18 years ago, when Lilli West got into the real estate business, she saw a need. Back then, it was short sales and foreclosures—and she grew her business at an unlikely time when real estate agents were leaving the industry left and right. Today, as the owner of Maple Leaf Realty, the largest agency in Bennington, VT, West sees a different need: “We have run out of housing, and we desperately need new construction.”
To address this need, West thought Vermont would benefit from a checklist or roadmap for housing development, to streamline and clarify the complicated process. She was thrilled to learn that the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development was creating this very tool to jumpstart and empower missing middle housing production.
The “Homes for All Toolkit,” launched in March 2024 and supported by AARP-VT funding, is a design-and-do guide for small-scale home builders, investors, and community leaders. It proposes missing middle homes, or MMH, as a way to deliver diverse and affordable housing choices in convenient, existing, walkable neighborhoods and places.
VT Missing Middle Home typologies developed for the Homes for All Toolkit
These home types, which include accessory dwelling units (ADUs), duplexes, small-scale multi-household buildings, and neighborhood-scale mixed-use/live-work buildings, are rooted in Vermont’s traditional development pattern and the New England vernacular style. However, over the 20th century, restrictive zoning and regulations made many of those options illegal or limited where they could be built.
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The result for Vermont’s home production environment: large, expensive single-family homes, large and mid-size lots, and large-scale multi-family apartments. Vermonters looking for housing options in-between, like a duplex or four-plex, cooperative housing, senior housing units, age-friendly homes, or townhouse condominiums have very limited options.
The VT Homes for All Toolkit aims to change that.
This 220-page guide is full of tips, tools, and resources for would-be developers (and those who support their work) to build the well-located homes Vermonters need at different scales designed to cater to a range of income levels, family sizes, and lifestyles. It includes three components:
Builders’ Workbook: A Missing Middle Home builders’ ‘how-to’ workbook that provides a comprehensive road map to real estate development for first-timers. This workbook provides guidance on a variety of considerations—including regulations and zoning, financing, infrastructure, and design, with advice on potential partners able to help beginner developers achieve success.
Missing Middle Homes Design Guide: A design guide for Missing Middle Homes drawing from local architectural traditions that are familiar and loved by Vermonters—as well as suitable for New England’s variable weather.
Vermont Neighborhood Infill Design Case Studies: A series of five case studies developed in cities and towns throughout Vermont (Bellows Falls, Arlington, Rutland, Vergennes and Middlesex) showing how MMH building designs can be integrated into existing neighborhoods and communities using illustrated visualizations.
But the Toolkit is much more than its component parts. It is the start of a movement to bring missing middle housing back to Vermont communities, an opportunity to grow a new generation of developers who value “return on community” as much as return on investment. It is a statewide clarion call to support these developers and their work through common-sense regulatory and financial solutions.
This was evident on March 14, when the VT Homes for All Toolkit launched to a maximum capacity crowd at the Toolkit Trainer Summit in Barre City.
The half-day event was an energizing occasion to connect, network, and learn for novice and emerging small-scale home builders, community development professionals, and local leaders interested in innovative home-building and home-renovation solutions. The Summit included a Vermont small-scale developers’ panel featuring stories and advice from four current developers, and an interactive activity where attendees were encouraged to “think like a developer” and design a missing middle housing site plan. Using a base map, resource packet, and a kit of parts—including three of the new VT missing middle home typologies—participants worked through a set of common development constraints such as environmental, regulatory, and infrastructure. They then identified developable area and configured the site plan, being mindful of parking requirements, driveway access, outdoor gathering space, and considerations like snow melt that are familiar to Vermonters.
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Participants working through the “Think Like a Developer” site design activity.
Summit attendee Ravi Venkataraman—who is a planner with the City of Burlington, lecturer at the University of Vermont, and PhD candidate in Planning at Virginia Tech—says the activity animated the Toolkit in a practical way. “The ‘think like a developer’ activity brought together the dimensional requirements concepts with the places we walk by every day,” said Venkataraman. “Having developers in the room too clarified not only the impacts of small changes to, say, setbacks and lot coverage on the built environment, but also how such small changes affects small developers, renters and homebuyers alike.”
The story of Homes for All
The Homes for All Toolkit was years in the making, and it was not born in a vacuum.
“The Vermont Department of Housing & Community Development (DHCD) strives to keep tabs on innovations around the Country,” explains Planning & Policy Manager Jacob Hemmerick—especially when it comes to untying the Gordian knot that is the housing crisis. He points to development-ready community checklists popping up in places like Maine and Michigan, pre-approved house plan sets such as “Build South Bend” in Indiana, and emerging non-profits like the Incremental Development Alliance’s small-scale developer training.
Community Infill Site Visit in Vergennes, VT – October 2023. Photo credit: Jacob Hemmerick.
DHCD saw an opportunity to offer a step up for small-scale developers in Vermont’s unique market. It was an idea to challenge market forces suppressing missing middle homes and builders, and it spoke to the indomitable spirit of Vermonters and their passion for local solutions scaled for our rural economy. The Governor’s team and Senator Michael Sirotkin, former Chair of the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs, saw the potential and supported funding for this project in the Omnibus Housing Bill in 2022. The Department then framed up the project, attracted strong interest in the consulting contract, and hired Utile Planning & Design, a firm with extensive experience in both affordable housing and the New England context.
Over the past year, the Homes for All team engaged dozens of folks across the state, from experts across the building professions to bankers and real estate agents. The team also led neighborhood infill studies with local advocates in five communities and conducted precedent research in many more. One of those communities was Bellows Falls, which applied to participate in the project as a pilot infill site.
“This toolkit is imperative for small downtowns like Bellows Falls, where there is so much passion for the community and housing, but a gap in development skills. The toolkit helps to fill that gap by providing step by step guidance to developing new housing for new or emerging housing providers,” says Sarah Lang, Administrator of the Rockingham/Bellows Falls Incremental Development Working Group, or RIDWG. She added that the Toolkit was one step in “a long list” that RIDWG has taken to advance incremental development in the community.
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Exploring an infill site in Bellows Falls as part of the neighborhood infill case study site visits.
Homes for All was supported by a Steering Committee and design subgroup representing industry leaders and allied professions throughout Vermont. Lessons learned transcended the Toolkit itself, and include additional needs for hands-on training, modular construction options, and continued land development regulation reform by locals.
Importantly, infill housing is facilitated by, and reinforces, recent advances and innovations in Vermont’s regulatory landscape, including code reform, historic statewide housing legislation, incentive programs to locate housing in compact, walkable communities, and new funding streams to support Accessory Dwellings Units and middle-income housing renovation and production.
And the work continues. “We are working hard in the legislature this session to ensure that land use, permitting, and density are all addressed in ways that promote housing development, not limit it,” says Alex Farrell, Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development. “Infill and missing middle housing represent practical solutions to growing our housing stock that can serve as the building blocks for vibrant, equitable, and adaptable neighborhoods.”
What’s next for Homes for All
Vermont has a plan to keep bringing missing middle housing back online and keep the momentum generated by the Toolkit’s launch going.
The Toolkit’s four missing middle housing typologies proposed in the toolkit will be starting points for a pre-approved plan set of context-sensitive designs ready for use around the state, along with regulatory efficiencies, to make housing development more predictable and affordable—as time is money in real estate. Vermont would become one of the first states to produce such a pre-approved plan set.
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Before and after pictures of small-scale developer Jonah Richard’s renovation project in Bradford, VT.
Later this year, the Department will also launch the first round of a live training cohort to coach a group of aspiring developers through the Builders’ Workbook with hands-on project support, technical assistance, and networking opportunities.
“This is representative of a sea change,” said Seth Leonard, Managing Director of Community Development at the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, at the Homes for All Summit on March 14. “Housing is the backbone of our economic vibrancy, of our diversity, of our shifting demographic realities for the future. We have to focus on who’s building and developing in Vermont in a new way.”
The Homes for All project is on track to attract and support and new generation of grassroots investors, local champions, and developers—especially first-time, women and BIPOC builders committed to their communities and ready to build walkable neighborhoods.
One such aspiring developer is Lilli West, the Bennington-based broker whose other hats include investor, renovator, and landlord. Now, West is making the transition to small-scale developer with her new company, Solutions Development. It’s an apt name because West, like many Vermonters, knows this moment of housing shortage calls for innovative solutions, and leaders to pilot them, on the path to providing homes for all Vermonters.
Lilli West.
The Homes for All Toolkit and materials—including dynamic pro formas—are available to view and download for free at:https://accd.vermont.gov/homesforall.
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
