This commentary is by Jim Suriano, who lives in Montpelier.
I’m leaving. And I’m writing to share my experience living here in the hope of effecting some changes for you all.
I moved here in the fall of 2019. For years, I’d been determined to live in Vermont. I loved the Green Mountains and all the encounters I had with people in the state. I through-hiked a section of the Long Trail between Rutland and Waterbury and hitchhiked into Burlington back in 2016. The experience left lasting impressions on me.
I finally got myself up here after a seasonal job ended. Got to experience the boom of wintertime ski-town living, and then Covid-19 happened. Luckily, I met up with an incredible human and got to share time in the isolation of those days. Otherwise, I knew very few people up here.
I transitioned to work in the only field that appeared to be booming in this little state: residential construction. All the building going on made me feel this was the place to be and that it would support my life here in exchange for my hard work.
We decided to start a family and purchased a camp in 2021, doing what we could to convert it to a full-time home. It was all dreamy and idyllic for a time. A bigger home without foundational issues would have been better, but it’s what we could afford.
We lived through two major flooding events and a great deal of financial struggles. When we got support from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, that little bit of money felt monumental to meet our bills each month. Every time I seemed to get a bump in income, my health insurance and property taxes jumped. I was commuting 45 minutes to an hour one way each day for work. And the winters were long and hard, but they didn’t slow down the effort to build houses for people.
Now, the people I’ve built houses or barns for have all been good people, to my knowledge. But they all had one thing in common: resources. None of them were struggling for housing. These folks would even have a house or two somewhere else in the state or down in Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was building for a particular economic class of people, not for Vermonters as a whole.
To which some might say: “Well, of course! The people with the money are going to spend it. They are the ones that fill our paychecks.” That’s great, and people who worked hard for their resources or share them with family deserve to spend their money.
But here is my dilemma: Our cabin got moldy. We started an addition last year after securing a loan. We’d definitely need the space with two growing children. Now we had to choose between addressing the mold issue with a massive overhaul that would kill the addition effort, or leaving.
We chose the latter. Gratefully, we sold the house to a neighbor with resources. We house-searched for a while, but that’s too expensive for us. We looked for an apartment for months, trying to find anything we could afford. Ultimately, after five months of living in lovely yet expensive Airbnbs, we found an apartment in Montpelier with a rent triple the mortgage on our former cabin. Then we discovered the basement floods when it rains, and there’s lead in the chipping paint.
Yeah, it’s been a time living in Vermont. I thought I was making decent money that, along with my wife’s income, could support our family. But we are in over our heads here. We are dipping into the little we got from selling the cabin to afford rent for an apartment with a moldy basement and lead paint. We can’t raise kids here. Nothing about this is sustainable for us, and so we are taking what we can and moving out.
Now, what could have kept me here?
It’s a tough place to live, for sure. I can’t imagine myself staying. Maybe if groceries weren’t so expensive or housing upkeep such an effort. Maybe if everybody wasn’t so preoccupied with dumping on the federal government. Maybe if I didn’t see homeless folks struggling every day in the streets of Montpelier. But I couldn’t ignore those people if I tried.
Or maybe I just needed some more free time to kindle that yearning to live here I once had. Maybe spend time hiking ridge lines and being with the mountains. But unfortunately, that won’t cut the cost of living in such a beautiful land.
So thanks for welcoming me, Vermont. I love you. You’ve taught me a lot, but I’m gonna try to make it work somewhere else.
