Vermont’s housing crisis needs bold answers

This commentary is by David Bond, who taught at Bennington College from 2013 to 2026. He now runs the Center for Environmental Justice at Georgetown University.

Vermont is not an easy place to be homeless. Winters are unforgiving, and this rural state has minimal infrastructure to support unhoused people. Shelters are few and far between, and most were built when the loss of housing was a temporary setback tied to house fires or fleeing domestic abuse.

Personal tragedy is no longer the trigger of homelessness in Vermont. Today, a social catastrophe rips all manner of residents from their homes with ruthless indifference. Yet our government seems incapable of reckoning with this unfolding disaster.

Last year, I taught a class on the housing crisis at Bennington College. My students and I read every report we could find and interviewed shelter staff, local journalists and housing advocates who all describe the same horror story: a system overwhelmed by desperation.

Ten years ago, the median price of a home in Vermont was $200,000. Today, it’s $438,000. Home prices have nearly doubled over the past decade while salaries increased at half that rate, with most wage growth accruing on the higher end of the income ladder. A newly constructed home in Vermont now has a median price of $620,000, a sticker price out of reach for, by my calculation, 80% of the state’s population.

Rents have also risen while the income of most renters has flatlined at $43,000. In some Vermont communities, the median fair market rent has almost doubled in the past five years. And today, half of all renters in Vermont have slipped into what the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as cost-burdened as rent eats up more and more of their paychecks.

The human wreckage of these numbers gathers in parking lots crowded with occupied cars each night, in tattered encampments in the woods and under the overpass, and in the long lines outside public libraries and recreational centers each morning waiting for the privilege of a bathroom: rural homelessness.

While the actual number of homeless people in Vermont may seem minor in comparison with states like California and New York, the rate of increase in homelessness in Vermont outstrips every other state.

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And in contrast with those states, the homeless in Vermont are not pouring in from elsewhere nor willfully rejecting society. By and large, unhoused people have deep roots in the Green Mountain State. And a great number of them are working full-time or are seniors living on the fixed income of retirement.

In Vermont, housing costs have achieved escape velocity from the economic fundamentals of place. What working residents can afford is no longer a gravitational force holding mortgages and rents within the realm of reason.

For Vermonters losing their grip on housing, few accord the crisis any academic explanation. It’s a full-time job that no longer adds up. It’s a sickness that bankrupted a family. It’s retirement that never factored in inflation. It’s student loans when no one is hiring. It’s a divorce that cut a paycheck in half. It’s a minor setback that spirals into total loss.

Three converging trends offer a provisional explanation of the housing disaster in Vermont.

First, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many cooped-up residents in Boston and New York City bought second homes in Vermont. Many of those homes now operate as vacation rentals in a state with the second-highest share of seasonal homes in America. Vacation rentals limit housing available for residents and skew pricing away from local wages and toward weekend wealth.

Second, private equity has elbowed its way into single-family home markets. A recent study found that Vermont has witnessed a 60% rise in corporate investor purchases of single-family homes, catapulting the state into the top 10 for growth of private equity in residential markets.

And third, global investors, having amassed more wealth than can be profitably held in checking accounts or stocks, now turn to U.S. real estate. Their outsized investments in luxury properties may have started in big cities, but their telltale signs ripple outward into rural areas: surging prices with high vacancy rates.

This all shines a rather unflattering light on high-minded talk of supply and demand as the most sensible solution to the housing crisis. Simply unshackling private developers to build, build, build may only construct more vacation homes and investment opportunities for elites from elsewhere.

Vermont was founded as an armed animus to absentee landlords. Where are the bold visions now to meet this housing crisis at scale? Where are the radical policies and programs that can place housing costs back within reach of working Vermonters?

In my class, students brainstormed how Vermont might seize shuttered colleges and factories to remake public housing for the 21st century. We explored how Vermont might look to Red Vienna or Mexico’s National Housing Fund or even American labor unions’ unrealized plans for mutual housing as models to meet this crisis at scale. And we imagined how Vermont might become a beacon for young talent eager to get to work building a more just, sustainable and dignified world.

When Gov. Phil Scott’s executive housing team visited our class, students jumped at the chance to ask about their visions for public housing. The deputy secretary of the Agency of Human Services, Kristin McClure, responded to the premise by saying, “Vermont is not looking to become more of a landlord.” Reflecting on the quarter-billion dollars Vermont spent on emergency housing in the past few years, she added, “We did the math, and we could have housed every single homeless person had we built new units with that money.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s housing crisis needs bold answers.