Vermont Is Flying Blind on Housing Policy — And You Pay the Price

Vermont’s housing debate often moves faster than the facts. Last week’s Rutland Herald article, “When Vermont landlords stop renting,” followed a familiar script: cite a headline number, quote a Legal Aid attorney, and frame rising rents and homelessness as the inevitable product of landlord profit-taking. But when you hold that story up against the Legislature’s own 2025 Landlord-Tenant Law Study Committee Report, a very different picture emerges—one grounded not in narratives, but in the State’s admitted data blind spots.

The committee’s report, released in January, spells out exactly what Vermont knows—and just as importantly, what it doesn’t—about the housing system. And on the most fundamental questions, the answer is: not much. For a state preparing to debate rent control, just-cause eviction, new registries, right-to-counsel mandates and expanded housing interventions, the lack of basic data should be alarming. Because without understanding the underlying numbers, Vermont’s housing policy is navigating in the dark.

And right now, the darkness is thick.

Homelessness: A Big Number, Built on a Narrow Measurement

The Herald article repeats a familiar claim: that Vermont’s homelessness has “tripled since 2019.” That figure traces back to VHFA and DCF counts included in the Housing Needs Assessment. But the legislative report acknowledges what those numbers actually measure—administrative program participation, not true demographic homelessness.

Vermont’s homelessness data primarily reflect:

The General Assistance emergency motel program
Point-in-Time counts conducted once a year
People who enter the shelter system

It does not track:

Whether individuals are long-time Vermonters
Out-of-state arrivals entering the motel program
Those staying with friends, in vehicles, or outside the GA system
How many people cycle in and out of assistance
How many displacements are economic, behavioral, or voluntary

The report explicitly states that the Housing Needs Assessment “cannot readily account for Vermonters experiencing homelessness, migrant workers, and those without a permanent address”. In other words, the “tripled” figure is a raw headcount of program usage—not a clear demographic picture of who is homeless and why.

Even the Study Committee admits it cannot answer the most basic question:

“How do eviction rates relate to homelessness?”
(Recommendation for Further Investigation)

If the State can’t correlate eviction with homelessness, then it certainly can’t sustain the casual narrative that landlord behavior is driving the crisis.

Evictions: The Numbers Politicians Quote but Don’t Understand

The report provides clear counts of eviction filings from 2021–2024—rising from 1,025 to roughly 1,855. But, as the Judiciary testified, a filing is not an eviction. The State does not track:

How many filings end in actual removal
How many filings are duplicates
How many filings are abandoned or settled
How many tenants negotiate payment plans
How many tenants relocate without court involvement (“self-evictions”)

The Study Committee again concedes the gap:

“How many annual eviction filings are re-filings of prior cases?”
“How can Vermont measure displacements that do not use the formal eviction process?”
(Recommendations)

This matters. Vermont legislators, tenant advocates, and media outlets frequently lean on eviction filing numbers to make sweeping claims about displacement. But without tracking outcomes, the State cannot say how many filings represent genuine housing loss—and how many are simply procedural steps in overdue-rent cases that resolve without displacement.

The gap between filings and actual homelessness events is wide, and the Legislature knows it.

Rents Are High, but Vacancies Are Near Zero—A Contradiction the Narrative Ignores

The Herald article frames Vermont’s high rents as evidence that landlords are charging beyond their “legitimate costs.” But this claim doesn’t survive contact with basic economic reality—or the State’s own testimony.

The Study Committee notes that Vermont’s vacancy rate has fallen to near-record lows. In a functioning market, if rents were universally unaffordable, vacancy rates would rise. Instead, renters are taking units as soon as they appear, even at elevated prices. That’s not greed—it’s scarcity.

Low vacancy + high rent is the textbook signature of a supply-constrained market.

The causes are well-documented:

Slow permitting
High construction costs
Aging housing stock
Labor shortages
Flood recovery impacts
Limited available land
High insurance and energy costs

None of these are related to landlord behavior. They’re structural. Yet advocates routinely treat rent increases as proof of excess profit rather than as the downstream effect of supply failure.

And the Study Committee reinforces this, noting bluntly:

“It is becoming increasingly financially infeasible for the private sector to build and provide affordable housing.”

If landlord profit were the defining feature of Vermont’s rental market, private development would be booming—not collapsing.

The Legal Aid Claim: Strong Words, No Data Behind Them

The Herald quotes a Legal Aid attorney saying:

“Rent has skyrocketed beyond landlords’ legitimate costs.”

But the Study Committee reveals that Vermont has no dataset capable of validating or falsifying this claim. The Committee ends its report with a list of unanswered questions, including:

“What returns on investment are landlords receiving?”
“How are costs borne by landlords?”
“Do landlords maintain consistent profit margins?”
“How do nonpaying tenants affect rental rates?”

These are the exact questions you would need to answer before asserting whether rents exceed legitimate costs. The State has not answered them. It has not collected the data required to answer them. There is no evidence base at all behind the Legal Aid claim.

Yet the narrative persists because it is politically useful—not because it is empirically grounded.

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Where the Real Crisis Lies: Vermont Cannot Build Its Way Out

Perhaps the most important point in the entire report is one that the Legislature barely grapples with: Vermont is not an economically viable place to build large amounts of unsubsidized housing.

Even modest duplexes, triplexes, and four-unit buildings are financially impossible without subsidy. Construction costs per unit now reach $400,000 to $600,000 in many projects; debt service alone would require monthly rents exceeding what most Vermonters can pay.

The report acknowledges this indirectly through testimony:

Private developers cannot serve low-income Vermonters without subsidy.
Aging, flood-prone units are being lost faster than they can be replaced.
Costs have risen faster than wages and construction capacity.

But instead of confronting the structural math, the Legislature focuses on policy tools—rent control, just-cause eviction, and registries—that do not create new housing and do not reduce construction costs.

The Core Problem: Vermont Is Making Policy Blindfolded

After months of hearings, testimony, and analysis, the Study Committee ends with a list of 20 unanswered questions, almost all of them foundational. The final section reads as a confession: Vermont cannot diagnose the housing crisis because it does not measure the variables necessary to understand it.

Before debating:

rent caps,
eviction reforms,
tenant purchase rights,
or statewide registries,

Vermont first needs a comprehensive data overhaul.

The first step in any serious policy process should be:

1. Reliable homelessness demographics

2. Accurate eviction outcome tracking

3. Real landlord cost and ROI analysis

4. Statewide rental census and condition assessment

5. Transparent construction cost benchmarking

6. Migration and displacement tracking

Without these metrics, Vermont will continue debating shadows, not causes.

Conclusion

At some point, the plain truth has to be said: Vermont is passing housing laws without having the data to understand the problem they’re trying to solve. The Legislature is debating rent control, just-cause eviction, right-to-counsel, purchase mandates, and new regulatory layers — all of which cost taxpayers and property owners money — while openly admitting it cannot answer the most basic questions about landlord costs, rental economics, or the causes of homelessness.

They’re making laws with no baseline facts, no market analysis, and no financial modeling. They are spending public dollars and restructuring private housing markets based on guesswork.

Before one more bill passes, before one more program is funded, before one more regulation is imposed, Vermont needs to do something simple and long overdue: answer the questions in its own report.

Until then, the responsible position is clear:
no new housing laws, no new mandates, no new restrictions — not until the State can prove it understands the system it’s trying to regulate.

Count accurately. Measure honestly. Build policy on numbers, not narratives.

Until that happens, no amount of legislation will fix what Vermont refuses to understand.

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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

#fyivt #vermont #housingcrisis #policyfails

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