WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Housing Shortage Still Critical

Housing Shortage Still Critical

Burlington, Vermont -- September 5, 2002

A new report says Chittenden county's housing shortage remains a crisis, and it's getting worse. A housing task force blames a combination of causes, including the escalating cost of housing -- and NIMBY -- neighbors who say Not In My Back Yard.

Chittenden county continues to grow in population, but the demand for housing has grown faster. In spite of several new housing developments like Victoria's Place nearing completion in Burlington, the Chittenden County Housing Task Force concludes the county's current shortfall of housing is almost two-thousand units, and that the gap will grow to five thousand by the year 2010 if the pace of new housing construction doesn't pick up.

Housing Task Force chairman Mark Lords summed it up: "In the last year it's only gotten worse." Lords is a housing builder with the Snyder group. He says the demand for housing is greater than ever, that not even two rounds of layoffs at IBM have eased the housing crunch.

"I can tell you that I have not noticed any decline in demand for housing after the IBM-2 layoffs, he told reporters. "In fact, I think that at this point in time I've seen more demand than I have in the last fourteen years of building in Vermont." At the same time he says smaller builders are getting out of the business because it's just too expensive.

The group's key recommendation is to allocate a certain amount of new housing to each town through the regional planning commission -- a kind of quota system.

It's not only the suburbs that have resisted housing development. In Burlington's Old North End, the city has issued a stop-work order on a century-old house that's been under renovation for the past eighteen months. The reason: the neighbors complained. The task force says the Not In My Back Yard syndrome leads to time-consuming appeals of housing developments, such as McAuley Square in Burlington, which neighbors delayed for years.

"People ought to have the right to appeal," mayor Peter Clavelle said. "They ought to have their day in court. But they should not have years in court."

Clavelle, a member of the task force, backs the recommendation to allocate housing county-wide -- and make it stick. Towns would be compelled to approve their agreed upon amount of housing."With the adoption of an allocation plan," Clavelle said, "contribution to the housing need will be part of your compliance (a town's) with the regional plan. My vision would be, nothing gets permitted unless you've made your contribution and met your goals."

Andy Potter, Channel 3 news.