By John McClaughry
Everyone in the Statehouse is rightly concerned about the shortage of affordable housing in the state. The preferred solution is a combination of subsidies for housing to make it affordable, plus a relaxation of strict development regulations.
The enviros are willing to back off a little bit on Act 250 requirements, but only if the development project is to be located in state-designated compact settlement zones, that from the enviro standpoint are already areas ruined by heedless people and businesses.
The game here has always been to impose strict regulations to defeat development everywhere, then back off a bit in favored compact settlement areas.
A friend of mine recently told me that he was looking to sell his woodland to a neighbor, who wanted to create a sugarbush. My friend said, “I had to go through a subdivision plan if I did not sell him all the contiguous land that I owned. Because the land is nowhere near a designated growth center, I had to get a binding septic plan, a subdivision permit, and file surveys identifying all features. The total cost of complying came to around $30,000. And this was for a sugarbush and sugar house, not an actual development.”
In effect, Vermont’s development regulations have long been weaponized to resist development — and then relaxed if the development satisfied the regulators’ demands. No wonder we don’t have developers ready to build the housing we need.
John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Ethan Allen Institute Blog.
If that land was enrolled under the current use program, the owner has been shifting about 36% of his annual property tax load onto other taxpayers. The $30,000 fee is simply restoring to him the taxes he’s been avoiding as a result of promising not to develop the land. After all, even if the purchaser says it’s going to be sugarbush, the seller can’t hold him to it. We’re all in this together.
The party with a veto-proof majority in the Vermont legislature constantly wring their hands over the shortage of affordable housing while their federal colleagues flood the country with hundreds of thousands of indigent migrants…who all need a place to live. Who votes for these people?