Vermont doesn’t have enough housing. That’s not a controversial statement; it shows up in rents, in bidding wars over rentals, and in how hard it’s become for people who grew up here to stay here. What’s less agreed on is why, and what to do about it. We don’t think this has to be a fight between neighbors. We think it’s a shared problem worth solving together.
The Math Is Simple
When housing supply doesn’t grow to meet demand, prices don’t stay flat; they climb. Every unit that doesn’t get built, whether because of a zoning delay, a lengthy permitting process, or a project that didn’t pencil out under current conditions (i.e. rising taxes, const of construction, regulations), is a unit that a renter or buyer doesn’t get to compete for. Scarcity doesn’t just affect the person who wanted that specific unit; it tightens the whole market above and below it.
What’s Actually Slowing Things Down
The barriers to building more housing in Vermont rarely look like a single decision-maker saying no. More often, it’s a combination of well-intentioned rules stacking up:
- Minimum lot size requirements that make smaller, more affordable units difficult to build
- Parking minimums that add cost and eat up buildable land
- Long, multi-step permitting timelines that make some projects financially unworkable before they break ground
- Local review processes designed for a different era of growth than the one Vermont is in now
Each of these exists for a reason. Together, they add up to a housing supply that’s grown more slowly than Vermont’s population and workforce need it to.
We Value Vermont’s Land Too
It’s worth saying plainly: we care about Vermont’s landscape as much as anyone who’s ever raised a concern at a planning meeting. This isn’t an argument for paving over farmland or treating open space as expendable. But we think it’s worth looking honestly at how Vermont’s land-use framework, including Act 250, has actually played out.
Act 250 was designed to protect the environment from unchecked development. In practice, it’s often made building up, denser housing in and around existing town centers, where infrastructure already exists, slower and more expensive than building out, toward the edges of towns and onto previously undeveloped land. The unintended result, in a lot of cases, has been more sprawl rather than less: more land consumed, more driving, and less of the walkable, town-centered growth that tends to preserve open space rather than eat into it.
Building is going to happen; Vermont’s housing demand isn’t going away. The more useful question isn’t whether we build, but where and how. Growth concentrated upward and inward, in places that already have roads, sewer, and infrastructure, puts a lot less pressure on the land everyone’s trying to protect.
Taxes and Construction Costs Are Part of This Too
Zoning and permitting aren’t the only pressures shaping what gets built, and what gets maintained. Property taxes and the rising cost of construction materials and labor play just as real a role, and they don’t get talked about enough in this conversation.
As housing providers, we’re constantly making decisions based on the resources we actually have, not the resources we wish we had. When a tax bill goes up, that’s not an abstract line item. It’s money that would have gone toward a new roof, an upgraded electrical panel, or a safer staircase, redirected instead to cover a higher bill. Every dollar has a job, and when pressure gets added on one side, something else has to give. Sometimes that means a capital improvement gets delayed a year. Sometimes it means rent has to rise to cover the gap. Neither outcome is good for tenants, and neither is a choice we make lightly.
Construction costs work the same way. When materials and labor get more expensive, the math on new development gets harder to make work, and the math on renovating existing housing gets harder too. That’s true whether you’re a small operator like us or a larger developer. Rising costs don’t just slow down new supply; they also slow down the reinvestment that keeps existing housing stock safe and livable.
This is where we think cities and towns have a real responsibility, and it’s a balancing act, not a simple one. A municipality isn’t just managing land, it’s managing the people who live on that land. That means weighing the tax revenue a town needs to fund schools and services against the reality that higher taxes on rental property eventually show up somewhere, either in deferred maintenance or in higher rent. It means recognizing that permitting delays and construction costs aren’t separate from affordability, they’re a direct input into it.
We don’t think there’s a clean answer here. But we do think honest conversations about these trade-offs, rather than treating taxes, construction costs, and zoning as three unrelated issues, would get Vermont closer to housing policy that actually works for renters, owners, and towns alike.
This Doesn’t Have to Be Either/Or
Housing and conservation get framed as opposing goals, but we don’t think they actually are. Denser, in-town housing and land preservation reinforce each other more often than they conflict. Every unit built up in an existing town center is a unit that doesn’t need to be built out on undeveloped land.
Most people who care about the environment and most people who care about housing affordability want a similar outcome: a Vermont that grows thoughtfully instead of getting chewed up by sprawl. The disagreement is usually about mechanism, not goal, which is a much more solvable kind of disagreement. If you want to dig deeper into this intersection, Let’s Build Homes is a good resource; they focus specifically on Vermont housing and zoning policy, and how to build what the state needs without sacrificing what makes it worth living in.
Renters Feel the Shortage First
Homeowners are largely insulated from a tight housing market; they already have a place to live, and rising values work in their favor. Renters don’t have that cushion. When supply is constrained, rents rise faster than wages, competition for available units increases, and the renters with the least flexibility, lower income, no co-signer, credit challenges, get squeezed out first. A housing shortage doesn’t land evenly. It lands hardest on the people who can least absorb it.
The cycle doesn’t stop there, either. A renter who spends years paying elevated rent has less left over to save for a down payment, at the exact moment starter homes are also becoming scarcer and more expensive for the same underlying reasons. By the time they’re ready to buy, there often isn’t an affordable home waiting for them. That pushes them back into the rental market for longer, which adds even more pressure to rental demand and prices. It’s a vicious cycle: the shortage that keeps people renting longer is the same shortage that makes it harder to eventually stop renting.
Where We Come From
As people who buy, rehab, and manage rental housing across Chittenden and Franklin counties, we see this tension play out regularly: good projects moving slowly through permitting, a handful of available units drawing dozens of qualified applicants, and rents climbing in a market that simply doesn’t have enough places for people to live. We don’t think that’s the result of any one group being unreasonable; it’s the result of a system that’s made it genuinely hard to add supply, even when there’s real demand and real need.
Vermont doesn’t have to choose between its character and its housing supply. More flexibility for duplexes, accessory dwelling units, and multifamily infill near town centers, the kind of smart density that builds up instead of out, is one of the more promising ways to serve both. We think that’s worth supporting, and we think it’s the kind of conversation Vermonters on different sides of this issue can actually have together.
We talk about housing policy, the Vermont real estate market, and what it actually takes to build more homes at the Vermont Real Estate Meetup. Come join the conversation.