controlled, limiting profits on new housing construction and capping market-driven increases in the value of existing stock.
- Center human services on a holistic evaluation of people’s needs, with stable housing as a primary objective in all cases.
- Abolish or severely limit the loss of single-family dwellings to absentee landlordism.
- Adopt policies that discourage “flipping” and all other forms of housing speculation.
- Require development to balance density with green space preservation.
- Require institutions of higher education to house all students on campus.
- Approve only development proposals that prioritize identified community needs, so that, for example, an unused armory is converted to actually affordable housing and not reconfigured as a luxury hotel.
In short, treat housing as a basic human need, and not primarily as a commodity. Measures like these might substantially mitigate the affordability crisis, although I don’t think they could solve it altogether.
Unfortunately, I doubt the political or legal feasibility of such measures; at least, not until we accept moral responsibility towards all our people and stop monetizing human needs.
