This commentary is by Michelle Kersey, chair of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition.
It’s been in the news a lot recently — Vermont is facing a housing crisis. Vermont’s housing crisis dominates the discussions of hospital recruiters, business boardrooms, and dinner tables of residents increasingly struggling to secure and maintain housing.
Recent estimates by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency indicate that we’ll need to add 30,000 to 40,000 new homes by 2030 to meet the demand and stabilize the housing market. This will be a heavy lift for a state that, in recent years, has averaged only 2,100 new homes per year.
Closing Vermont’s housing gap will require unprecedented housing construction. Many worry that growth will destroy our bucolic landscape, alter the character of our historic villages, and threaten the natural environment. Smart growth policies can help us to meet our state’s overwhelming housing needs while preserving Vermont’s vibrant communities and natural environment.
Smart growth policies encourage building within existing neighborhoods and downtowns. This approach to development facilitates a mix of building types, uses a range of housing and transportation options, and focuses development next to jobs, stores, services, and public transportation.
It takes advantage of existing infrastructure like water and sewer, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating long commutes for work or groceries, helps reduce the cost of new housing, encourages the creation of walkable communities, and increases the use of public transportation services. And concentrating growth within village centers limits sprawl across the rural landscape and fosters liveable communities.
Smart growth policies will not succeed if applied locally or in a fragmented way: Housing challenges cross local boundaries and need regional and statewide solutions. According to an article by the Brookings Institution, “If land-restricting policies are adopted only locally, housing prices are very likely to rise. Only if such policies are adopted regionally, along with other policies that raise densities, can smart growth avoid making housing less affordable.”
We can learn from New Zealand’s example — nationwide zoning reform there helped more than double the number of homes permitted over the course of a five-year period.
The Vermont Legislature is currently deliberating legislation that would employ smart growth principles. This legislation would address many of the current barriers to development across the state and need for statewide policies.
Legislation in the Senate would reduce minimum parking requirements, allow duplexes and quadplexes where single-family units are allowed, and encourage more housing, such as accessory dwelling units, where sewer and water exists. Together, these reforms form an important tool in our response to the housing crisis.
Enabling a broader range of units by right will increase the amount of housing in our downtowns, where people want to live — closer to activities, shopping, restaurants and services. Allowing denser development helps lower the cost of housing — it’s basic math. The high cost to build new homes has been driven by inflation and the increased costs of supplies and labor, and construction costs have nearly doubled over the past five years. Utilizing municipal water and sewer, and spreading the cost of land, infrastructure and construction of items like roofs and foundations across more than one unit of housing, makes each unit of housing cost less.
Smart growth is not a silver bullet. Zoning reforms must be accompanied by investments in affordable housing, efforts to reduce the cost of building, and investments in municipal infrastructure.
Reforms to local zoning must also be accompanied by a careful reexamination of Act 250 to better balance our housing needs with our preservation goals. To create 30,000 to 40,000 new units of housing, we’ll need to look beyond the 41 square miles that make up our village centers.
Vermont has a choice: It can choose to manage the housing crisis with smart policies or the housing crisis can continue to manage the state. The cost of inaction is high: Our children will continue to move out of state, older Vermonters will continue to struggle to stay in their communities, our hospitals will continue to struggle to provide health care because they cannot recruit or retain health care workers to deliver care, schools will continue to be understaffed because teachers drawn from other areas can’t find housing, and restaurants and retailers will continue to shut down for lack of service workers.
Instead, Vermont should imagine a thriving state that includes revitalized village centers with easy access to schools, restaurants and social events; diverse communities made up of a variety of racial and economic backgrounds with a mix of families with children, young singles and retirees; and a greener, more sustainable Vermont where people don’t need to drive an hour to get to jobs, stores and services.