This commentary is by Patrick Tester, an 11th-grade student at Lyndon Institute.
Vermont is overrated. Many people likely will disagree with this and argue that the stars and clean air and nature make it incredible or even underrated, and these are all valid pluses about the state. Vermont has many beautiful qualities, but in my view, the downsides and shortcomings outweigh them a thousandfold.
If you wish to travel almost anywhere in New York City, all you have to do is tap away $3, and the subway will take you there. Public transport can bring you to a Michelin-starred restaurant, a comedy club or a modern art museum. No matter what your interests or tastes may be, there is a place for you.
In rural Vermont, when you want to go anywhere, such as an airport, a functional pool or even just a place to buy underwear, you often need to drive for at least an hour. After living in Vermont my entire life, it is always a shock to travel to a different state or country, to get off a plane and suddenly find yourself already at your destination.
Vermont has many outdoor recreational activities, from swimming in lakes or rivers to biking and skiing. These activities are all close by and easy to use. But what if your life doesn’t revolve around a mountain? What if you can’t afford the hundreds of dollars it now costs for a single day of skiing? Or the thousands for a bike? I am a student athlete who needs to balance AP classes with a sport — competitive swimming — that requires me to drive 140 miles to access a competition pool. There is no time to enjoy the outside when everything is so far away.
Many people say that they couldn’t live in a city because of the people and the lack of nature. But cities are designed for people. Many of them, such as New York and Philadelphia, have massive parks that give you a break from the concrete jungle. And people are everywhere, even here in so-called unspoiled Vermont. When I was younger, I hiked with my family and friends all the time and saw only a couple of people. But ever since Covid, the number of people I see on the trails has increased dramatically. Every time I’ve hiked in the past few years, I’ve struggled to find places to park and cannot go even a minute without seeing or hearing other people. This feels worse than in a city, because in a city, there are rules and people to enforce them. In Vermont, you have dogs off-leash barking at you on trails, litter everywhere and no escape from people.
But it’s not just about rural versus urban living. I often hear the argument that big cities are expensive to live in, while Vermont is affordable. Yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Vermont regularly ranks in the top 10 most expensive states in the U.S. for cost of living. The Vermont Futures Project’s competitiveness dashboard shows Vermont trailing most states in economic performance: 51st out of 51 in economic momentum, 49th out of 50 in economic outlook, 51st out of 51 for effective business tax rates and 43rd out of 51 for cost of living. What hope is there for someone my age to get a good job, buy a house and afford to live here?
The result of this is that many of my generation, including me, are turning away from Vermont to places where our future has more promise. While I don’t exactly know what I will do as I get older, my plan as it stands is to study nuclear engineering and start a family somewhere. Yet there are no nuclear opportunities in the state, and I don’t feel confident in being able to build a house here. Due to the high level of Vermont taxes, I could work the same job and make thousands of dollars more elsewhere.
Stringent Vermont regulations, such as Act 250, prevent everything from housing to hospitals from being built, or make what should be a straightforward process that takes no more than a couple of years drag on for five times that, preventing the entire state from progressing. It’s all very well for established Vermonters to want to preserve the state in all its rural picture postcard beauty, but the next generation has to live somewhere. If they drive us away, the only people who will get to enjoy the pristine landscapes will be rich second-home owners.
Vermont is overrated, not because it isn’t beautiful, but because nothing is here, and too many rules conspire to prevent anyone from creating anything good.
Disclosure: VTDigger Opinion Editor Tess Stimson is married to an employee of Lyndon Institute.
