SWEENEY: Vermont needs more housing now

November 9, 2025 | By Kane Sweeney

Here in Vermont, the word “affordability” has been packaged and repackaged so many times over the last few years that it’s become nothing more than a buzzword. 

What started as a siren call from working people about their hyper-inflated cost of living has been co-opted by wealthy landowners who use the word to campaign against wealth taxes and rent reform. 

Let’s set the record straight. 

Vermont is not affordable to working people. Fifty percent of renters are cost burdened and 30% of homeowners are too—and that’s just Waterbury. 

Where once Vermont was a powerhouse of industry and agriculture, its working people have since been corralled into service industry and low-paying trade jobs to please the ever-tumultuous tourist economy. 

However, cracks that formed a decade ago have widened into crevasses. The yearly beat-down Vermont receives from climate change has not been a positive force for tourism. Floods two summers in a row, bad ski seasons, and a drought that dampened the color of the trees during foliage season have not and will not increase job growth in tourism and service sectors, which already employ nearly 40,000 Vermonters. Climate change, paired with the federal government’s seemingly unreal disdain for foreign visitors, will crush tourism, thereby closing restaurants, coffee shops, inns, and bed and breakfasts. The economic driver for towns all over Vermont will be wiped away. 

What does this mean for working people who already struggle to afford the roofs over their heads or the restaurant owner struggling to pay their staff? It’s bad. 

If you’re reading this and you dare not enter Burlington due to the perception of widespread homelessness, buckle up. 

If the tourism economy fails, that widespread homelessness will no longer be contained to just Chittenden County because 9% of Vermont’s labor force will be out of a job. 

I’m not calling for Vermonters who work in the service or tourism industry to quit, pack their bags and leave. I, myself, am a chef. What I’m calling for is a paradigm shift in our local economies before it’s too late. 

That means housing and a metric ton of it. More housing means more people. More people mean less reliance on tourists to fund local economies. And more housing means a staving off of rent increases. Supply up. Demand down.

Right now, short-term rentals, or tourist rentals, have sliced a good chunk of the pie away from working people. People who’ve lived in the same apartment for years are having their leases cut to make way for tourists. Whole houses and apartment buildings are being purchased by investors to convert them into short-term rentals. Whole neighborhoods in your community—once vibrant and neighborly—have been converted into open-air hotels. It’s not sustainable and it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for working people who can’t find an affordable place to live. It’s dangerous for local businesses. It’s dangerous to your neighborhood, and it’s dangerous for our local economies. When the tourist bubble pops and those investors pull out, who will buy those buildings? Who will rent them? Not the 9% of Vermonters who will be unemployed. 

However, if every single short-term rental in Vermont switched back to long-term tomorrow, it would not fix the problem. Rental reform must be paired with new construction. Communities must grow or they will die. 

So often are working people left out of the discussion of zoning bylaws and tax debates that in some cases, they’re forgotten about entirely. However, working people are the bones that hold Vermont's body together. Without them, you have no economy. Working people and affordable housing must be agenda item number one in every city council, selectboard, board of aldermen, planning commission and zoning committee meeting from now until our affordability crisis is solved. 

We can no longer trust the tourism economy. We must rely on each other. We must make housing affordable for every single working person in the state of Vermont, and we have to do it now. We have an opportunity to make Vermont the place we all know it can be: Affordable for everyone. We just have to take the reins and do it.

Kane Sweeney is vice chair of the Waterbury Select Board.