It is not news to any Vermonter that the state is in the midst of a housing crisis.
Vermont’s General Assembly grappled heavily with this in the 2024 legislative session. This resulted in the passage of a law loosening Act 250 regulation in designated cities, whilst strengthening it in protected areas, after overriding Gov. Phil Scott’s veto, according to a June 17 Vermont Public Article.
To better understand the housing crisis that is gripping Vermont, I spoke with Gary Winslett, associate professor at Middlebury College’s political science department and the director of Middlebury’s international politics and economics program.
Winslett described the Vermont housing crisis as being about land use regulation.
“We make it extremely difficult to build housing at scale. In lots of other places, a developer can walk up to a field, clear-cut it, build 50 to 100 homes at a time, and save on economies of scale,” said Winslett.
Vermont state and local law prevents developers from building densely, which drives up housing costs, he said.
“It’s the zoning at the local level, but it’s also at the state level, we’ve got stuff like Act 250 which, honestly, I think just should be fully repealed,” Winslett said.
Act 250 was passed in 1970, establishing a legal process to ensure sustainable land-use regulation, according to the Vermont Historical Society.
Winslett preferred to focus on statewide law revisions and new legislation to supersede municipal statutes, rather than advocating for local zoning reform.
“I think the politics of housing reform work much better at the state level than they do at the local level. At the local level, you’ve got all these NIMBYs who pop up everywhere, and who say, no, no, not in my backyard, like I don’t want that housing over there,” he said.
The facts on the ground lend credence to professor Winslett’s assessment. Vermont will need to build between 5,000 to 7,000 new homes annually to account for housing needs, yet the state only saw 2,300 units permitted by the government in 2022, according to an Aug. 30 VTDigger Article.
As a result of this insufficient permitting by the government, Vermont saw the highest home price appreciation rate in the nation at 12.8% between 2023 and 2024, according to a May 31 VTDigger Article.
This matter has been a growing issue in Vermont state politics in recent years.
Two increasingly large revisions to the state’s housing laws passed in the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions, represented by S.100, a law reforming and liberalizing municipal housing regulations, and H.687, a law regarding land use and environmental protections, respectively.
Despite these improvements, Gov. Phil Scott argued that further reform is necessary to allow for enough housing construction to bring down rent and property prices for those living in Vermont.
“Today, in the middle of a housing crisis, the House Energy and Environment Committee will likely advance a bill that will dramatically expand red tape across the state and make it even more difficult to build the housing we need,” said Gov. Scott in a Mar. 14 tweet from @GovPhilScott on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the debut of H.687.
In a state as sparsely-populated as Vermont, there should not be a housing crisis of such magnitude that it now tops the nation in house-price increases, said Winslett.
“Having a housing shortage in Vermont takes a real commitment to policy mismanagement,” he said.
This present crisis is a simple issue of supply-and-demand: the supply of housing is too low and demand is too high, according to an Aug. 30 VTDigger Article. Vermont’s legislature has the power to reverse this trend and has not yet chosen to wield it to its full capacity, opting for slow reform that does not adequately alleviate pressure on the state’s housing market, according to a May 31 VTDigger Article.
As a result, reforming Vermont’s housing permit system would be a life-saving legislative achievement for the thousands of homeless Vermonters and the tens of thousands of Vermonters struggling to make rent each month.
The state legislature must make supply reforms in the 2025 session, like a vastly expanded version of S.100 to supersede local zoning laws, in order to reduce prices for ordinary Vermonters before even more slip into poverty and homelessness.
