Op-Ed: Build it, but they will not come

April 3, 2026  |  By John Bossange

The belief that Vermont needs more housing with the expectation that those homes will attract new families and workers seeking employment opportunities, defies our history and common sense.   

New families and younger workers are not moving here for three primary reasons: new homes are too expensive; the cost of living is too high; and the winter weather is too harsh.

These are the key reasons that Vermont’s population continues to remain relatively flat. This past year, it actually declined a bit, down 700 people.  Since 2010, our population has only grown from 622,500 then to 644,663. That’s only 4.0%. 

More recently, our past six-year growth rate has gone from 643,007 in 2020 to 647,464 today, an increase of only 4,457 people or just 0.006%.  This should not be surprising to anyone who has lived in Vermont for a decade or more. We’ve experienced steady, flat population totals for years now, and that will most likely continue. 

If a new, younger family or a qualified worker decided to move to Vermont, they would need to find affordable apartments and moderately priced homes of all sorts, including multi-family duplexes and triplexes, and of course, single-family homes. Instead, developers are doing the opposite by constructing unaffordable homes that only well-off families can afford.   

In Chittenden County, where there are many job openings, a building frenzy is underway. A quick look at some local sites says it all. Homes at the Spear Meadows development in South Burlington start at $769,500.  The massive O’Brien Hillside project has homes that range from $640,000 to $1,200,000. Kwiniaska Ridge in Shelburne has houses for sale between $850,000 and $900,000. And in Williston, a new home will cost between $500,000 and $800,000. 

Where are the moderately priced homes that a new, younger employee or a family can afford? If we wish to have more employees for a healthier business community and want to encourage younger families to move here and gradually replace the older population, the price and type of new homes will need to be affordable for younger Vermonters, and not priced to the open market, where only wealthy out-of-state investors and second-home buyers have the money to buy them.

Those who might want to move to Vermont must also know of our six-month “stick season,” cold rainy Novembers and Aprils, and cold mountain snows that have kept our population low for decades. Today, those who live in larger metropolitan areas to our warmer and sunnier south are well settled and will not likely live here full-time. The long, harsh winter climate wears people down. The “blue bird” ski days occur far less than the 35-degree rainy days in November and April, or the 15-degree cloudy days in January and February.

Finally, we all know the overall cost of living in Vermont is very high. Vermont is ranked the 10th most expensive state to live in, with a 113.6 cost of living index score. The price of our food, gas for our cars, heating fuel, electricity, and property and state taxes to sustain our state and local municipal services combine to create a Vermont that is, unfortunately, unaffordable for many residents, and also for those who might wish to settle here. 

With so little commercial tax base, we are caught in a Catch-22 environment. We need more business, small cottage industries, and more people to move here to take those jobs, create a larger tax base, and take the pressure off our property taxes and state income tax. Yet at the same time, as discovered, the homes being built now are unaffordable not only to younger employees but also to Vermonters already here wanting to buy a place of their own.

Will building more homes solve the scarcity issue and create a surplus to help drive the cost of a home down? No. The surplus will evaporate with the free market explosion of wealthy out-of-state buyers seeing more opportunity to gobble up any surplus. The darkened windows we see today in new housing developments reflect not only our flat population growth resulting in unsold homes, but also those that have already been claimed by the wealthy snowbirds or hedge fund investors. 

We might still have a population surge from climate or “red” state refugees.  But those are unknown factors, and not enough of a reason to justify building so many unaffordable new homes in anticipation of a population explosion. Nor does this anticipation justify all the changes to our Act 250-approval process to encourage more housing developments presently under serious consideration by our lawmakers in Montpelier. Even the AEI Housing Center shows Vermont with 342,357 housing units with a shortage of only 3,959 units, the second lowest in the nation! That’s a shortage of just 1.2%.

The winners of the growth industry continue to be the developers, real-estate speculators, and banks. Meanwhile, the losers are Vermont taxpayers who have shelled out public dollars to fund infrastructure subsidizing private development, who will then suffer from even higher taxes, the loss of natural resources, like clean air, water, and their children’s access to the beauty of our cherished landscape.

What we need are more homes to take care of Vermonters who are already here and desperately need affordable, lower or moderately priced homes. Then, if we find our population rising over time, we can build responsibly in the appropriate locations to accommodate new residents.  But until we see signs of steady, long-term growth, let’s stop building thousands of unaffordable new homes based on speculation and ginned-up numbers with the belief that they will come.

South Burlington resident John Bosssnge is president of Better (not bigger) Vermont.