A new housing strategy is in the works for Vermont’s largest city.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger presented a 47-page report Thursday on Burlington housing that identified a number of key challenges and attributes within the city’s residential market.
“Significant demand for housing coupled with limited production of new units has created an affordability crisis,” the report says.
A key indicator of the affordability problem is the fact that Burlington renter households are putting 44 percent of their income towards housing. The next-highest city listed in the study was Portland, Oregon, where residents spend 34 percent of their income on housing.
The report studied a group of similar cities (selected based on size, college and university presence and “New England peer cities”) to see how Burlington’s housing compared.
While Burlington has “a relatively robust downtown residential base,” the report said “recent growth in downtown Burlington has not kept pace with that of comparable cities, and it is losing young professional households.”
Between 2002 and 2013, the report said, downtown Burlington added 220 households.
Market-rate housing, Weinberger said, grew even more slowly over that period.
“Only 18 of those units, as the report defines it, were market rental units,” he said. “And I think it is in the market rental that, I think, you see Burlington’s affordability problem most acutely.”
Problems with rental affordability have pushed out a key demographic in Weinberger's vision for a high-tech city of startups and innovation. The report said that from 2000 and 2012, the downtown area lost 6.6 percent of its population between 25 and 34 years of age, despite the numerous colleges and universities in the area.
At an event announcing the study, Weinberger said that throughout that 12-year period, the growth rate of Burlington’s housing stock did not keep up with similar cities.
“Those cities, over the last couple decades have produced new downtown housing at a far faster rate than Burlington has – two to six times as fast in the years 2000 to 2012,” he said.
This slow growth paired with a steady stream of college students and new American families has led to the city’s 1 percent vacancy rate and the “affordability crisis” the report seeks to address.
So what can the city do to help?
“We believe that through strategic placement of purpose-built student housing … we can free up some of the neighborhoods that have traditionally been places where young families or young professionals were able to get a foothold in Burlington,” Weinberger said.
Reducing the pressure added by thousands of students living off-campus in Burlington is one step, Weinberger said, but the city also hopes the housing stock will grow far more in the 12 years that it did in the previous 12.
"There should be the creation of economic incentives to increase the production of multi-family housing,” he said.
The report didn’t offer many specific details about policy strategies or specific building projects, and Weinberger said it serves as a starting point for what will be a continuing focus of his administration moving forward.
Burlington’s Community Economic Development Office and Weinberger plan to hold a public hearing on Thursday, June 12 at 7 p.m. to get input on the study and how the city can address some of the problems it outlined.
