The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
A 97-acre parcel of undeveloped land off Mountainview Road in Williston is home to a wetland, views of Camel’s Hump and Mount Mansfield, and most days, some horses out to pasture from a neighboring farm.
It is also the site of a conflict that is forcing one of Vermont’s fastest growing municipalities to reckon with the challenges of building new housing at a time of heightened demand and inadequate supply.
Jack and Caitlin Glaser have owned the land for the past 20 years, and they’re now looking to sell. But they want a buyer to strike a certain balance. They hope to retain what neighbors appreciate about the land — the view, the horse pasture — but also to build 93 units of sorely needed new housing.
Some in the community have pushed back on the proposal, arguing that it would lead to overcrowding and traffic. But Jack Glaser said that leaving the entire parcel undeveloped in a zone that’s designated for residential growth would be a missed opportunity.
“We think we have, in a sense, a responsibility to see that that property gets developed responsibly,” he said.
Because the Glasers say their plan would provide what’s known as a “substantial public benefit,” their proposal is subject to an unusual and lengthy review process. Discussions have surfaced questions about how the land should be used, and how quickly it should be allowed to change. If the proposal is scuttled, the end result could mean an even larger, denser development takes its place.
On this week’s podcast, Glaser, his neighbors and the town’s planners discuss the outlook for the Mountainview Road proposal — and what it means for Williston.
Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Riley Robinson: Mike and Tina Mauss own Windswept Farm, in Williston. It’s a horse farm. They teach people to ride and care for horses, and to compete in events like dressage. Their students range from elementary school kids to adults.
Mike Mauss: Over the years, I’ve been here so long, and I’ve seen generations of kids. And they’ve become remarkable human beings: doctors, lawyers, veterinarians…
Riley Robinson: There’s some families where multiple generations have learned to ride at Windswept. Mike and Tina are so proud of these kids, and you can hear it in the way they talk about them.
They talk about the horses that way, too. They know their distinct personalities, and Tina introduces me as we walk down the long line of stalls in the barn. She doles out hay to each of them. And sometimes a few treats.
Mike has farmed this land for 50 years.
Mike Mauss: This land has been farmed since the 1760s or 70s. It’s been in continuous farming. I moved here about 50 years ago. When I moved to Williston, there were enormous numbers of farms. It was mainly agricultural.
Riley Robinson: When Mike started working here, it was a dairy farm. There was a fire, and after that, Mike bought the place. He watched the other farms disappear around him as Williston grew.
Mike Mauss: Now all that’s left are myself, Johnson’s farm down that way, which is farmed by his son, Mr. Danny Lewis. And there’s another farm up there on North Williston Road, and that’s all that’s left.
Riley Robinson: What has it felt like watching Williston change over the 50 years you’ve been here?
It’s disturbing. I really enjoyed the agricultural setting. When I first moved here, that was a dirt road outside…
Riley Robinson: Now his road, Old Stage Road in Williston, is paved, and it branches off into housing developments.
Mike Mauss: If you’ve farmed land as long as I have, you become a part of the land. You know, it enters into your soul. And you hate to see it changed. You hate to see it turned into simply just more houses.
I don’t think you can stop the inevitable. I think what you have to do is try and make it as palatable as possible, and see if concerned people can put enough input in so that you do the least amount of harm possible. I would love to see this all stay in agriculture. But I know that’s not possible.
Riley Robinson: Mike has accepted that this landscape around him will change. But depending on how a local commission votes next week, the change around him could put Windswept out of business.
Around their farm is 97 acres of undeveloped land. Some of it is wetland, with tall grasses. It frames a view of Camel’s Hump and Mount Mansfield. They lease a big chunk of this land from their neighbors for one dollar a year. That’s where they pasture their horses.
Mike Mauss: If they developed the entire piece, it would put me out of business, because no one would board a horse here if there is no longer pasture. And since I only own five acres, and I lease everything else, and I have about 20 acres in pasture — basically, I would have to shut down. That would be the end of it.
Riley Robinson: Now, those neighbors, the Glasers, have moved out of Williston. And they’re looking to sell this land.
The Glasers put a proposal before the town, through a rarely used part of the town’s bylaws. They want to see 93 housing units here, mostly duplexes. They’d donate a big chunk of the land to the town, including 11 acres meant to protect the view of the mountains. Mike and Tina would be able to keep using a piece for their farm.
Mike and Tina have, reluctantly, come to support this plan. They don’t want to see the land change. In their perfect world, it would stay open field forever. But they’ve accepted that development here is inevitable, and this deal might be the only way their farm can survive.
If it doesn’t go through, the Glasers plan to put the lot on the market and sell to the highest bidder — which would probably be a commercial developer. A commercial developer probably wouldn’t lease to the farm, especially not for just a dollar.
Mike Mauss: I don’t think it can be delayed any longer. So I think we have to try and mitigate what damage could be done. So that we still have the feeling of the state. So it isn’t New Jersey, with house upon house.
Riley Robinson: Williston is one of the fastest-growing towns in Vermont. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the town’s population grew by 16%. That’s more than twice as fast as Chittenden County as a whole, and more than five times as fast as the state.
Over that same time frame, the state has entered a full blown housing crisis. Home prices and rents have skyrocketed, and the vacancy rate for rental units is really low. The state has made huge investments in housing construction and renovation, but these trends haven’t budged.
If Vermont is serious about expanding its housing supply, it’s going to face a lot of hard conversations like this one over the Glasers’ property. This one piece of land gets at some of those big questions that can make development challenging: Where is all that housing going to go? What’s the most responsible way to use this finite resource, this land? And who gets to make that decision?
Jack Glaser and his wife, Caitlin, have owned the land around Windswept Farm for the past 20 years. This is Jack.
Jack Glaser: We’d been living there for about five years, and the land was made available for sale by another one of our neighbors who was the owner at that time. It was the last piece of a big farm that they had purchased probably back in the 1970s. And my wife, and I wanted to basically preserve it to keep it open, allow the horse farm to use it, and really just, you know, keep any major developments from happening right next to our house.
Riley Robinson: Jack, with his dad, founded a specialized microscope business, that’s also based in Williston. And Jack and Caitlin lived here for several years. But they sold house in Williston a few months ago and moved, and now they’re looking to sell this parcel.
Jack Glaser: The fact of life is, I’m getting older. My wife is getting older. And we know this will take a long time. We’ve reached the point in our life where we have other things that we need to attend to, and being active property developers is not something that’s high on our list.
Riley Robinson: But when they sell, they want to have some say in how the land gets used.
Jack Glaser: Originally, from our direction — which was, hey, let’s just keep this land open in perpetuity — in our contemplation and our evaluation of what we should do, we realized that probably was not the responsible thing to do, which was preserve a big piece of land in the middle of what the town considered to be the growth density district. Because what that would do would be to put pressure on more rural areas, and, you know, cause more houses to be built in what I would call the bucolic part of Williston, the beautiful part of Vermont that we all want to preserve. It was more responsible for us to actually try to build some houses in this property.
Riley Robinson: Williston is zoned into three parts. There’s a dense area of shopping centers and taller apartment buildings. Then there’s a residential area, which contains the original village of Williston. Beyond that, it’s all rural.
Zoning rules dictate what kind of buildings can go where, and how they connect to the town water and sewer systems. For example, buildings in the more rural part of town have to use their own septic. The Glasers’ land is in that middle zone, meaning it’s approved for town water and sewer access. It’s zoned for residential use — which is why Jack knows there’s strong potential to develop it.
Jack Glaser: In my mind, we need more homes. We need there to be less of a housing shortage. And to accomplish that, we’re in a unique position right now, where we have this property which is in the zone that has really been allocated for residential growth. So we think we have, in a sense, a responsibility to see that that property gets developed responsibly.
Riley Robinson: Some conservationists would argue the responsible thing to do with land like this is to leave it untouched. Jack’s pitch to his neighbors is different. He’s saying, basically, with this housing crisis, it’s irresponsible to not build where we can.
Jack Glaser: If we were to keep this land open, the unintended consequences — there’s going to be more pressure on creating a sprawl environment, which is kind of an unplanned growth, or growth that kind of pops up in more rural areas, where there’s not the support of a sewer system, not the support of a water system. But in my mind, that’s just not the responsible thing to do.
Emily Heymann: You know, there’s the Vermont joke: ‘Burlington is nice, it’s close to Vermont.’ As if Burlington is not a part of Vermont.
Riley Robinson: This is Emily Heymann, Williston’s senior planner.
Emily Heymann: We field inquiries from people who moved to Williston and are furious about the subdivision going behind their house, and they declare, ‘We moved to rural Vermont.’ And it’s like, well, you’re on a town-paved road, a plowed road with municipal water and sewer, and yes, it’s more rural in comparison to an urban metropolitan area. But in a Vermont context, it’s not rural. So for people to have a grounding in a similar definition is a really important place to start.
Riley Robinson: I went to Emily, and the town planner Matt Boulanger, and I asked them why Williston looks the way it does. Like, why is Williston the town with all these big parking lots and big stores?
Matt Boulanger: So, a lot of why Willison looks the way it looks really goes back to, number one, its proximity to Burlington. The intersection of two state highways, Routes 2 and 2A, and then the addition of Exit 12 off of I-89 in 1962.
But the expansion out of Burlington really started right around or just after 1955. The first strip mall in Chittenden County outside of Burlington was Staples Plaza in South Burlington. There wasn’t room in Burlington for everything that people wanted — the way that people started wanting to shop, mass adoption of the privately owned car as a means of transportation, the suburban expansion of housing that came after World War II with the G.I. Bill, and the establishment of an FHA loan program.
So this, the suburban story of America, played out very similarly in Chittenden County as it did in most of the rest of the country. And again, big external forces start to squeeze growth and development out of that traditional downtown core in Burlington, and Williston’s part of that.
Riley Robinson: Zoning, as Matt described it, was the local response to these big forces outside of local control. That demand for construction, and development pressure, continued for the next few decades. In the 1990s, Williston developed an additional planning and permitting process called “growth management.”
Matt Boulanger: Primarily, the goal of growth management is to regulate the pace of growth. And in this case, we’re talking about residential growth — regulate the pace of growth in a way that the town can keep up with it, in terms of its ability to provide services and its ability to expand services as more services are needed, at a pace that’s sustainable.
Riley Robinson: And by services, Matt’s talking about schools, the police and fire departments, and sewage capacity.
Matt Boulanger: Given Williston’s proximity to Burlington, given what I was talking about — the highway exit, the intersection of two state highways, we’re down the road from the airport. That there’s anything left in Williston at all that is farmland or forest, and public on top of that — in many cases, it’s really kind of miraculous. All of the other exterior forces would say that that’s not what’s going to happen to a place like this. And there are examples all over the country, and in Vermont, where that’s not what happened to the rural landscape.
Riley Robinson: To regulate new construction, Williston doles out a limited number of permits each year. Developers essentially compete for them. Project proposals get ranked against each other and can beat out their competition if they include design elements the town wants — open space, walking trails, energy efficiency, etc. There’s a set number of permits for each of the town’s three zones — the dense core, the residential middle area, and the rural perimeter.
There’s a lot of demand to build homes in that residential zone, where the Glasers’ land is. And in that part of town, Williston grants only 20 permits per year. Those building permits are already claimed for the next decade.
Emily Heymann: In my eyes, it’s gonna be kind of like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets. It’s gonna be pretty tough.
Riley Robinson: Williston’s growth management plan makes things more complicated for the Glasers.
If a developer went with the conventional permitting route, and got in this queue, they wouldn’t be able to build any homes here for at least a decade. Then they’d have to pace out construction over several years.
And for a developer, that long wait for permits is a real problem.
Jack Glaser: We had people who are like, forget it. I’m not going to be trying to do anything in Williston. It’ll take way too long for anything to get built. Not interested.
Riley Robinson: People didn’t want to build in Williston at all?
Jack Glaser: Absolutely. For a lot of developers we talked to, there was no interest.
Riley Robinson: And the Glasers want to keep some of this land open. But to do that, they had to find a developer who’s OK with building and selling fewer homes. And they had to structure a deal where a developer could still turn a profit.
When they can only build a couple homes per year, or they have to wait 10 years to get started, each house costs them more to build.
Jack Glaser: The developer said, I can, you know, I can do fewer homes, if we can do it a little bit tighter of a timeline.
Riley Robinson: Jack declined to name the developer, since the plan is still in the works.
Jack Glaser: If they can build a number of houses in a shorter time period, it’s much more economical. So they’re able to basically make more affordable houses and do the work more efficiently. If it takes longer, it costs more money. And that means that they need to build more homes for them to, you know, meet their margins.
Riley Robinson: Basically, if they want a developer to build fewer units, they need to find a way to build those units faster, and in one go — instead of waiting for the permits to dribble out year after year.
And that’s why they’re trying this unusual zoning option, laid out in the town bylaws, called a “specific plan.” It would function like a trade: The landowners offer the town something the town wants, a “substantial public benefit.” There’s a set list of possible public benefits a landowner can offer: for example, creating public space, providing jobs, or building affordable housing. And in return, this project wouldn’t go through that long permit queue. Ideally, this process would create a mutually beneficial relationship that helps Williston meet certain goals written into the town plan.
The Glasers are offering public space. In this plan, they would donate 53 acres to the town. They’ve said 11 acres of that would protect the “viewshed” — that vista of Camel’s Hump that’s visible from the road.
To pull this off, the Glasers need to keep a lot of different people on board. And they all have different competing interests. They need to keep it profitable enough for a developer, and they need to keep it palatable to the people of the town.
Williston residents have a lot to say about this proposal. At the last planning commission meeting, on December 6, the seats were full, and a whole bunch more people called in on Zoom. The town has now scheduled a third meeting to take public comment.
A lot of people who ride at Windswept, or have kids who ride there, showed up to speak in support of the plan.
Windswept Farm isn’t technically the part of the deal the planning commission is voting on. The farm isn’t the public benefit. But a lot of people at the meeting urged the commission to see it that way.
But aside from people with connections to the farm, there was pushback from people who live nearby. And some residents opposed how this plan was going through, saying it felt the town was being held hostage.
Jack Glaser: We’re just we’re the landowners. We’re just applying to basically do what the rights of a land owner are, on that particular land. You know, we’re not asking for a higher density, we’re not asking for something that’s outside of what the town plan is calling for. We’re just asking to do what’s actually in the town plan.
Riley Robinson: Matt, the town planner, said there is always pushback any time undeveloped space is considered for a construction project.
Matt Boulanger: There are some reactions to that that I think are just really human and really common. Most of us would rather things didn’t change. I think when we’re talking about new development, we almost always, in those public hearings, hear about traffic. And we heard that.
Riley Robinson: After the meeting, I talked to John Killacky, an outgoing state representative from South Burlington. He spoke at the meeting because he boards a Shetland pony at Windswept.
John Killacky: The other thing that I heard tonight is not to discount anyone’s fears. But people are worried about change. And when I’m in these housing conversations, it’s all it’s not in my backyard kind of conversation. Well, this is really an interesting thing, but I don’t think it should be here.
Riley Robinson: He worked on housing issues in the Legislature, and saw other communities in Vermont are having similar conversations.
John Killacky: I’m really astonished at the sprawl that’s happened without addressing the extreme need that we have for housing as well. So I think, I think what we heard tonight, what we’re hearing in South Burlington, in similar meetings about new developments, are almost all the same conversations. Is this too much? Is this too little? Is it mixed use housing? What was it addressing? What are we gonna do for those less fortunate? But I think a town, or a city, has to look at all of those things in the whole. But every development can’t solve all those issues.
Riley Robinson: A couple people at the meeting opposed the project because it didn’t include any designated affordable housing.
Lisa Braden Harder: I think the argument for a substantial benefit to the community doesn’t reflect the realities of life. In Vermont circa 2020, where we face a severe housing shortage and a deeper understanding of how about housing enforces exclusion of some folks, it doesn’t reflect that business leaders cannot staff their growth because of housing. It doesn’t reflect our new town values and hopes to build a more inclusive town.
Riley Robinson: I asked Jack Glaser why they didn’t propose any affordable housing in this project, when affordable housing is one of the options for creating a public benefit.
Jack Glaser: The balance then would be, do you build affordable houses in a place that the town has already said, you don’t really want to build houses in, I think that would create a conflict that I don’t know that the town would support.
What the developers, especially who are involved with this particular project, say is: To do affordable housing, it’s much more financially restrictive for them. It’s harder for them to make any money. And so the only way that they could do that would be to build yet more homes. And so anyone who is concerned with this being to larger development at whatever I think we’re proposing now, 93. If, if we were to do more homes to be more affordable, we’d probably be looking at over 200 or approximately 200 homes.
To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable putting 200 homes on that piece of land. At this point I, for me, I feel with the values that I have, and the values that I see in my neighbors, that we want to keep a good part of the land open.
Riley Robinson: How much do you think each unit would go for, at market rate?
Jack Glaser: I can’t even predict what housing is going to sell for in two or five years from now. So I really don’t want to get in and say these are going to be like $350,000 homes. That might be totally unreasonable. In five years, I have no idea. I can say that we’re not aiming for, like — this is not going to be a luxury home project. It’s really for kind of middle class. That’s what we envision.
Riley Robinson: Matt, the town planner, predicted those homes would cost more like 450 to 500 thousand dollars, based on what similar units have been selling for.
I went back to Mike and Tina’s house the day after the planning meeting. And I asked Tina — what should Vermont do about the housing shortage? What do you make of that problem?
Tina Mauss: I’m sad about it. Because I don’t think that they’re building housing for the workers and the Vermonters. I think they’re building houses for people who are coming out of state.
Riley Robinson: Out-of-staters aren’t the only factor in Vermont’s housing shortage. But Tina has a point here. There’s no way a lot of Vermonters, especially working in a rural economy, can afford a half-million-dollar unit in a duplex.
Matt Boulanger: I’ll tell you a quick story. A guy called me one day, and he was looking at buying a house. He was, in fact, under agreement to buy a house in a new subdivision in the suburban part of Williston. And so we were talking about the subdivision, and where the house was, and some things like that. And then he asked me a question. He said, ‘Well, what’s Williston like?’
And I said, well, that says to me that you’ve you’ve never been here. And he said, ‘No, I haven’t. My wife’s from New England. We live in Virginia, we’ve decided to move to Williston. And we’re buying a house there.’
And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to ask why.’ He says, ‘It’s too hot in the summer down here now. It used to not be too hot in the summer. Now it is.’
We have folks looking to buy homes coming from other places where they had a home that they’re able to sell, and that creates a lot of a lot of demand.
They’re selling a single family home where they’re coming from. It means they have the means to purchase that new single family home here in Williston. We are talking about folks with significant means. I was looking at the middle unit of a triplex in Williston, built in the last five years, so probably the least desirable of the three units in the triplex, because it’s in the middle — and I saw that one went last week for $506,000.
Riley Robinson: There are some material benefits to the town with all this competition to build there. The town is in a position to make demands.
Matt Boulanger: When you are working in a place or living in a place that’s desirable for a lot of stuff, you also get to say to that stuff: Well, you can come in, but there’s some things we want. We might want nicer building design, we might want some open space given to us as part of that. If you’re interested enough, here’s our standards that we would like you to meet.
Williston hasn’t been shy about doing that. And I think it’s really great to be in that position.
Riley Robinson: Because of the proximity to Burlington, Williston doesn’t need to do much to bring in businesses or jobs. A lot of other communities don’t have those advantages.
Matt Boulanger: There are communities in decline. There are communities in Vermont that are losing population — that, in a relative sense, are losing land value. I think the most sort of poignant version of that story is looking at school closures happening as a result of consolidation, and consolidation happening as a result of population decline.
Riley Robinson: Matt went to Mount Abraham High School in the ‘90s. That school district has shrunk dramatically in the past several years, to the point where the community has considered merging school districts, or enacting major staff cuts.
Matt Boulanger: Those are some pretty hard decisions too. And so the flip side of growth is not all sort of sunshine and rainbows, necessarily. And I think regardless of that, the best way to deal with that human resistance to change is to dig in and engage with it.
Riley Robinson: The Williston Planning Commission is set to take a vote next week on whether the Glaser proposal would provide “substantial public benefit.” With this vote, no means no. The Glasers would go put the land on the market. A yes vote would really mean “maybe” — the plan moves forward, but it’s a long road ahead.
The plan would go to a committee of residents, then it would need to be approved by the selectboard, then it would need to go to the Development Review Board. It costs the Glasers more money to do this — they’re paying for this process, and they’d make less money on the land.
Riley Robinson: I’m still stuck on this. This option is a lot more work. Like, what’s your why?
Jack Glaser: Because we want to do what we think is the right thing. That’s the why, is we want to do what we think is the right thing, the responsible thing. And I guess that is definitely balanced with the amount of effort that it’s going to take.
Like, I’m not going to try to do the right thing, you know, move forward with this, using extraordinary means. I feel like we’re already going way out of our comfort zone, in order to try to make this happen. It would have been far easier for us to call up a realtor, or one of the developers that have approached us before and just say, give us a number, you know, and we’re ready to sell. That would be far easier. … And we really didn’t think that was the right thing to do.
Riley Robinson: This land has been proposed for development before. In 1983, a developer wanted to build 500 homes on a plot that included this parcel. And that plan met fierce pushback. People complained about the crowding, the traffic, the environmental impact.
This is how the Burlington Free Press wrote about it at the time: “The developer responded that growth is inevitable, and a proposal such as his offered the best chance for planning that growth.”
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The buyer backed out.
Correction: A previous version of this post misspelled Matt Boulanger’s name.