How do they throw act 250 at them? I thought the property would already have to be subject to act 250 for it to take effect?

I know you said you cannot but could you tell me how many times that actually happened?

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https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/1/22758176/zillow-offers-ibuyer-housing-market-inventory-investors-real-estate

No idea what they plan to do. The 3 they bought in my neighborhood are still empty. We’re expecting the CLA to drop next year since it will finally drop beyond the range of that company’s weird offers, so maybe regional property values will start dropping then.

I think housing is a problem everywhere. I also think the author focuses on the Burlington area appears to hope you won’t bother following the links in their story.

For instance: “That’s why Vermont now was the most expensive in-state college tuition of all 50 states, at more than $30,000 per year.” has a link in the middle of the sentence. Follow the link and the top of the page says: “Vermont has the highest average yearly in-state tuition of $17,083 at public institutions.” Scroll to Vermont section of that page and you get “The total cost of attendance at an average public 4-year institution is $29,665 for in-state students.”

I followed the one link chosen at random and it showed the author was in error about the numbers. That says the rest of the data in the article is suspect which means their conclusions are, at best, based in bad data. I also think they drifted all over the place rather than making a case about housing.

Vermont is not special in these ways and actually a lot of what people cry about on this reddit statistics show we aren't even the worse by far. Doesn't mean it's not bad tho...

It’s not hard to write like this when you grew up in VT and then left for 20 years as and adult before returning. It’s basically a composite of several people I knew growing up. Also, those kids names are all real, they were all peers.

yeah like at first it was NIMBY shit which I got but then suddenly they inexplicably tied it to those dingdang wokes with their pronouns and ACAB and it totally lost me

OP lost some brain cells halfway through I guess

Yeah, I was having trouble following the layers of irony, but I think they are shitting on nonbinary people, which really isn't cool.

PS I'm loving all the downvotes! It reminds me a bit of someone I knew of who while at Woodstock high school had the bumper sticker "Nuke the gay baby whales". It drove the teachers crazy and they tried to block him from having this sticker (apparently the teachers didn't really know that much about the 1st amendment...).

Neither were they scholars of the Greeks (“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation").

He prevailed in antagonizing them...

If you are a Vermont resident more than 1/2 the year I think you should pay lower taxes. If you have a second home rented long term I think you should get more of a tax credit. If you own a home and do short term rentals double all current taxes. If you have a home that sits empty more than 6 months a year triple the taxes.

I have a client who can’t even build a modest home on spear st. For less than 4 million.

This is really good insight, thanks for sharing. Do you object to multi-unit dwellings generally or just the aesthetics of the ones that have been built? They seem like a logical option for people who don’t want a big house (elderly, young).

I’ve never seen a beautiful suburb myself, even when the houses are pretty. Not being a snob at all. It’s just a really inefficient allocation of space.

There's way of stoping suburbs and promoting sustainable communities that grow. Act 250 is a barrier but never trust a developers, lot size maximums and up zoning all single family zones to allow for up to 4 units. Allow soft commercial and edu in all residential zones. Have developers cover the maintenance of road and water infrastructure in developments of given size for up to 10 years so they have to cover the first cycle of maintenance. Remove parking minimums, lot size mins, floor area ratios, allow for single access blocks, ban drive thrus, ban street facing parking lots, require all commercial to have main entries to be street facing, etc, etc.

I'd say it's working as designed, to slow growth and preserve the state environment. Unpopular opinion but adding thousands of units of housing would ruin the place.

Apartments are not just for lower income lol. Don’t get me wrong no one should be too poor for adequate housing but that’s a different consideration. Not that middle class people are doing so well with housing either.

Suburbs are inefficient and unsustainable. I do get that many people like them, not criticizing your taste. Dense housing is the only feasible option I see for the future.

In Vermont I’m not even sure what counts as suburbs, though. What’s a suburb of middlebury (wheee the author lives)? Weybridge?

The problem with the suburbs that they are not resilient long term and are restricted to single family housing and car based comercial, single family housing is that it's the only housing typology allowed in a lot of our residential zoned land. That's the problem its zoned out diversity of housing stock. You should be able to get the housing type you want but when you gate keep it so the only housing you can get is only one type then we create the hot mess we are i.

I have a LONG history of working with the CSJ property, going back to the 80s. It has always been an Act 250 nightmare there due to the proximity to the creek and there are also significant wetlands about the property. There is also a lot of ledge and bedrock on the property that makes it very costly to bring in utilities (water/sewer) for expansion / development. Unfortunately, the same problems are presenting themselves for the old Rutland Plywood property across the creek, which has put off developers from looking into utilizing that property as well. :(

That was a real shame when the senior housing project fell through. However, I see that Casella has been looking at investing in the property, so we are all keeping our fingers crossed!! :)

What a loss! That sounds like exactly the kind of development to benefit everyone. Super curious why the developer backed out.

Poor people love to blame the upper middle class and lower upper class, when it's really the billionaire investor class that is doing this shit.

40 years ago dentists from Boston were also buying summer homes in Vermont but they could typically afford one per family. The billionaire investor class buys homes to speculate in the hundreds/thousands.

I think of that as a symptom not the cause. It's really death by a thousand cuts. We have exclusionary suburban focus zoning of the 1940s and 1950s , that bans or makes it impossible to build anything but single family housing in over 70% of residential zoned land. Preventing things like small mix used, boarding homes, hostels, duplex, triplexes, etc. Economic decline in large portions of the state's municipalities, shifting of job centers, disconnect between available stock and desired areas, car centric tourist development, bizantine building and safety codes. Rise in costs, etc. Speculative real estate markets and Airbnb are just another nail in the coffin of affordability.

Supply and demand. Housing is in short supply, so there is opportunity to make profit off of that. Investors will buy up multiple homes/ apartments in one area in one fell swoop, sit on them for awhile and then sell them back off individually at a much higher price than they paid for them...= Profits without having to invest in upkeep, rehabilitation or becoming landlords.

They were touched on briefly in the piece, but the author spent a lot more energy blaming “anti-capitalism” then he did digging into the obvious failures of capitalism that led us to this point.

> My father, and most of my 8 uncles, all left the state for jobs in their 20s. None of them wanted to stay on the dairy farm. "Too much work for too little money".

Thanks for your reply! I did Ag advocacy for about a decade (90's), mostly focused on feed costs, cull prices, finding labor, crop rotation, and a good chunk on succession and its prospects. in '99 I proposed doing a survey called 2020 - prospects of farming. Its a lot more than counting wheels:) I even suggested the Land Trust make allowances/exceptions to permit a co-housing plan in which those who farmed it lived rent-free, as it were, to address the succession issue. Not that it was a good idea, per say, so much as trying to think outside the box.

Kids leave the State since forever and its been a minute that your education taxes aren't making elsewhere more literate :) Fact is, for the rural parts, its boring AF; specially if not in a clique. We've done shit for supporting college because of it; tourism and second homes pays the bills (mostly) and keeps the trades in decent pay, so and raising (non-native) taxes is a lead balloon.

So instead we adapt to the new realities, which is what VSU is trying to do now due to lowering enrollments and higher costs. They're going Univ of Phoenix - Vermont Edition. Re-purposing libraries because mostly everyone doesn't go there for books. Cutting back sports because even the NCAA class is 3rd tier, few poor or minority students are going to turn pro and transpo costs alone are sky-high. VT doesn't need sports more than academic excellence, nor should it have to recruit from poor inner cities to boost enrollment. You'd be gobsmacked to know how many NVU students are 1st generation to get past HS.

Bet $5 will get you $8 closing Johnson w/in 3-5 years if not sooner. I don't envy those calling the shots, this sub is full of backlash and well-deserved calls for transparency. I know this bec wife is in academic support and I feel people's pain over uncertainty; but its the right (hard) call.

Encouraging teleworkers and knowledgeworkers is the right call, there should always be a livelihood in trades, in logging, in beef and hemp and like, if not in dairy. Dairy consolidation aside, my sis works an organic outfit (100ish head) near Poultney and they are getting by OK, but the parents are still in charge.

So, please don't think I'm complaining more than calling it as I see it. Most all commute 1hr to a job, outside of ChitCo the State is rural AF, Glover is no worse off for the hippies and Peter's circus, nor is MontP for the few still alive:)

Peace Out, bub!

Seconded. (5th generation Vermonter here who has spent his life in land development.) Act 250 / Land Use described as Statewide HOA: 100% correct!

> I tell them to imagine it as a statewide HOA.

Spitballing here, but I'd say 80% of VT is rural hamlets and villes. So lets talk that: valleys with properties usually very near the road built when some farmer sub'd their land and excluded the pastures behind said new homes. Or, properties up along some hillside or gore off dirt roads in the woods. OK?

Those places are akin to HOA's only due to the fact that they're run by the 'town fathers'; the click that collectively ignores everyone at town meeting day to preserve the status quo :)

> My house on 3.5 acres that is part of a neighborhood in rural VT subdivided in the 90s was rezoned to a 5 acre minimum several years ago.

My homestead was on 5ac, abutted by substantially larger tracts of land; either some farm or some woods logged or sugarbushed. I like the 5ac and think 3.5ac would feel too confining if I had neighbors. 5ac is about the min amount that offers real privacy and peace/quiet. I say this bec I have friends on smaller lots and they beef about noise/neighbors with too much regularity.

Just my .02 - Peace Out!

Many of the problems faced are not unique to VT, some (like graying and edu) are. Being a tourist State so close to the Tri-State corridor and 30M people is impactful too.

A lot of your assertions are correct. Many of these issues have persisted for a long time. Your anecdote regarding farmland may have merit, e.g. using 250 as a weapon. I also think that for as valuable as the VT Land Trust is, it needs more flexibility in addressing conservation vs succession issues. But the truth is that farming in VT is in peril. If not for lack of interest then for poor economy of scale. Beef, organic dairy, hemp, and the like have promise, but its still a threadbare life keeping the machines running.

Sure, its important to attract industries to work-centers like ChitCo, but outside of the 45-60minute commute, the rural problems are still going to be there regardless. I had hope for Newport, but that sure got F'd up. Maybe Hardwick can become a success story (a la Pete's greens and the like).

I just don't thing Big Business should be the first goto to find a fix to small State problems.

I'm a newcomer to Maine; and don't for a minute think of the irony when I'm posting on r/Maine; despite having the same sentiment vis-a-vis the stressors being faced.

I moved from (near eden) to ME a year ago. Partly because of costs, partly because I've gotten to old to buck/split wood and care for maintaining the homestead, partly to get out of a mortgage, mostly because said homestead is a 2-person operation that were something to happen 1 person couldn't handle the workload.

I would have stayed in VT were it not for insane RE prices, (even a house lot to throw up a tiny house), so after nearly 40 years, spouse-n-me decided to try a change. Maine (the ocean, the north woods) was a good choice, but despite visiting friends here regularly, I miss the greens that I know like the palm of my hand :)

Sounds like that flatlander should go home...;)

I'm not disputing the facts at all; they speak for themselves in being painfully obvious. I'm disputing the proposed fixes coming from a very unqualified source.

Can't speak to whether 'turning the other cheek' or just ranting is the only thing that's been done, or not. I do know that there's no lack of advocates trying to effect positive change(s), but its not possible to escape undeniable truths.

One being that there aren't too many solutions to fundamentally rural problems; which about 3/4's of the State is. Fortunately, our rural parts benefit (trickle-down) from tourism in ways that rural villes and hamlets in places from OH to VA .... don't. Those places now look like ghost towns.

We are a tourist state that attracts 30M people from Boston to Baltimore. Sure, we have a few industries, but even relaxing regs would not make Vermont competitive with elsewhere. We need industry that we can build from the ground up.

We do K-12 OK, but >50% kids don't stay past HS; because growing up rural can be boring and there's too little opportunity. So our edu taxes make places elsewhere more literate. We're graying out, and the new blood replacing it is bringing in new values and new money; making life even more expensive.

I don't have any solutions, but know any proposed will be a tough pill to swallow and invite the inevitable backlash, no different than what's happening with the VSC/VSU transition.

What I do know, for sure, is that fixing wealth inequality, employer tied for-profit healthcare, .... the big killers of our social safety net .... would go a long way to remedying many of the issues we're facing.

I don't think that the quest for profit is responsible for the present crisis. The cause is a lack of supply through decades of intentional under-development. Which was exactly what the article is about. Rising prices are because of too much demand and not enough supply.

absofriggenlutely.

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I’m saying all landlords should be personally tied to and liable for their properties.