Vermont’s housing crisis is pushing policymakers, environmental advocates, and communities into increasingly tense debates about how the state should grow. A recent joint op-ed by Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore and Department of Public Service Commissioner Kerrick Johnson argues that Vermont must move more decisively to build homes — and accuses environmental groups of obstructing progress without offering alternatives. Their piece raises valid concerns about the scale of the state’s housing needs, but it also exposes gaps in the way Vermont talks about development, affordability, and environmental protection.
A Crisis With Real Numbers Behind It
The op-ed’s core statistics are accurate. State housing assessments estimate Vermont needs 30,000 to 40,000 additional year-round homes by 2030 to stabilize vacancy rates and meet workforce demand. The authors’ suggested benchmark of 8,000 units per year reflects the upper end of that need.
Housing costs tell a similar story. Vermont’s median listing price has doubled in the past decade, reaching nearly $500,000 in late 2025. That increase places homeownership far beyond the reach of the state’s median household income, currently around $75,000. Rental markets show the same pressure, with many counties reporting rent-to-income ratios far above recommended thresholds.
Where the op-ed shifts from data into assertion is in its claims about environmental organizations. The authors critique these groups for offering “no actionable alternatives,” but provide no examples of specific appeals, delays, or decisions that demonstrate such opposition. Without supporting evidence, those claims remain rhetorical rather than substantiated.
The Investment Gap
One of the central challenges absent from the op-ed is scale. Constructing 8,000 units annually would require unprecedented investment — roughly $2.8 billion per year, assuming an average cost of $350,000 per unit, which industry analysts say is conservative given Vermont’s labor constraints and construction expenses.
That raises a question neither the administration nor its critics regularly address: Who will finance this surge?
For private developers, the economics are difficult. Vermont’s incomes lag far behind the home prices produced by current construction costs. Building thousands of new units at today’s cost structure risks creating housing that Vermonters still cannot afford.
Without matching growth in wages or major public subsidies, analysts warn that large-scale construction could simply reshape Vermont’s demographics by attracting higher-income newcomers while local workers continue facing limited options.
The Competing Priorities Problem
Interviews with planning experts and developers point to a structural issue familiar in other states but rarely stated plainly in Vermont: the state is trying to achieve three goals that cannot coexist at full strength.
Those goals are:
- Building substantially more housing,
- Keeping that housing affordable, and
- Maintaining strong environmental protections.
Stakeholders across the political spectrum acknowledge privately that Vermont can fully achieve any two, but not all three. If protections remain strict and affordability is a priority, production remains low. If production and protections are emphasized, affordability suffers. And if Vermont insists on production plus affordability, environmental requirements must be eased.
This trade-off framework is well understood among land-use practitioners, but it rarely appears in policy messaging. The result is a public debate where each camp argues its goals are compatible with the others, even when the underlying economics suggest otherwise.
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Permitting Realities
A similar tension exists in the permitting system. Local officials describe another three-way conflict between permitting that is:
- Fast,
- Inexpensive, and
- Highly protective.
Again, Vermont can reliably sustain only two. Fast and protective processes require significant staffing and resources and are costly. Cheap and protective systems are slow. Fast and cheap systems are less protective.
The op-ed calls for a permitting framework that is both efficient and environmentally sound, but the practical trade-offs involved in achieving that balance are left unaddressed.
Property Rights and the Cost of Protection
Another underexplored tension surfaces when environmental objections halt or reshape private development proposals. Landowners and developers who spoke with FYIVT say they often face restrictions based on ecological criteria without any corresponding mechanism to compensate them for lost use or diminished value.
In other states, conservation trusts and habitat mitigation banks provide funding to offset such conflicts by purchasing land or supporting ecological restoration. Vermont has versions of these tools but at a scale too small to address widespread housing needs. The result is that private landowners often bear the full economic cost of environmental protection on land they own and maintain.
Analysts say this mismatch between regulatory authority and financial responsibility creates ongoing friction: decisions that benefit the public may be paid for entirely by individuals.
The Fiscal Catch-22
Vermont’s broader economic picture adds a final complication. Many of the state’s most urgent needs — infrastructure upgrades, emergency housing, flood mitigation — require substantial revenue. Yet Vermont frequently resists development and population growth that would expand the tax base necessary to fund these priorities.
This dynamic forces the state to rely heavily on federal funds, creating a long-term dependency that makes long-term planning difficult. Economists describe this as a policy loop: Vermont’s needs require more money, but growth-averse policies reduce the state’s ability to raise it.
A Missing Conversation
The op-ed accurately describes the scale of Vermont’s housing shortage, but it stops short of engaging with the structural trade-offs that make the crisis difficult to solve. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, have not articulated what level of human cost they consider acceptable in pursuit of ecological protection.
Until both sides confront the limits of what Vermont can simultaneously protect, build, and afford, the debate will continue to circle the same unresolved questions — while the cost of living continues to rise for the people already here.
Dave Soulia | FYIVT
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