Housing leaders in Vermont’s largest county are calling for more state investment to bolster lagging affordable housing production.
At a press conference on Monday, the Building Homes Together campaign, which is led by Champlain Housing Trust, Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, and nonprofit housing developer Evernorth, announced that housing development in the region is below targets set by the group.
“The challenge that we face today is that the external factors contributing to Vermont's housing crisis just keep increasing,” said Evernorth President Nancy Owens.
According to the campaign, 720 new homes and apartments were built in the county last year, with 125 of them being affordable units. Both totals fell short of the group’s target to build 1,000 new homes a year, with a quarter of those being affordable units.
In Chittenden County, the rental vacancy rate is 1.2% and hasn’t been above 2% since 2019. (Housing experts consider a 5% vacancy rate a healthy market for renters and landlords.) Rents and home sale prices both rose 5% last year in Chittenden County, according to a press release from the group.
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Recent legislative changes have eased regulations that advocates say have slowed housing development, and housing leaders at Monday’s press conference said they expect those reforms will help. But, they said more state funds are needed to boost Vermont’s housing supply, especially to create desperately needed affordable units.
“Without it, we will continue this downward path of not being able to support the housing needs of average Vermonters, let alone the most vulnerable amongst us,” said Champlain Housing Trust CEO Michael Monte.
Monte said the Legislature needs to consider another housing bond similar to one passed in 2017 that set aside $35 million for affordable housing development.
“But it's got to be $100 million — it's got to be in that range,” Monte said. “We think that that's probably the right number. It might even be higher than that.”
More from Vermont Public: Chittenden County falls short of target to build more housing
The Building Homes Together campaign set a target in 2021 to build 5,000 new homes in Chittenden County over five years, with 1,250 of the units being permanently affordable. The new homes would be a combination of new rental units and homeownership developments.
For the first two years of this effort, housing production also fell short of the campaign’s goal. In 2022, there were 594 housing units built in Chittenden County, with 110 of them permanently affordable. Those tallies were below the campaign’s annual target to build 1,000 homes, with a quarter of those units being affordable. In 2021, the first year of the campaign, there were 909 units built, with only 151 affordable ones.
The Building Homes Together campaign launched an earlier effort in 2016 to build 3,500 homes in Chittenden County, with 20% of the units being affordable ones. That effort met its overall development goal, but failed to produce that target number of affordable units.
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