This commentary is by Bob Stannard of Manchester, an author, musician and former state legislator and lobbyist.
“I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.” – E.J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic.
For most of my adult life, I have heard about and been engaged in discussions on homelessness. How to take care of those who are homeless has always been a vexing problem and it’s getting worse.
It might be helpful if we could fix the root cause versus dealing with the symptom.
Growing up in South Dorset, Vermont, there were kids from families that were well off and some who weren’t. Even the poorest family that I knew had a place to live. The poorest person I knew was a man named Rufus who lived with his mother on Route 30 just south of the turn to go onto Dorset West Road. There were two shacks there — one for Rufus and his mom and one for some other family members.
The kids who lived there might’ve been looked down upon, but if so I didn’t see it. Us kids all grew up together, played ball together and hung out. There was some wealth disparity between the families, but it didn’t keep the kids apart from each other.
My aunt and uncle had a pond down over the bank behind their house. The pond was open to any kid in the neighborhood as long as they behaved themselves (or at least didn’t get caught misbehaving). The pond was the primary place the kids hung during the summer.
There was no such thing as a gated community. Gates were for keeping cows in a pasture, not for keeping people out. In the 1960s, a man came to Dorset from somewhere and bought a house on Nichols Hill Road for $220,000. That was the most expensive purchase ever made. It was the talk of the town. To top it all off, after the purchase the man had an elevator installed! Completely unheard of.
The local tradesmen, like my dad, thought this man was nuts for spending that much money on a house, but was delighted to do a lot of plumbing work. The owner did provide needed income for some local people.
Although it was outrageous to spend that much money on a house, no one saw that purchase as the quintessential canary in the coal mine.
As the years ticked by, more wealthy people moved into this area and more local people profited from the wealthy immigrants. For the older local people, the influx of new, rich people was a godsend. The locals were able to sell their homes for more money then they could ever dream of, move to another place and retire with financial security.
And so it has evolved over the past 60 years to where we are today. Thanks to a variety of factors, not the least of which has been advantageous tax breaks, we now have a lot of rich people in America and some of them really love Vermont — or what their image of Vermont today might be. They are buying up houses and land at unimaginable prices or building huge houses that serve as second homes.
Ski areas like Stowe that have served to provide jobs for many people have seen real estate prices skyrocket. The largest house built in Vermont, 18,055 square feet, can be had for only $16 million. I don’t know of any Vermonter who could buy this place, do you?
The pressure on Vermont has been constant for the past six decades. It was exacerbated when 9/11 happened. Covid also drove more people here. Real estate brokers should have mentioned that viruses don’t stop at state borders.
No one is really to blame. It’s the American way to want to get ahead in life, to become financially independent and live a safe and happy life. The result of those desires has been an explosion of people who make a lot more money elsewhere than the people of Vermont.
So one might think that the obvious fix would be to overdevelop Vermont so that this state is like the other states that are creating more, wealthy people. We could turn Vermont into the East Coast version of Silicon Valley and offer more and more great-paying jobs. But where would that take us?
The reasons that folks want to move to Vermont are its natural beauty, it’s a safe place to live (or at least used to be), and it has an abundance of great people who’ve lived here for generations. Amazingly, we don’t seem to notice that being overrun by people of means will, in all likelihood, change forever the things that we all love about Vermont.
Vermonters are learning that not only can they not afford to buy a home, but cannot find a place to rent. The exodus of rich people from other places to Vermont sure did seem like a good idea in the 1960s. Like Captain Smith, we didn’t see it coming.
