This commentary is by Bryan Sell, who teaches in Vermont State University’s Resort and Hospitality Management program.
Vermont’s housing debate is mostly treated as a problem of not enough units, with capitalist bogeymen feasting on the stock — outsiders hoarding homes, or investors gouging rents. These arguments resurrect Vermont’s old flatlander/woodchuck divide, sometimes said out loud in public forums. But look closer, and the conflict splits again: workers demanding reasonable rents versus investors seeking returns in some towns, blighted properties, affordability and absentee landlords in others. Three different fights, dressed up as one.
You’d be forgiven for thinking any one of these is the root cause, because in your town, it might be the only one. In the next town over, two entirely different causes may need to be addressed. In another town yet, there’s no cause for alarm at all.
The truth is that the housing crisis debate is complicated by three different causes that register differently between Vermont towns. Choosing a one-size-fits-all approach will never work.
The first is the short-term rental capturing existing housing stock: residential renters excluded for the sake of higher-paying vacationers. The second is an aging workforce that cannot meet the demand of a housing build-out. The third is a steady depopulation trend: birth rates dropping and Vermonters leaving the state.
Long-term rentals are converting to short-term rentals at alarming rates, but only in a narrow set of Vermont tourist towns — landlords see a bigger profit and take it.
In ski towns like Killington, the conversion is nearly complete, evidenced by the highest home vacancy rate of any Vermont town with a real year-round population: 83.4% of its housing stock. The housing debate is framed around where the workers will live. The resort itself has addressed this by converting hotels into worker housing for its foreign J-1 and H-2B workforce. Ski resorts brought people back to places hollowed out during the farm-abandonment period of more than 100 years ago, helped by the state’s own funded campaign advertising those vacant properties to outsiders.
In Manchester, the conversion rate is far lower at 32.7%, but long-term residents worry about their cultural center being destroyed by seasonally vacant homes. And rightly so; Manchester has always sat in prime farm country and has never suffered the kind of population collapse that emptied towns like Killington.
Both towns show the second problem: an aging labor force. The state has about 15,000 workers who could build these homes, but many are expected to retire within the next few years. Neither town can build its way out of its housing problem with Vermont labor alone.
Some towns have very low vacancy rates — almost no second homes — and clearly show the third problem: depopulation, driven by low birth rates and Vermonters leaving the state. No amount of new housing changes that.
And yet state legislators are preparing housing bills for none of these problems. They generate tax revenue and increase supply, which is fine, but we shouldn’t pretend housing woes are being adequately addressed.
Montpelier occupies a unique spot in this debate, with the state’s tightest housing market. Housing is a real concern there. Just a handful of short-term rentals entering the mix could meaningfully raise rents and shrink availability.
Montpelier’s situation is oddly disconnected from what’s actually happening at the State House. Lawmakers have leaned on Act 181 and Act 69, both pieces of legislation aimed at supply. Neither touches worker-home conversion, and both ignore labor and demographics entirely. The one bill that would have addressed conversion directly, H.242, never advanced out of committee. It’s dead.
The real path forward is for towns to decide which of the three problems is their priority. If your town has a stable population, like East Montpelier or Westford, your primary problem is the aging workforce entering retirement. Who’s left to build affordable homes and who services them once built?
Maybe your town is like Montpelier or Randolph, where the market is tight, and vacancy is already low. Post-industrial towns like Barre City and Rutland City face depopulation and disinvestment directly — Vermonters leaving properties blighted. Short-term rentals aren’t the threat there, and tourism isn’t strong enough to be one.
Many tourist towns have already been fully captured by short-term rentals. But these towns have been seasonal with strong tourism for a very long time. Workers have certainly been displaced — but in Killington’s case, the resort answered by converting hotels into housing for a seasonal foreign workforce.
If you think this is too complicated, consider that some towns, such as Mendon, are geographically split: short-term rental pressure on one side, stable owner-occupied housing on the other, blighted properties in between. That calls for a zoning committee, not a town-wide ordinance.
None of this supports a scapegoat. Blaming outsiders won’t preserve your town’s cultural identity, and taxing one group over another won’t either. Likewise, retroactively restricting short-term rentals has already proven not to work elsewhere. Nor is the answer simply building more units. We don’t have the people to build them, and building housing in towns that have been depopulating for decades solves nothing.
The real solutions start with identifying the problem specific to your town, not reaching for one-size-fits-all fixes. Each town needs a sober look at tourism pressure, working-age structure, and demographics. We all need to appreciate that Vermont is more socioeconomically diverse than the proposed solutions assume.
