Vermont

City Center vision coming together, South Burlington officials say – VTDigger

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1 year ago

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November 25, 2024

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City Center vision coming together, South Burlington officials say – VTDigger

South Burlington officials, residents and guests cut the ribbon in front of new municipal and community buildings at 180 Market St. in July 2021. File photo by The Other Paper

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Other Paper on Nov. 21

As the state’s second-largest city, South Burlington has for decades had plans for a downtown area ripe with commerce, community and connectivity and data now shows those plans are coming to fruition.

The idea for a thriving city center dates back 50 years when South Burlington was officially incorporated as a city in 1971. Those plans for a vibrant downtown began taking shape nearly 10 years later as the term “City Center” would appear in three master plans that followed.

But it wasn’t long ago that the heart of City Center, the roughly 100 acres wedged between Dorset and Hinesburg roads most notable for housing the state’s only Target and Trader Joe’s, looked much different than it does today.

While the city hit a milestone in 2021 when it cut the ribbon on brand new municipal and other community buildings at 180 Market St., Ilona Blanchard, community development director and an employee of the city for over a decade, remembers that even paving that street was a major accomplishment for the city.

“If you were here 15 years ago, half of Market Street was paved and the other half was a dirt road,” she said, letting out a laugh. “When I came here, we had to borrow a grader from an adjoining community to grade it.”

But after what state and local officials recognize as a critical housing shortage, data shows that South Burlington has become one of the largest suppliers of new homes in the state.

A recent analysis put together by the Vermont Housing Financing Agency for the Department of Housing and Community Development, known as the “Vermont Housing Needs Assessment 2025-2029,” outlined staggering statistics for the state of just under 650,000 people.

In recent years, the report outlines that the supply of available homes has simply not kept pace with the increased demand to live in Vermont.

To accommodate projected growth in households living year-round in Vermont, replace homes that are lost from the housing stock due to disrepair, normalize vacancy rates and house the homeless, Vermont is likely to need an additional 24,000-36,000 total homes across the state over the next five years.

Without increased supply, Vermont’s home sale and rental markets will continue to grow even tighter than they currently are, the report says, with prices likely to continue to skyrocket and further intensify an affordability crisis throughout the state.

Housing plans

Nearly 40 percent of those homes — 290 — were in South Burlington’s city limits. That trend, director of planning and zoning Paul Conner said, has been happening over the last 10 years and is something the city has specifically planned for and welcomed.

The boom can mostly be traced to 2012 when the city took steps to implement a financing model that city manager Jessie Baker said is one of the most powerful economic tools available to municipalities: tax increment financing or TIF. To most, the idea is mysteriously complex, but to city officials like Blanchard, that was the catalyst for much of the growth seen today.

The TIF district, a subset of the 300-acre City Center, was officially adopted by the city council in 2012 and allows the municipality to take out debt to build public infrastructure projects and pay off the debt using future tax revenue from new development.

The idea is that as the infrastructure is built and improved, it attracts private sector investment in new and renovated buildings and incrementally increases the value of the grand list, or the total value of all city property.