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.
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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.
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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.
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According to the report, Vermont’s homeowner vacancy rate — the number of homes on the market compared to the total number of actual households — is estimated at 1.2 percent, below the 2.0 percent rate considered indicative of a healthy housing market, with Chittenden County at a notably low vacancy rate of .5 percent, reflecting the high demand for homes in the region.
While the Legislature made monumental strides in housing legislation over the last two years — Act 47 and working to modernize Vermont’s 50-year-old land use law, Act 250 — meant to spur development and limit obstacles to building housing, a campaign, Building Homes Together, launched by Chittenden County Regional Planning, Champlain Housing Trust and non-profit developer Evernorth aims to build nearly 1,000 units of housing per year in the county over the next five-year period.
But in October, the group announced that Chittenden County had drastically failed to meet that goal with 720 units built in 2023.
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.
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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.
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byHabib Sabet
Since its inception, more than 500 homes have been built in the district; 187 are under construction, and 46 have been permitted and are awaiting construction. Of those, 139 are perpetually affordable. These numbers do not include the roughly 200 new homes built within City Center, but outside of the TIF district.
“When I think about the TIF district, I think about it as the kernel or the seed,” Blanchard said. “What we’re seeing right now is we have now established a downtown market in South Burlington, which we did not have before and the TIF district as an economic tool has established this form of the downtown. It’s the core of it. But that also means that it is blazing the way for other properties in the area to build on the success that is here.”
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Baker noted that a large portion of these numbers comes from the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Medical Center’s investment in housing but countered the common perception that since the institution’s faculty, staff and students have first-right of refusal to the housing, it’s not really adding positively to the housing stock.
“I think that’s a real misconception,” she said. “A lot of these folks are folks that will be otherwise living in our community, in other apartment buildings or condos or pricing out other folks who want to live here. It’s important to always note that adding capacity across the living spectrum is adding capacity. It’s not fighting between our neighbors on what capacity that is, whether it is affordable housing, student housing, designated housing, it is still adding new homes.”
Competing goals
But with that growth, both Baker and Conner noted that there is simultaneously an increased focus on things like environmental protection, climate resiliency and connectivity. All these are also areas of focus that the city’s planning department and commission focused on when crafting the new land use regulations that were just passed by the city council earlier this month. But the team also noted that the battle between the need for housing and protecting portions of Vermont’s landscape is not always easy to balance.
Like many neighboring communities, some residents in South Burlington have voiced opposition to development and lawsuits over environmental and aesthetic concerns have frequently ended up in court.
“Zoning is an incredibly strong tool to be strategic as a community,” Baker said. “I think South Burlington is really trying to thread that needle right now and actively participate in all the climate conservation efforts and the housing efforts, and I think that’s a hard conversation in our community, and that’s a hard conversation at the state level.”
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While South Burlington is partly leading the way for housing goals in the county, the work to meet demand is not possible without collaboration with surrounding communities, Conner and Baker said, which reflects the way people inherently move through the county on a daily basis.
“They don’t live their daily lives within the bounds of one single municipality,” Conner said. “They use Chittenden County and beyond every day for their everyday needs. The community uses our core communities interchangeably every day, and so it’s therefore our responsibility collectively to make sure that the transportation, housing, the services, all that is provided to the way people live.”
The growth over the last 10 years is only set to continue as the city has plans for even more infrastructure projects — all approved by voters — to create a more walkable, thriving downtown and includes projects like the planned walking and biking bridge over I-89.
“It’s always really thrilling to go outside and to see people walking on Market Street and sitting at the bench in front of the library and city hall, seeing the seniors in the senior center,” Blanchard said. “Our downtown is about people, and it’s just so great to see people using it in the way that it was intended.”
A portion of a Vermont highway has been shut down following a rock slide on Tuesday.
Vermont State Police said in an email around 1:22 p.m. that they had received a report of a rock slide on Route 5 in Fairlee, just south of the Bradford town line.
“Initial reports are of a substantial amount of rock & trees in the roadway, making travel through the area difficult or impassable,” they said. “Motorists should seek alternate routes or expect delays in the area.”
Route 5 is a nearly 200-mile, mostly two-lane highway running from the Massachusetts border to Canada.
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In an update shortly after 2 p.m., state police said Route 5 in Fairlee between Mountain Road and Sawyer Mountain Drive will remain closed while the Vermont Agency of Transportation assesses the stability of the roadway.
Vermont has some big problems that desperately need fixing! Many of them are connected, in a variety of ways to a symptom rarely discussed. The population of Vermont is falling while the population of the United States is growing. Vermont has been losing people for the last few years. The reasons include deaths in Vermont outpace births; between 2023 and 2024 there were 1,700 more deaths than births. More people left the state than moved into Vermont. In another worrying sign the birthrate in the United States is down 25 percent since 2007 when the decline began. Another symptom may be that weekly take home pay in Vermont is about $400.00 less than the national average. Taken together these problems should set off alarms about our future.
S, it should not be a surprise that our schools throughout the state have a diminishing number of students while simultaneously school budgets are skyrocketing upward. Yes, it is costing us more to educate fewer students, and Vermonters are rarely wealthy. Maintaining quality schools is expensive. The average pay for public school teachers in the United States is $72,030. The average pay for a public-school teacher in Vermont is only $52,559. A nearly $20,000 gap is hardly an incentive to attract the best of the best. Good teachers are a precious commodity.
Gov. Phil Scott has demanded the Legislature do something about education costs in the Green Mountain State. Legislators have been spending much more time on this problem than any other facing the state. There have been various proposals, one of the latest is from Sen. Seth Bongartz of Manchester that would create a two year “ramp period” for school districts to merge voluntarily. Two years is a long time to wait when the problem is financially urgent. School mergers are inevitable in many areas which will mean the eventual closing of several small elementary schools. The closing in many cases means long bus rides for little kids.
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One idea that has not been discussed is increasing, substantially, Vermont’s population over the next decade or so. We don’t have enough students to make financial sense for our small rural schools. We need more property-owning people whose taxes will help balance our cash-strapped education budgets. Why doesn’t the Legislature think about a campaign to entice people to move to the Green Mountain state?
In the 1960s Vermont’s economic development officials, under new Gov. Phil Hoff, launched a marketing campaign that was known as “Vermont the Beckoning Country.” The campaign was remarkably successful, bringing thousands of people to a place that at that time had largely skipped the Industrial Revolution. Vermont’s ski industry began growing by leaps and bounds then, bringing in large numbers of people new to the state. Entrepreneurs, many of them World War II veterans, began developing ski resorts in the Green Mountains. They attracted thousands of visitors and some of those visitors fell in love with Vermont. They stayed. These Flatlanders changed the state, making it more liberal, and more environmentally conscious. Gov. Hoff, the first Democrat elected governor since 1853, was followed by a wave of successful liberal politicians who turned Vermont from red to blue. People can differ about the whether the political transformation improved the state or destroyed it, but the state undoubtedly grew more prosperous.
Vermont has plenty of land that can be used to build new housing. New people can bring fresh ideas and the capital needed to create new businesses with good jobs. More families living in more houses means more property taxes going to schools. It should also lighten the load for the current financially stressed Vermonters.
A well-financed advertising campaign to entice new people to make Vermont their home will make us more prosperous. More taxpayers can be one of the many solutions needed to save our struggling education system.
Clear the cobwebs off the old slogan and invite a whole new crop of young, energetic families to Vermont the Beckoning Country!
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Eric Peterson lives in Bennington. Opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.
