This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

For years, a rundown former hotel in the heart of downtown St. Johnsbury had been a prominent eyesore. An out-of-town landlord owned the property, where commercial spaces sat vacant and apartments were “poorly managed,” said Patrick Shattuck, executive director of Rural Edge, the main affordable housing developer in the region.

In 2021, local leaders celebrated the building’s grand reopening as the New Avenue apartments. Rural Edge partnered with affordable housing developer Evernorth to rehab the old hotel, preserving dozens of affordable units and refurbishing retail spaces. Funding streamed in from multiple sources, but a state earmark secured by the region’s powerful senator, Jane Kitchel, helped lock in the project’s future, Shattuck said.

The undertaking turned the crumbling building from a drain on St. Johnsbury to a major asset, he added. “The investment of public funds in that building has changed the entire market for downtown,” Shattuck said.

Earlier this year, Kitchel, a Democrat who has served the Caledonia district for nearly two decades, announced she would retire at the end of her term. During her tenure in the Senate, she has become one of the chamber’s most powerful members; as chair of the Appropriations Committee, she has had an outsized command over the state’s purse strings.

Her departure has teed up the district’s first open race in recent memory. Squaring off are Democratic candidate Amanda Cochrane, the director of a Northeast Kingdom gender-based violence nonprofit and a newcomer to state politics, whom Kitchel tapped to run, and Rep. Scott Beck, R-St. Johnsbury, a longtime conservative legislator, local business owner and teacher.

The contest is one of several Senate races statewide where Republicans see an opportunity to flip a seat in the upper chamber from blue to red, weakening the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority. Republican Gov. Phil Scott has campaigned for Beck, calling him “a compassionate, common sense public servant who is a champion for taxpayers and making Vermont more affordable.”

Like many Vermont races this election season, this one is animated, in part, by promises to tackle the state’s housing woes. Both candidates emphasize the need to bolster the availability and affordability of housing. But their routes for achieving those goals differ, highlighting some of the key partisan rifts in Vermont housing politics.

‘There’s very little available — almost nothing’

Like all areas of Vermont, this corner of the Northeast Kingdom has seen a precipitous rise in both rents and home prices in recent years. Price tags in Caledonia County tend to be significantly lower than in the state as a whole — the median home price there in 2023 was about $232,000, compared to the state median of $325,000, according to the latest Vermont Housing Needs Assessment — but in this relatively impoverished region, residents are still struggling to keep up with costs.

Nearly a third of households in the county are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income toward housing costs — similar to the statewide average, according to the housing needs assessment.

That problem is exacerbated by a shortage of housing, which became even more acute after the region was repeatedly hit by flooding this summer. The deficit is particularly pronounced for rentals: The needs assessment estimates that Caledonia County needs around 900 to 1,000 more rental units to meet demand over the coming five years. 

“For rental housing, there’s very little available — almost nothing,” Shattuck said.

How to close the affordability gap

On the campaign trail, Beck has emphasized the need to reduce regulatory hurdles to housing construction, a task the Legislature has honed in on at both the local and state levels in recent years — and where Gov. Scott in particular sees more need to push.

Limiting when and how new housing projects can be appealed by naysayers should be a priority, Beck said in an interview, mentioning proposals backed by the Scott administration this past session that largely got axed by lawmakers. Rules that might be “requiring people to over-engineer or overbuild septic systems” should be looked at, he said, as should opportunities for the state to jumpstart water and sewer infrastructure projects to prime places for new development.

The overarching goal, Beck said, is to close the gap between the cost of construction and what the average Vermonter can pay for a home — by making private development more attractive in Vermont.

“When we’ll know we hit it is when developers actually show up and they go, ‘Hey, I’m going to buy that five acre lot right there. And I’m going to put 25 homes on it,’” Beck said. “That’s not happening right now.”

Cochrane has also emphasized the need to streamline Vermont’s land use rules to make it easier to build new housing. Like Beck, she wants to encourage housing growth by incentivizing increased density in areas that are already developed.

The state shouldn’t “make suburbs where farmland is,” Cochrane said. “I think that would be the wrong approach for Vermont. But to really look at — how can we better use the space that we do have?”

In addition to tackling the rules that govern building, Cochrane has also called for increasing funding for affordable housing initiatives. In contrast, Beck has been outspoken about his belief that funneling more public money into the housing market will actually increase construction costs, making housing more expensive overall.

If the state’s limited construction workforce ends up working on projects made possible with government funds — or working for the few people with large amounts of cash to throw at building a one-off house — then that leaves few workers to build “the home for the family that just wants a place to live, but doesn’t qualify for any government assistance,” Beck said.

Coming off years during which Vermont channeled federal pandemic-era funds into affordable housing projects, the debate over how much the state should continue investing in housing dominated discussion at the Statehouse in 2024, and is likely to arise as a key consideration next year, too.

Beck voted against a long-term affordable housing spending bill backed by House Democrats last session that would have relied on revenue from a new income tax bracket for higher-earners and increased property transfer taxes on properties over $750,000.

“We’re taxing people plenty,” Beck said. “The problem is the cost of housing. The problem, I don’t think, is that we’re not throwing enough public money at it.”

That bill died in the Senate, in part because Kitchel never took it up in her powerful committee. At the time, the moderate Democrat emphasized that the state’s resources for investing in housing were finite.

Cochrane echoed the sentiment that the state can’t bear all of the burden of funding affordable housing, and suggested Vermont needs to also look to federal resources and public-private partnerships to spur development, pointing to the New Avenue project as an example. But the proposed wealth tax is worth returning to, she said.

“The opportunity to look at taxing higher earners in the state is something we should continue to look at and determine if that’s a feasible approach to raise revenue,” she said.

Tackling tenant protections

Another housing issue primed to headline the Statehouse next session is the thorny topic of landlord-tenant law. Last session, lawmakers decided not to advance a set of locally approved measures that would ban landlords from evicting tenants for “no cause.”

In Vermont, landlords can generally decline to renew a tenant’s lease for any reason. The locally approved “just cause” standards prohibit evictions for “no cause,” yet still allow a landlord to evict a tenant because they haven’t paid rent, or they’ve violated their lease. Most also limit the amount a landlord can raise the rent when leases roll over.

Beck believes that abolishing “no cause” evictions will decrease housing availability by discouraging landlords from continuing to rent out properties.

“We want these landlords to add units, not get out of the business because you can’t make any money in it,” he said.

In a Vermont Public candidate questionnaire, Cochrane signaled her support for abolishing “no cause” evictions. In a subsequent interview, she equivocated.

Cochrane echoed Beck’s sentiment that landlords are “a key linchpin in our housing ecosystem.” She and her husband used to rent out an apartment, she said. “It really opened our eyes to the challenges that landlords face,” she said. “When times get tough, people can’t pay their rent, and it can be really hard.”

On the other hand, she recognizes that low-income renters are hardest hit by Vermont’s housing shortage.

“We also have an obligation to protect renters who, again, are really struggling the most to make ends meet in our state,” she said.

Any future policy tackling evictions would need to balance those nuances, she said.

Campaign cash

The Caledonia district race has been drawing significant campaign donations, leading the Caledonian Record to proclaim last month that the race was “already the most expensive political contest in the region’s history.”

To date, Beck has raked in over $60,000 in campaign contributions, far out-fundraising Cochrane, who has brought in about $30,000, according to the candidates’ latest campaign finance disclosures.

Beck has garnered support from Gov. Scott’s campaign, as well as from some key housing players. The Vermont Realtor PAC donated $1,680 to Beck’s campaign, and several prominent Chittenden County landlords and developers have given funds, including Mark Bove and Eric Farrell.

Cochrane has brought in funds from several lobbying groups, including Vermont Public Interest Research Group, as well as the teachers’ union Vermont-NEA. Several Democratic senators have donated as well, including Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, the campaign of Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, and Kitchel.

Whoever wins the Senate race will have “huge, huge shoes to fill,” said Shattuck, from local developer Rural Edge.

“Sen. Kitchel was so aware of how precious our resources were, the role of being a good steward, but also making wise investments,” he said.

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