This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
SHELBURNE – Once the site of an Econo Lodge motel, a nondescript lot tucked off Route 7 has been transformed into this Chittenden County town’s newest neighborhood.
Called Bay Ridge, it is one of the largest affordable housing developments built in Vermont in recent memory. Nearly 100 new homes will be either rented or sold at permanently subsidized rates.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday, elected officials hailed the project — a joint effort by the nonprofits Champlain Housing Trust and Evernorth — as a model for addressing the state’s housing crisis.
“We want to make more dollars available so that this kind of project can be replicated across the state,” said Vermont Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, who lives a half-mile away from the development.
All of the homes in the new neighborhood come with income-restrictions for potential tenants and buyers to qualify.
The development consists of 68 apartments, including one-bedrooms in renovated motel buildings and three- and four-bedroom units in sleek, newly-constructed buildings. Rents range widely; a three-bedroom costs $1,725 monthly, according to the housing trust. Twenty of the apartments will be set aside for people who have been unhoused.
Twenty-six shared-equity condominiums, priced between $170,000 to $190,000 each, line a freshly paved road. Their estimated market values are more than twice that amount, according to the trust’s website.
The development will feature both on-site and off-site solar arrays to offset energy usage, and it will soon host a playground. Families have already begun to move in.
The project, which cost about $55 million, was among the largest recipients of federal Covid-era funding that Vermont poured into housing development. It also received $14 million in private equity from federal tax credits.
On average, it cost about $584,000 to build each of the new homes, according to a funding source breakdown provided by Champlain Housing Trust. That’s more than double the median cost of affordable rental housing in Vermont before the pandemic, when construction costs skyrocketed.
Champlain Housing Trust purchased the old Econo Lodge more than a decade ago as temporary housing for people experiencing homelessness. As the organization began to redevelop the site, it purchased another hotel across the street, which it continues to run as an emergency shelter.
While the pace of homebuilding in Vermont has picked up over the last few years, publicly-subsidized affordable housing – including projects like Bay Ridge – make up a modest fraction of the overall market. Recent assessments indicate that the state still needs to double or triple the number of homes produced annually to return the market to a healthy condition.
“Often when we’re here at these ribbon cuttings, people will say, you know, ‘This is great that we have this housing, but it’s a drop in the bucket in Vermont,’” said U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., at the event on Wednesday. “But we have to celebrate the successes. We have to draw attention to the fact that we are making progress.”
