This commentary is by Matt Swenson, the founder of Omnidex Solutions, an independent research and strategic analysis company. He lives in Vermont.
For years, Vermont politics has run on one diagnosis: not enough housing. The prescription never changes: Build more, build denser, permit faster.
Supply matters. But it no longer explains what we’re seeing. In Vermont’s largest rental market, vacancy hit 3.3% this summer, up from under 1% during the pandemic years. More than 1,300 rental units opened in 2024 and 2025. Landlords are cutting rents and throwing in incentives. And working Vermonters still cannot afford what’s available.
The numbers underneath explain why. Between 2019 and 2024, the median value of a Vermont home rose from $233,200 to $352,800 — nearly $120,000 in five years. Household income grew about 15% over the same stretch. In 2019, a Vermonter earning the median income could afford roughly half the homes in the state. By 2024, a third.
That is not a construction problem. That is a gap between what Vermont pays people and what Vermont charges them, and no amount of framing lumber closes it.
Property taxes are a housing cost too. The fiscal year 2027 yield bill, H.949/Act 169, holds the statewide average increase at roughly 3.5% using a $104.9 million one-time general fund transfer. That reduces this year’s property tax bill, but it does not reduce the underlying cost. It pays part of the education bill with other state tax revenue and pushes the pressure into future years. That isn’t structural relief. It’s a bill with the due date moved, and when the one-time money disappears, taxpayers inherit the balance.
Consider what that means when we actually build something. Alice Holway Drive in Putney cost $15 million for 25 apartments — $600,000 per unit, financed mostly through state housing programs, which is taxpayer money. The site made sense: walking distance to the co-op, easy access to Interstate 91. The building doesn’t match the site. Drive past it, and $600,000 per unit is not what you’d guess. I’d put housing on that lot again tomorrow. I would not spend that much doing it, and I would not call it a model for anything.
It also took four years to build. Neighbors appealed to the environmental court, lost, appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court, lost, and appealed again on different grounds. Meanwhile, a subdivision on an open hayfield, requiring new frontage, a new septic system and a permanent increase in car trips draws less scrutiny than a bake sale. We fight density where it’s cheap to serve and shrug at sprawl where it’s expensive, which is precisely backward, and precisely why the fields keep disappearing while the affordability numbers don’t move.
The siting problem is bigger than Putney. Housing in Burlington, Winooski, Rutland and established village centers makes sense where the infrastructure already exists. Pushing that same density into towns like Williston and Hinesburg does not. Hinesburg has studied traffic on Route 116 so many times that the study should qualify for residency. Parts of Vermont increasingly resemble outer Boston. We imported the commute and left the paycheck behind.
Open land is Vermont’s actual asset — the thing in every tourism budget and relocation pitch the state has ever written. Covering hayfields with houses the people working those fields can’t afford isn’t a solution. It’s a trade, and a lousy one.
There’s also a comforting myth in local politics: Build more houses, grow the tax base, ease the burden on everyone else. The data says the opposite most of the time. Cost of community services studies conducted across dozens of counties find that residential development typically costs local governments more in services, chiefly schools, than it generates in tax revenue — commonly $1.15 to $1.50 spent for every dollar collected. Farmland and open land run the reverse ratio, producing a surplus. More rooftops don’t lower tax bills — they raise them, because schools cost money and houses don’t pay for themselves. Every hayfield we convert to subdivisions trades a fiscal asset for a fiscal liability, and the property tax bill in 10 years will show it.
The same math that prices Vermonters out of housing prices Vermont out of the professionals it says it wants. Take a primary care physician at $300,000, near the national average. Federal income tax takes about $68,000, payroll taxes another $17,000, Vermont’s income tax roughly $20,000 — before property taxes. Compare: Colorado’s flat 4.4% rate produces about $12,500. Pennsylvania’s flat 3.07% produces about $9,200. Vermont runs four brackets from 3.35% to 8.75%, with the top rate arriving around $230,000 of taxable income — not yacht money for a state trying to recruit doctors. When a recruiter lays those columns side by side, Vermont’s counteroffer is scenery, and scenery does not amortize.
None of this argues against building housing. It argues against building housing as a substitute for an actual economic strategy. Concentrate development where the infrastructure already exists and make that path fast, not four years long. Stop treating open land as the default site of least resistance. Fix the property tax structure instead of financing it with surplus money. And make the tax code competitive enough that the people Vermont needs choose it on the merits, not in spite of the bill.
Otherwise, the trajectory holds: more homes than Vermonters can afford, more development than the state can carry and a landscape gradually converted into the one thing nobody moved here for.
