The vanishing Vermont single-family home

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S.100 and a companion House bill H.68 are the Vermont Legislature’s latest attempted response to the call for more housing. A critical housing shortage, with many causes and many years in the making, contributes to an acute worker shortage (nowhere for new hires to live) and growing numbers of homeless people.

By Guy Page

A fast-tracked Senate bill now in the Vermont House would further slacken the already slow pace of new, single-family home (SFH) construction.

S.100 instead offers powerful regulatory support for new construction of duplexes and quadplexes. Local parking, lot size, water/septic, and other regulations once limited to new single-family construction would be expanded to include multi-family housing. Convert a garage into ‘accessory housing’? Sure.

S.100 is about ‘infill’ — adding housing to already-developed neighborhoods, especially urban cores. What it’s not about is incentivizing traditional, single-family housing developments in rural areas. Because a new, traditional SFH is 1) expensive – the median new home purchase price in Vermont is $554,000, and in Chittenden County small new SF homes in South Burlington cost closer to $800,000. Even in Milton, long a starter-home heaven for young families, new SF homes now cost between $400-500,000.

The same homes might be cheaper if built in a retiring farmer’s pasture in rural Vermont, but in a climate-minded Legislature likely to pass a bill requiring 50% of total land area be protected from development by 2050, suburban sprawl outside of Chittenden County is unlikely.

So infill, it is. And the cost of land and materials, the shrinking size of families, and legislative preferences for low-carbon living being what they are, that means more duplexes and quadplexes and fewer SFH’s — and fewer garages, too.

S.100 and a companion House bill H.68 are the Vermont Legislature’s latest attempted response to the call for more housing. A critical housing shortage, with many causes and many years in the making, contributes to an acute worker shortage (nowhere for new hires to live) and growing numbers of homeless people (nowhere for them to live either, even working people with means).

And although none of these bills’ legislative sponsors and lobbyists are saying so explicitly, incentivizing duplexes and quadplexes are shifting the focus away from building new, single-family homes — the kind of homes most Vermonters living and dead were raised in, and most legislative leaders live in now.

On February 23, S.100, the Senate Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee bill called “An act relating to housing opportunities made for everyone” was introduced into the Vermont Senate. Upon a motion by Committee Chair Kesha Ram-Hinsdale, the rules requiring a one-day waiting period before voting were suspended. The bill has been under review by the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee all week.

If it clears the Senate, S.100 will go to the House. At a press conference yesterday, Ram Hinsdale said she looks forward to working with the House on her bill. She then introduced  Housing Committee Chair Tom Stevens, who said:  “Housing is a vaccine…It’s health care. It’s about stability, about getting people into homes so that they can be stable, and the costs related to negative outcomes are lowered.”

The 53-page S.100 appropriates almost all of H.68, the House housing bill introduced by Rep. Seth Bongartz (D-Manchester), a former state senator. Both bills require municipalities to:

Downgrade minimum parking requirements: “Not require more than one parking space per dwelling unit or accessory dwelling unit.” That’s down from the current 1.5 minimum. This change moves urban society away from reliance on cars (long a goal of climate-minded urban planners). It also reallocates garage and parking lot space to living space. You might say it robs Peter Parking to buy Paul an extra bedroom.

Ease changing car garages to housing – In the same anti-vehicular, in-fill spirit, the legislation requires that converting “accessory” buildings (AKA garages) to housing face no higher municipal regulatory burden than conventional housing.

Apply SFH building dimensions, water/septic regs to multi-family units — S.100 states that “duplexes shall be an allowed use with the same dimensional standards as a single-unit dwelling. In any district that is served by municipal sewer and water infrastructure that allows residential development, multi-unit dwellings with four or fewer units shall be an allowed use.”

S.100’s likely impacts on city water and sewer spillovers has raised the ire of longtime Lake Champlain water quality advocate James Ehlers. The implacable Ehlers routinely reports municipal wastewater system dumping into Lake Champlain, and he sees holding multi-family housing to the same standard as SFH as a recipe for further incidents.

“Here on the banks of the unswimmable, unfishable, undrinkable Winooski River, it is abundantly clear, no Princeton PhD necessary, that there is no separating the life cycle from the water cycle,” Ehlers said.

This week’s Senate Natural Resources and Energy testimony on S.5 has done nothing to assuage Ehlers’ concerns.

“Perhaps the whole Natural Resources committee should be disbanded so we can forgo the pretense that protection of the natural world matters at all to this Senate, saving both the taxpayers money and senators the embarrassment of participating in a charade,” Ehlers said. “Honest debate is all that I and others ask for and that is not possible with a chair stacking witness testimony to advantage close-minded members and special interests requesting senators speak off camera.  You can watch it here.”

The legislation also prohibits municipalities from enacting tougher energy building standards than allowed by state law, and gives some small developments a pass on appearing before local zoning boards. Waiving both of these restrictions is likely to make urban duplex and quadplex construction more affordable.

S.100 also allocates $25 million to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to address many housing needs: “provide affordable mixed-income income rental housing and homeownership units; improvements to manufactured homes and communities; recovery residences; and, if determined eligible, housing available to farm workers and refugees. VHCB shall also use the funds for shelter and permanent homes for those experiencing homelessness in consultation with the Secretary of Human Services.”

Guy Page is publisher of the Vermont Daily Chronicle. Reprinted with permission.

Image courtesy of Public domain

14 thoughts on “The vanishing Vermont single-family home

  1. Jobs are a vaccine for poverty and a decent job gets you a chance at a house / they will manage to build multi unit crap – it’s the anti American dream !

  2. If they really wanted more housing, they would be getting rid of the regulations that it expensive to impossible to build a home. — let that sink in.

  3. And yet they whine there isn’t enough housing to move more invaders into the state to do the jobs that aren’t being filled. The leftist mind is full of cobwebs because it’s never working. Liberalism IS a Mental Disease,

  4. Designed to destroy your neighborhoods AND fill them with all sorts of things that have been invading our borders…both north and south….from over 150 countries, all un vetted. It’s all about destroying America. Obama’s brain child. Part of his idea to ” fundamentally change America “. This is CHANGE alright.

    • What is going on in DC and many states is all about global government and the destruction of America as we have known it. Obama started it, Trump tried to halt it, so he was attacked, and senile Biden is being “encouraged” daily by all his well disguised White House “advisors” who are connected to China and the Left and the elites who want to control the world and all the “peons” in it. We cannot let them succeed, and time is sadly very short to stop them. We could start in Vermont. After all, Ethan Allen did that during the Revolutionary War.

      • George. Bush senior started it with the signing of Agenda 21 in the 1990’s , remember him talking a about the new world order back then? I do, didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. Sadly I voted for the………

  5. What will happen is these urban leftist high income transplants will institute rent controlled units, many of which, they will occupy themselves for life and it will be just like old times in their original hood.

  6. Notice $25 million hand off to friends of government? This whole idea was and is not home grown. Our villages were designed to be near streams, because water was a main source of power. They are typically the worst locations for further development. This agenda was passed down from the united nations, along with the timelines. We are mere puppets.

    Vermonters can and could easily find better solutions, as we have in the past. Town water and sewer, inherently make properties more expensive to keep up. They also don’t protect the environment as well as evidenced by the decimated brown trout on every Burlington beach front.

    This is more “affordable housing” as brought to us by Bernie Sanders, direct from the soviet union…..

    where you will own nothing and be happy. state controlled/owned/subsidized housing. Your land lord and slave owner is that state…..also you god, so get down on your knees and be grateful, they may cut of your power via smart meter if you don’t.

    • Neil,
      This is part of a population replacement plan.

      Everything your legislature is doing seems to be designed to force people to leave the state.
      They will then build all Bernie’s Brutalist style Soviet Housing for the new ‘Reconstruction Era’ and fill it with the illegal aliens breaching our borders.
      There will be just about no middle class in Vermont.. they’ll be rich people and their peasants to serve them.. and they will serve their masters- as they live in fear of deportation.
      They’ll be drugs, prostitution, no police- just grief counselors.. go ahead and kill yourself if you don’t like it.
      What a Utopia..

  7. The “American Dream” these days is having a home on it’s own piece of land that is not subject to any level of homeowners association with a neighbor. Even many towns now insist that a subdivision with 2 houses on a town road share the bottom of the driveway, in order to save on “culvert maintenance” costs. This forces the individual homeowners to be forever tied through a deed to each other for driveway maintenance standards. If one turns out to be a real asshat, or there is some simple disagreement about snow removal it creates a problem. Any multi-unit dwelling situation is going to have such issues. Government in general loves conflict like that as a distraction from their own malfeasance.
    Also, the moonbat-celebrated concept of “mixed use development” where they want retail space on the bottom floor with apartments above essentially puts those who live up there in charge of what kind of business activities can go on downstairs and the hours of operation. How would you like to be a 7-day-workweek, busting your butt business owner trying to successfully operate a restaurant and have the section 8 deadbeats living upstairs telling you they dont like you serving breakfast because it interferes with them sleeping until noon?

    • And this type of property automatically means it’s a rental, banks hate mixed use properties and demand really high down payments, very high risk.

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