Homing in on Mad River Valley's housing needs
Toolbox
By Farley Urmston Correspondent - Published: November 5, 2004
Of all the issues facing the Mad River Valley, perhaps none is thornier than the rising cost of resort land and housing. It impacts everyone, from ski area employees who can't find a place to live to couples who can't afford to buy a house and raise a family, to farmers who find it harder and harder to rent pastures in the area.
As this weekend's Valley Vision 2020 kicks off at the Waitsfield Elementary School, housing in the Mad River Valley is sure to have a prominent spot among residents' concerns. Valley Vision 2020, a Friday evening and Saturday event, is designed to give residents a chance to take an active role in determining the resort area's future.
But solving the housing crunch will not be easy. And the issue of housing – both shortages and costs – is not a new concern for either the state or the towns in the resort region, where most incomes fall far below what it takes to buy most housing.
Over the past eight years, Vermonters have seen the median price of a home rise nearly 54 percent, from $97,500 in 1996 to $150,000 in 2003. Wages, on the other hand, rose only 20 percent over this time period, according to the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign, a statewide coalition in Burlington that advocates for housing issues.
Figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition show 61 percent of workers in the state are employed in jobs with median wages below what the Coalition determines as Vermont's "housing wage:" $13.78 per hour. The group argues this is the threshold necessary to afford the rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment, based on spending only 30 percent of one's income on housing costs.
In valley towns, the situation is even worse. Some 73 percent of those employed in Waitsfield last year made below the "housing wage" for Washington County, $26,645 or $12.81 per hour. The average salary paid out in Warren last year was $19,559; in Fayston it was $21,176.
Housing at those incomes in Waitsfield, Warren and Fayston presents a near insurmountable task. Vermont housing data shows the situation in stark terms.
In Warren, 40 single family homes were sold last year, 25 of them as vacation dwellings with an average price of $375,908 (median: $302,500). The average selling price of the other 15 was scarcely better at $305,832 (median: $200,000).
Waitsfield's average for its 21 primary residence homes sold last year was $234,857 (median: $200,000); the average for the five vacation homes sold came to $239,800 (median $220,000). Fayston's eight primary residence homes sold for an average of $268,604 (median: $285, 415); the 17 vacation homes sold in Fayston cost an average of $269,921 (median: $224,000).
Median prices of listed homes currently on the market range from $350,000 for Fayston and Waitsfield, $379,000 for Warren.
Land costs inevitably follow the housing trends, and some farmers are being hard hit. Though the DeFreest family farm, the last working dairy operation in Warren, sits on about 1,000 acres, much of the land the family actually farms is rented from local owners. Over the past five or six years, says Marlene DeFreest, renting land in the area has gotten significantly harder.
Recently a letter arrived from one landowner to announce that for all the farmers that used his land, rent would be doubled. "I think we were the only ones who paid," DeFreest says. "People that were renting the land to hay it couldn't." When borrowed pasture land is sold, families like the DeFreests are forced to look to other towns for necessary acreage.
"We have to go as far as Brandon, and even there it's not always available."
Housing advocates note that far more money can come from selling land to developers than from renting it to farmers. For developers too, it is easier to make a profit on large vacation projects than on smaller more affordable ones.
Says John Fairbanks, coordinator of the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign, "It is not difficult to understand why a developer might chose to focus on high-end housing. If you are a private developer, you need to make a profit. In the valley towns where zoning is strict and infrastructure is unavailable, it is both easier and more profitable to build five or six $3-400,000 homes than it is to build double the number to sell at half the price. If you look only at profit and amount of headache, the choice for that developer is obvious."
As in many small resort towns, affordable housing projects are hard to launch and finish. For a number of reasons, all three of the affordable housing projects proposed last year in Warren failed. In one case, the Central Vermont Community Land Trust, the project's sponsor, needed time that the seller couldn't give. In another, local opposition to the loss of open space near a school put an end to the endeavor. In the third, problems with access doomed the project.
Dee Pierce, director of the Mad River Valley Planning District and an organizer of this weekend's event, finds the inability to built affordable housing frustrating.
"We're talking affordable here; we're not talking Section 8. This is housing for people that make less than $60,000 a year," she says.
Pierce, who has studied housing development in places like Vail, Colo., and Lebanon, N.H., says it is imperative that more facets of the community become invested in this issue. "A public-private partnership involving local businesses seems to be the piece that will make it happen," she said.
Bob Ackland, president of Sugarbush Resort, agrees that businesses can only do so much. "Currently we are working with the Vermont Community Land Trust to try to find areas that work for development. We've tried to leverage whatever influence Sugarbush might have to make one or two sites work, but it has not happened to date."
Money for affordable housing was built into now-postponed plans for a high-end lodge project at the ski area, and such stipulations will likely be a part of any future expansion of the resort. "There was a set amount per unit sold that would go into a trust for affordable housing," says Ackland. "We were adamant about having the dollars stay in the valley and having the money put into bricks and mortar rather than just funding studies and solving bureaucratic problems."
Earmarked dollars do not, however, always result in affordable housing in the valley. Without municipal water and sewer in place, and without zoning changes that allow for increased density, projects are often doomed from the start.
Says Ackland, "That's the bigger challenge. Until we as a community recognize infrastructure as the biggest hurdle and we as a society accept dense communities and see them as potentially beneficial, nothing is going to happen. We all live in Vermont and we think, 'Well, we don't want to have dense little areas because that's too urban.' Ideas get nixed by the not-in-my-backyard mentality."
John Fairbanks is convinced that most people in these towns naturally support affordable housing, and that if residents know that issues such as traffic and aesthetics will be attended to, they will support denser development in certain areas. The problem, he says, is getting proponents to be active.
"It's not enough to sit back and say you support affordable housing. You have a minority of very strong opponents to housing out there who are more organized, more active, more vocal. What a lot of communities in Vermont need is a lot of people who support housing to show up at these [planning commission] meetings." Whatever your specific concerns are, he says, "if you understand that families are going to grow, that children are going to want to live in the area but may not be able to, you have to care about this issue."
Organizers of Valley Vision 2020 hope that the open conversation format of the two-day event will encourage people of all opinions and ideas to start talking.
"This is a chance," says Pierce, "for people to come and talk about what type of community they want – what they want their towns to look like now, five years from now, 20 years from now."
Valley Vision 2020 will be held at the Waitsfield Elementary School from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Friday evening and from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. All are welcome and encouraged to come.
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