Burlington’s rental housing market, with a vacancy rate below 1% for the last several years, is in crisis, especially for most low to moderate-income people. Households which cannot easily find affordable housing are especially vulnerable to problems such as homelessness, housing discrimination, substandard housing, and other violations of housing rights.
The UVM/Burlington COPC fair share housing project is performing research, education, and outreach to understand the housing crisis better and to develop recommendations for alleviating it.
Most of the area’s affordable housing is in the central city of Burlington, concentrated in a neighborhood known as the Old North End, and in a neighboring old mill town, Winooski. These two towns are shouldering most of the burden of the affordable housing crisis, and of the social costs of poverty in general. Their ability to do more is limited: they have little additional open space on which to build new housing.
In contrast, the Burlington suburbs have abundant land, which has been rapidly developed for new housing, at a cost which is unattainable for low-income households. In addition, the inner-ring suburbs have used much previously open land for retail and service commercial development. These industries have a high percentage of jobs which are low-wage. Thus the suburbs are generating a large number of low-wage jobs, but not providing low-income housing for a large portion of the workers who take the jobs.
The UVM/Burlington COPC housing project seeks to alleviate the affordable housing crisis in the Old North End by opening up the suburbs to more low-income housing. Toward this end, project participants have been documenting the growth of low-wage jobs in the suburbs, the distribution of low-income housing by town, and the barriers to affordable housing in the suburbs. We are working with the city’s Community and Economic Development Office, and with local groups, including Vermont Tenants, Inc., the Committee on Temporary Shelter, the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, and the Lake Champlain Housing Development Corporation.
The UVM/Burlington COPC project also developed an undergraduate service learning course on the local housing crisis. About 20 students, including two workers from local nonprofit housing agencies, studied the dimensions of the housing crisis both nationally and locally. They also helped to construct and administer a rental housing survey in the Old North End. The survey documents affordability problems, the extent of certain housing code violations and safety problems, the extent of housing discrimination (by race, nationality, presence of children, and receipt of public assistance), the location of jobs vs. housing, and the preferences of residents for central city vs. suburban living.
We have presented our research in two reports. The first of these, Spatial Mismatch: the Location of Low-Wage Jobs and Affordable Housing in Chittenden County, was released in November 2001. The second report, Affordable Housing in Chittenden County: The Necessity of Regional Housing Coordination, was released in March 2002 and has been updated.
We have met with the planning commissions and/or the selectboards of the largest and fastest-growing urban and suburban towns in our area to present our research and discuss local housing affordability and barriers to affordable housing.
We organized a regional conference, "Making Housing Affordable: Regional Solutions for Chittenden County," on October 23, 2002. The conference featured workshops on zoning tools, regional housing coordination, building local support for affordable housing, and what employers can do. The keynote speaker was Carl Guardino, the President and CEO of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, which has been very proactive in dealing with the housing crisis in Silicon Valley.
For more information, contact:
Elaine McCrate, Co-coordinator of the Fair Housing Project
emccrate@zoo.uvm.edu (802) 656-0192
Brian Pine, Co-coordinator of the Fair Housing Project
bpine@globalnetisp.net (802) 865-7232
