This commentary is by Chris Campany, executive director of the Windham Regional Commission, and Devon Neary, chair of the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies.
Vermont has made progress improving pathways to new housing, but an often-overlooked need is the wastewater and water infrastructure to support it.
We need to create conditions to house Vermonters at all stages of life. This includes young people moving out of the family home for the first time, couples having children, empty nesters downsizing, seniors and others seeking housing to fit their independent living abilities, and those who have lost their housing to disaster. This means investing in infrastructure that supports building housing at scale to make it affordable.
“Affordable” shouldn’t be a loaded term. Here it means housing for which the household is paying no more than 30% of their monthly gross income for housing costs, be that an individual or a family. “At scale” means the ability to build enough units at one time to harness economies of scale that minimize per housing unit costs.
The housing solution does not lie with custom built houses on large lots along town roads. Barring a collapse in home and land values ‚ and material, labor and construction costs — these homes are well beyond the reach of most Vermonters today and in the future.
We need investment in existing buildings, development of vacant properties, multi-family housing, and clustered small home neighborhoods to create housing at scale, and it is nearly impossible to build housing that is affordable for Vermonters at scale in the absence of community wastewater systems and drinking water systems.
For towns with zoning, making sure that zoning does not create unwise and unnecessary roadblocks to building housing, especially multi-family housing, can help. But the underlying infrastructure is fundamental, especially in areas that have minimal flood risk.
Regional planning commissions play an essential role in supporting municipal land use planning, planning for the infrastructure to make action on those plans possible, and supporting engineering design and project construction, because most communities do not have the capacity to do it on their own.
This support is necessary not only for the development of new systems, but improvements to the capacity of those that already exist. We also recognize the challenges faced by municipalities that are already managing wastewater and water systems.
Through collaboration with the Vermont Bond Bank, we are beginning work to support communities that are struggling to operate their existing drinking water systems. Our goal is to make system management easier and more efficient and to ultimately identify operations and maintenance models that make more sense for Vermont’s small communities.
It may be tempting to think that we shouldn’t consider new systems or improve the capacity of existing systems if we can’t handle the ones we already have. That’s a false choice. We need to develop effective operations and maintenance models even as we develop the systems we need now and for the future.
Among Act 181’s reforms are improvements to regional future land use mapping. The state’s 11 regional planning commissions are working with each of our municipalities to map our future growth areas. This includes addressing flood adaptation needs.
These areas should form the basis for a statewide infrastructure investment strategy that supports each step of infrastructure development — from the connection to land use planning to project construction.
Just as the state adopted an “all-in” approach to clean water, it is important for all Vermonters to be invested in the housing infrastructure solution. We also need to make it easier to scale up operations and maintenance so that towns can more easily work together and towns aren’t left to figure out on their own what an intermunicipal, or regional, system could do more effectively.
