The roots and way out of Vermont's housing crisis

From Brattleboro to Newport and beyond, a crisis is brewing in the Green Mountains. Housing, especially affordable housing, is desperately hard to find.“The state would have to build a minimum of 5,800 homes and apartments by 2025, and more than triple that to address the broader affordability crisis,” Seven Days reported, noting that the growth of Vermont’s housing stock has fallen to one third its 1980s levels. Solving the housing crisis is “going to take both public investment to bring the price down and it's also going to take less barriers in terms of our land use policies to get housing built,” said Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.An unspoken driver of the affordable housing shortage, Seelig said, “has been the growth of income inequality as a key factor in leaving folks behind. … It doesn't take a lot of people coming to Vermont with a ton of money to have a big impact on the housing crisis.”We discussed the housing crisis and efforts to address it with Seelig and Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Brattleboro.