Dear Editor,
A recent VTDigger piece on the repeal of portions of Act 181 included a quote from Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, chair of the House Environment and Energy Committee: “We don’t need our shared interest in protecting our environment to divide Vermont.”
There’s certainly plenty of division in Vermont, but I don’t agree that the root cause is our desire to protect the environment. The division originates with profit-seeking entities that see environmental protection as an obstacle to their development dreams. Whether it’s cell towers, Amazon distribution centers, wind projects on ridgelines or massive solar projects on what was once forest, these kinds of projects divide and fracture communities, often irreparably. The best way to heal these divisions is not to scale back our concern for the natural world, but to recognize the role of developers in influencing policy for their own selfish ends.
In recent years, those developers have tried to paint environmental regulation, especially Act 250, as the primary obstacle to building the 40,000 new homes that Vermont supposedly needs. But as Vermont writer Alexsys Thompson argues in her essay “Vermont’s 40,000 Home Problem,” the number deserves scrutiny: It stems from the upper bound of a range of projections, based on a short-term and temporary population surge during the Covid years that has since subsided. Developers have embraced the highest possible number to instill a panicked “build, baby, build” ethos. But as Thompson points out, solutions to the housing shortfall “do not require a land use framework built on a pandemic-era projection that the demographic data has since contradicted.”
Many of the sources of division in Vermont originate outside the state. Amazon is the most obvious example of that, but even seemingly home-grown entities have deep connections beyond Vermont. For example, Let’s Build Homes, the pro-development organization headed by Miro Weinberger, is largely funded by Arnold Ventures, a national philanthropic LLC founded by hedge fund billionaire John Arnold. Among other activities, the company funded a so-called spy plane to surveil the citizens of Baltimore — a project that was discontinued and subsequently ruled unconstitutional — and spent more than $100 million funding think tanks and academics to advance its health care policy agenda, an approach the American Hospital Association has accused of being designed “to drive a wedge between different hospitals.”
Vermont’s real need for affordable housing will not be met by scrapping environmental protections so that developers can build unaffordable homes for the affluent. As Thompson argues, we instead need “investment in rehabilitation of existing stock, replacement of flood-damaged homes, and targeted production of affordable units in communities that need them.” None of this is contradictory to our shared interest in protecting the environment, nor should it be cause for division.
The Legislature is obligated to represent the citizenry, not profit-seeking exploiters who are willing to sacrifice the natural world for their own selfish ends.
Suzanna Jones
Walden, Vt.
