-The state's housing crisis will be a top priority in the upcoming legislative session, and housing advocates from southeast Vermont want legislators to hear their concerns.
At a Dec. 9 Legislative Briefing, members of the Housing Coalition of Southeast Vermont - housing creators, housing service providers, economic developers, planners, landlords, and those who shelter people without homes - shared some of the challenges they face in their efforts to eliminate homelessness and increase housing in the area.
State Reps. Mollie Burke, D-Brattleboro, and newcomer Emily Carris Duncan, who will be sworn in as Windham-6 representative in January, attended the meeting.
"I think everyone knows that we have a significant housing shortage and housing costs that are out of line with folks' ability to afford them," said state Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, the meeting facilitator.
According to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, Vermont will need up to 36,000 new housing units by 2029.
Small housing developers need more resources
Acknowledging that small, local housing developers play an important role in the state's ability to meet its lofty goals, meeting participants spoke of the need for tools and incentives geared to this sector, like the Vermont Housing Improvement Program (VHIP).
Through grants and forgivable loans up to $50,000, VHIP assists in the rehabilitation and construction of smaller-scale housing like accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and other infill development that is often undertaken by homeowners and smaller developers with limited resources.
The program has funded the creation of 76 units in Windham County since the program began in 2021, according to the Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT), which administers the program in this area.
VHIP was initially federally funded, but its second iteration - VHIP 2.0, launched in March - was funded with a one-time allocation of $20 million in state funding.
WWHT has approved six projects totaling 13 units under VHIP 2.0 and is currently reviewing an additional 19 projects with 36 units.
Skye Morse, coalition member and vice president of M&S Development in Brattleboro, advocated for continued state funding of the program, calling it "a kind of on-ramp" for small developers.
"It's small and simple enough for a really dispersed group of housing creators to benefit from it," Morse said.
VHIP is not without its challenges, however. Some developers have expressed frustration with the administrative requirements of the grant process and say that the ultimate amount of funds received, after taxes, is not incentive enough.
Landlords appeal for legal protection
For Housing Coalition members, the other side of the coin of developing and maintaining enough housing lies in control over who gets to live there.
"If you don't have legal protections from the people you potentially rent to, you're not going to get into the business," Morse said. When we're trying to attract developers to the market we need to make it easier for them to exist here."
More than one private landlord at the meeting expressed frustration with the eviction process.
Fric Spruyt, a property owner and landlord in Brattleboro, said, "The problem is that we effectively have no recourse when things go wrong. When we're looking at a minimum of six months, and more like a year or two, to move somebody along who is making life miserable for everybody else in the building, then we're not doing justice to our good tenants."
"And that is why there are fewer and fewer of us [landlords]," Spruyt said.
Mark Reffi, who manages 105 housing units in Springfield, Bellows Falls, and Brattleboro, said when tenants don't pay rent, he can lose tens of thousands of dollars, taking away funds for additional housing development.
He shared his frustration with the slow eviction process, which can involve lawyers from Vermont Legal Aid "who scour every document I've ever written," he said.
"It's not like I just wake up one day and decide to harass a tenant," Reffi said. "We've never done that. We're below fair market rent on most of our apartments. We bend over backwards."
It's not just small property owners who face this issue.
WWHT Executive Director Elizabeth Bridgewater spoke of the need to speed up the eviction process, describing the recent eviction of a dangerous person from a property. The process took more than a year to resolve.
"During that time, the rest of the folks in the building were terrified," she said.
"It's difficult because as housing providers we want to have laws that protect us," said Christine Hazzard, executive director of Brattleboro Housing Partnerships (BHP), an affordable housing provider. "We want to keep people housed the best we can, but at the same time, when people need to go, we really need to have a quick way for them to exit."
There's nowhere else for them to go
Hazzard said that most BHP tenants who have exited homelessness have been successful tenants. However, when BHP has to evict tenants with "very complex needs," there's a lack of transitional housing that includes support services for these people. They can end up homeless, Hazzard said.
"It's uncomfortable for us," she said. "When we exit someone, especially when they leave from public housing, there's not a lot of options for where they can go."
Hazzard pointed to the Elmwood Community Shelter (ECS) a tiny house community in Burlington, as a model for this type of transitional housing. Managed by the Champlain Housing Trust, ECS provides supportive services for people with mental and medical health issues, substance use disorder, and other challenges to accessing traditional shelter options.
Libby Bennett, executive director of Groundworks Collaborative in Brattleboro, which operates a 34-bed (soon to be 46-bed) homeless shelter, was "very impressed" at a recent tour of ECS.
Sometimes it's not the tenants, but the people in their lives, who cause the chaos, and issuing a no-trespass order is one way to address this problem. However, these orders can be issued only for single housing units. Bridgewater and Hazzard noted this problem at their respective properties.
"We find that those situations are really chaotic, and they can create a lot of chaos amongst the property," said Hazzard. She wants the state to address this issue.
Need for more life-saving, emergency shelter
Bennett said there's an urgent need for more shelter locally, especially in this period of adverse weather conditions and tighter eligibility for the state's emergency motel program.
"Even with increased bed capacity at Groundworks this winter, we will have no community resource for people who can't get into vital, life-saving, emergency shelter," she said.
She cited three recent deaths in Washington County of people who were living unsheltered. "Our current approach falls short," she said.
Groundworks' Outreach Team, which provides support and services to unsheltered people in the area, has received 232 referrals since the program began in February, according to Karli Schrade, director of shelters at the agency. The three-member team is currently serving 92 individuals.
Small communities need help
Patty Eisenhaur, who chairs Londonderry's Housing Commission, advocated for technical assistance to small, rural communities, especially as it relates to water and wastewater projects that are essential to housing development.
"This assistance is critical because we don't have paid staff," she said. She noted that her town's $7.9 million project to develop a community wastewater system is led by volunteers, "which is crazy," she said.
Sue Coakley, chair of the Putney Planning Commission, said that as her town completes its housing needs assessment, it might work with nearby communities to find solutions to identified gaps: the need for more housing; the need to repair and renovate existing, aged housing stock; and the need for senior housing.
Putney will need more than 80 additional housing units over the next five years, though this need will be partly addressed by the proposed 25-unit WWHT project on Alice Holway Drive, slated to begin construction in the spring.
Because of Putney's small size, Coakley wondered whether aggregating demand for housing across towns might "de-risk development" and thus attract housing developers.
Windham Regional Commission (WRC) is leading a pilot project to identify housing needs and solutions among the towns of Jamaica, Londonderry, Weston, and Winhall.
"If this type of approach and conversation works, we'll explore opportunities to replicate it with other groupings of towns within the region," said Executive Director Chris Campany in a post to the WRC website.
Rents are too low
Morse, of M&S Development, explained a fundamental math problem in local housing development. "I know it's shocking to everyone in this room," he said, "but our rents are too low relative to the cost of construction."
He noted that it costs more to build here than it does in more populated places with ready supplies of labor, as M&S experienced in the $10 million development of the DeWitt Block on Flat Street in Brattleboro.
"We needed to truck in labor from Springfield and Chicopee, Massachusetts, and Albany, New York," Morse said. "We don't have construction companies that are big enough to handle larger projects."
And, he said, "Even if a bank were willing to lend me the money to build a building, I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage based on the rent that I collect."
Bridgewater, of WWHT, pointed to low wages as the culprit.
"If we had higher paying jobs in the community, then the housing providers could charge higher rents and cover the cost of building," she said.
According VHFA, it costs about $500,000 to build a modest apartment in Vermont. Spruyt took issue with that number. "I'm not buying that we have to spend that much," he said.
Spruyt is currently working on funding a local housing project of three, "high-quality, energy-efficient units" that he said he can build for about $150,000 per unit. "If we get even more creative I think we can drop that number significantly to a fraction of that," he said.
'It's really about zoning'
Bridgewater of WWHT brought up density.
"Density is a scary topic," she said, "because it goes to the whole character and culture of rural communities. But if we want to solve the housing crisis, we need higher density projects."
She explained that one way to lower the development cost per unit is to increase the number of units, thus spreading the site costs over a larger number of units.
"It's really about zoning," said Chris Hart of Windham Aging and the former director of Brattleboro Housing Partnerships (formerly Brattleboro Housing Authority).
"A big part of the discussion [around housing and density] is the systems that we have in place for planning and zoning, and the fact that in some communities zoning regulations don't even exist," Hart said.
"Housing advocates are doing a stellar job with limited resources," said Burke, in a follow-up email to The Commons. "More funding, which is in short supply, would be a key to some success. The scope of the problem demands more."
Referring to the increased number of unsheltered people in the area due, in part, to legislation passed last session that limits the number of motel rooms available for emergency shelter and restricts eligibility for the program, she said, "In limiting the motel program, we have delegated responsibility for homeless individuals to our towns. And I believe, as a state, we must not let this happen."
"Similarly, our mental health system is inadequate to address the intersection of mental health and homelessness," she said.
The Housing Coalition meetings, which are open to the public, are held on the second Monday of the month via Zoom. Coalition members meet in person four times each year. Contact Field Services Director Sue Graff of the Vermont Agency of Human Services for more information.
This News item by Ellen Pratt was written for The Commons.