They were touched on briefly in the piece, but the author spent a lot more energy blaming “anti-capitalism” then he did digging into the obvious failures of capitalism that led us to this point.

Whenever I read something like this, I think of Sharon and Hartland. Both are in the Upper Valley and pretty close to major employers (DHMC, etc). Neither town has any kind of zoning and there has been minimal housing development, which bucks the theory the author is presenting. That’s not to say that exclusionary zoning in rich towns isn’t a problem — it is — but rather to say that we shouldn’t accept it as the being the only problem.

Turns out, solving the housing market is not as simple as opening up the “supply spigot.” Land prices, costs of goods, labor cost, etc all matter for getting housing developed. And all of those things are sky high in Vermont. So when developers are targeting places where they think their projects will pencil out financially, it leaves out a lot of Vermont.

On top of that, when you zoom out and see that the housing crisis is a nationwide crisis, there’s not much hope for the market to correct itself.

When you have this type of market failure for an essential good/service, the only viable solution is government intervention. We need community land trusts, more investment in affordable housing for low- and middle-incomes, and increased tenant protections (such as just-cause eviction). We pay for that with things like higher transfer taxes on sales of second homes. This won’t solve all our issues but it’s better than just hoping the market will fix itself.

Are there other tenants of the same landlord that you can organize with? If so, many of them probably have similar issues. You’ll have a lot more power to make demands of your landlord if you do it collectively.

If you make under a certain amount in Vermont then they forgive a certain percentage of your property tax. I got 30% back last year and ‘my partner and I are both middle income. Easy enough to scale up this program if needed, especially with home values going up so much.

Zoning is not the only barrier. It’s very expensive to source building materials in Vermont, and labor is scarce/expensive. The only thing that pencils right now for a lot of developers are large multifamily apartment buildings and the rents needed to cover costs are high even for middle incomes.

I live next to Hartland and Sharon - neither town has any zoning and there’s been hardly any new development, despite being pretty close to the Upper Valley core.

Yes, let developers build within reason and mandate affordability to the extent possible. But we also need to increase public subsidies, build social housing, and scale up other public assistance programs.

You can’t compare it to a rental. He owns the trailer and has to do all his own maintenance on it. It’s to rent the land the trailer is on.

Unionize! Organize your neighbors and negotiate in solidarity with each other. https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/2016AG_Chapter_2-12.pdf