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Report: No end to state's affordable housing woes
By Darren M. Allen
Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER — The costs of buying or renting a home last year continued to outpace the ability of many Vermonters to pay for them — a years-long phenomenon that shows no sign of abetting, state housing advocates said Tuesday.

At a press conference in the Statehouse, advocates said that the median-priced home in Vermont rose 10 percent last year to $165,000, a figure that is out of reach for households earning the statewide median income of $43,000.

For renters, the situation was the same: the monthly cost of a two-bedroom apartment jumped to $698, a 24 percent increase since 1996. To afford such an apartment requires an hourly wage of $13.42 — $27,914 a year.

But behind all those numbers is a story told for years by the state's housing advocates: There isn't enough new housing being built, and demand for existing homes is driving prices higher than most Vermonters can afford.

"Everyone in Vermont owns a piece of this problem," said John Fairbanks, communications director for the Vermont Housing Finance Agency and a candidate for Montpelier City Council who has made affordable housing a key part of his platform.

" If you're a young couple trying to buy a first home, if you're an EMT making $22,000 a year trying to pay the rent, if you're an employer trying to hire new workers, if you're worried about your property taxes going up because your town is losing people, Vermont's affordable-housing shortage is a problem."

It's a persistent problem recognized not just in the report — "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" — released by Fairbanks, but by some economists as well.

On Tuesday, Northern Economic Consulting Inc. reported that housing prices rose 10 percent in 2004, making affordability a growing problem.

"A median-income Vermont family needed to pay a higher share of its income to service a mortgage on a median-priced home in Vermont in 2004," wrote Arthur Woolf, one of the firm's economists. "While the share of income needed to service the mortgage in 2004 rose for the third consecutive year, near record-low mortgage rates means that the housing cost burden on the middle class is still low by the standards of the past 17 years."

Nonetheless, the housing advocates warned, failing to find ways to bring more affordable housing into the mix could eventually be a drain on economic growth, not to mention a continuing burden on the state's social services agencies, which are facing wide budget cuts from the federal government.

"Vermont's housing crisis will be exacerbated by the budget cuts being proposed by the Bush administration," said Erhard Mahnke of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition.

He ticked off a range of proposed cuts — in subsidized rental payments, community development block grants and social services — that could make taking care of low-income families more difficult.

The housing report released Tuesday is the latest edition of an ongoing analysis of the state's housing crunch, a crunch acknowledged even by Vermont developers and homebuilders.

Among the report's findings:

Analysis of available real estate sales data for last year did not find that a single newly built home — now costing an average of $294,000 — went to someone earning the state's median household income.
Over the last three years, an average of 4,000 Vermonters have relied on emergency shelters for housing.
The ability to afford the rent on a typical two-bedroom apartment is severely strained for anyone earning less than $13.42 an hour — which is more than the wage that is earned by waiters and waitresses, cashiers, child care workers, personal home health aides, ambulance drivers, retail sales people and emergency medical technicians.

Contact Darren Allen at darren.allen@rutlandherald.com.