This commentary is by Dan Jones, founder of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition and creator of the Sustainable Montpelier Design Competition.
Up here in Vermont, like many places in the U.S., we are beginning to see a collapse in our labor economy. Every institution, municipality and business is in desperate search for people to maintain their declining services.
Schools cannot hire sufficient teachers, staff or substitutes necessary for normal operations. As David Delcore reported Oct. 3 in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, “A persistent staffing shortage, which has had school districts around the region on yellow alert …, reached a tipping point in two of them on Monday.” A few regional schools had to close because they didn’t have enough teachers and subs. What is going on?
As for the teachers, the story goes something like this. Yes, the continued infections of Covid increase the system’s fragility, but the underlying crisis arises in housing and child care.
The way I heard it, last summer, Barre wanted to hire close to 30 teachers. The prospective recruits wanted the jobs, but they had to turn down the offers because they couldn’t find affordable local housing options.
There seems to be a similar problem in most of the central Vermont districts. This means that even decently paid middle-class folks can’t find reasonable housing options here.
The problem is that Vermont has become too attractive for people with money and a liberal mindset. The NPR show “On Point” recently explored how northern states, with water, are becoming “havens” for well-heeled climate refugees. Those who can see what’s coming in terms of climate disruptions, and have the financial and time flexibility, are drawn to the idea of finding personal havens in states like Vermont.
Coming from those fragile places where droughts, heat and floods are making life unlivable, these aware folks are getting out while the getting is good. I was surprised to learn that, in each of the last couple of years, more than 14,000 acres of our state’s woodlands are being developed for luxury homes for those well-to-do refugees.
Certainly this quiet flood of the wealthy started with Covid but has gotten worse with the climate crisis. For a few years now, those upper-class folks have been buying up our state’s housing stock.
Our governor, however, seems to be delighted with the situation; after all, more money coming into Vermont is good, right? He seems clueless as to the long-term costs of this situation.
Those costs to everyone but the wealthy are pretty high and getting higher. This means rents on formerly affordable apartments have skyrocketed. Vermont Business reports: “In Vermont, the average renter earns $16.47 per hour, which is nearly $7 less per hour than the wage needed for a modest two-bedroom apartment.”’
Housing prices in Vermont increased by nearly 9% in 2021 and will “surge” by more than 10% in 2022, according to the latest financial report from the state’s Department of Finance and Management.
But the well-to-do are looking for more. By allowing our real estate to be bought up and controlled by the wealthy, the rest of us become poorer as critical municipal, health and education services collapse from loss of workers.
Friends in state government have reported to me that all the state agencies are searching for people to make up the current 20% shortfall in state workers.
Without a working and middle class, we also won’t have the services that those wealthy people will need to build things, to look after and educate their kids, while keeping everyday things running and repaired.
Meanwhile, the state refuses to consider significant taxes on those who claim out-of-state residency, who demand services and who are profiting from the investment in the disruption by buying and racking up confiscatory rents.
At the same time, my Realtor friends complain about lack of local inventory to meet the demand from out-of-state clients. Things are so bad on the rental front that in Burlington the city has banned Airbnb rentals to insure more room for local renters. Perhaps we should be considering such efforts all over the state.
Born of the Covid and climate crises, this terrible housing situation is nurtured by a stupid state tax and development process that makes us incapable of meeting our growing needs. Most state and local government agencies, mandated with supporting the creation of housing, have been allocated tens of millions of dollars in the past year, but as far as I can tell, they are dithering.
Why? Because their whole public/private model is based on actually supporting developers who will make a profit from the effort. But private developers are leery of taking on the financial commitments to meet their part of the public/private bargain. Their reticence is due to high interest rates and the skyrocketing costs of materials and labor — a vicious cycle.
The housing crisis is symptomatic of a much larger systems failure, too.
The interconnected climate, political and economic crises are truly affecting us right here and now. Climate change is creating demand, supply-chain disruptions, inflation and economic fracturing. Coupled with our administrative and legislative political paralysis, these conditions are making positive responses ever more difficult.
By failing to focus pragmatically on the real challenges we face, our governor and legislators prove themselves incapable of courage and leadership.
Let’s cut to the chase here. Vermont is no longer losing population. It has become a desirable place for rich people to move. Instead of worrying about driving away their investments by reasonable taxes and demands, we need to recognize how much this colonization by the well-to-do is costing our future. Also, we can stop catering to their needs; they are not going anywhere else.
It’s past time to be having an honest conversation about what is really happening. We need to have the guts to make hard decisions on the kind of future we want. Instead of focusing on the various Washington political dramas, we must shift our focus and ask what we can do to help our middle and working classes and our children to be part of building our future.
The times are indeed frightening. Events are conjoining to make rational responses almost impossible. We don’t have a public media that is willing to focus on these complex challenges. Our governor and state bureaucracy are proving incapable of even understanding the challenges we face, and we have a tax structure set up to reward those wealthy climate refugees, settling here at a low cost.
It is time to start creating other ways of building our collective future instead of continuing this failed system.
