Tag Archives: Burlington

Brief respite from drought/wildfire news

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An interesting story in the UC-Berkeley student newspaper touches on several themes of interest. Yes, it’s alien territory – high-rent California, urban beyond our rustic imagination (Alameda County alone, home to Berkeley and Oakland, has 2 ½ times the population of the entire state of Vermont).

Still, there’s resonant material here:

  • A university food-service worker who can’t afford to live in the town where she works, Berkeley, and who thus must endure a long commute. She pays a mere $1,400 for a 2BR apartment in Richmond (hey, at $700 a bedroom, that’s about the going rate in Burlington!). Berkeley’s 2BR apartments average about $2,100.   Here’s a shot of a Berkeley “castle.” Not so exotic, really — we can picture a building like this in St. Johnsbury or Rutland.

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Chances are, a UC food-service worker makes a good deal more than a UVM food service worker. After all, the University of California recently raised its minimum wage to $15, more than Sodexo pays its line workers in Burlington, and the main beneficiaries were reported to be student employees, apparently because the regulars were already getting at least that much.

So, yes, the numbers are all inflated compared to our world, but the cast of characters is similar: workers who can’t find affordable housing near where they’re employed or where their kids go to school.

  • Berkeley has had some form of inclusionary zoning for nearly 20 years, but it hasn’t done the trick. In fact, the affordable housing shortage has increased. This doesn’t mean inclusionary zoning is worthless. It’s an important policy tool, but it’s not salvation and in many cases produces only a small fraction of the affordable units needed. (Burlington’s total is less than 250 units over 25 years, fewer than 100 of which were rentals).

Here’s another, not-so-picturesque perspective of pricey Berkeley:

berkeley2

  • Simply building more housing isn’t going to solve the affordability problem. So says a housing activist quoted in the stories. Yes, he’s talking about the Bay area, which apparently is pretty well-built out within its topographic limitations. Building new housing there typically means tearing down an existing building and replacing it with something taller and more costly.

We hesitate to draw the same conclusion about Burlington, which likewise is pretty well built out, but which still has plenty of room for in-fill and accessory units. Here, a surfeit of additional rental units might indeed alleviate the upward pressure on rents, but not enough, we suspect, for low-wage workers at our state university.

 

Whither, or whether, the South End

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We’d be remiss if we didn’t take note of the Plan BTV South End draft, a colorful 100-page compendium that invites comments through Oct. 1. The draft of course addresses the need for new housing, a controversial subject in the good old South End.

The report’s cover is a nice touch – nothing phony or public-relationsy about it. it’s a workaday portrait with its sandy footpath and telephone poles, warehousey landscape.

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That’s all apt, because the South End is nothing if not “funky.” That’s the recurrent adjective assigned to the neighborhood in this document. Just for kicks, we looked up “funky” in the online Urban Dictionary:

  1. Different but cool/nice.
  2. A bad smell.

Plan BTV’s” funky” is presumably of the first definition – akin to the quality Vermonters like to ascribe to their state generally. But no doubt there are irate Burlingtonians who impute the second definition to this draft report and its qualified appeal for housing in the enterprise zone.

Burlington certainly needs plenty more affordable housing, so why shouldn’t a good share of it be located in the mixed-income South End, given that’s a major employment center (6,300 jobs, according to the report)? The big fears seem to be that more housing will drive up land prices beyond the wherewithal of artists and artisans, and that the housing itself will gentrify the neighborhood.

The report calls for new housing outside the enterprise zone, where housing is already permitted, with affordability stipulations.

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New housing inside the zone could take the form of artists being allowed to live in their studios (“work-live units”), with affordability stipulations; or affordable housing units designated specifically for certified artists (an interesting idea, but we’re wondering if there’s precedent for targeting affordable housing to a particular segment of the lower-income population). Either way, artists would have to jump through some not-very-funky hoops to qualify.

 

A small step in the right direction

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Inclusionary zoning is getting more and more attention as a planning tool to increase the stock of affordable housing. This is a policy that requires, or encourages, various percentages of housing units in new developments to be “affordable.” The standard of affordability varies, but is typically targeted to people earning 80 percent or less of an area’s median income.

snowysubdivision

While inclusionary zoning has proliferated nationwide – a study last year counted more than 500 programs across the country – it hasn’t exactly taken off in Vermont.

True, inclusionary zoning is typically found in urban areas and larger cities, not in rural expanses. Most of the literature on inclusionary zoning, indeed, focuses on metropolitan settings. A recent example is this one from the National Housing Conference on how inclusionary policies can be made more flexible – with examples from urban settings.

The example routine cited in Vermont is Burlington, which adopted inclusionary zoning in 1990 and which happens to be the state’s largest city.

But in fact, small towns can’t make use of it, too – Davidson, N.C. (population 11,000) and Park City, Utah (8,000) are examples.

And closer to home, there’s Hinesburg (4,400). Hinesburg’s regulations apply to developments of 10 or more units in the village growth area, and call for 10 percent of those units to be affordable. Hinesburg also offers density bonuses, expedited review and other development incentives for projects that include affordable housing.

Now, while inclusionary zoning might seem to be a sensible way to address the affordable housing shortage, it’s hardly a cure-all. In Burlington’s case, for example, inclusionary zoning has resulted in just 200-plus affordable units (rentals and sales) over a quarter-century. That’s barely scratching the surface in a city with nearly 10,000 renting households – more than one-third of whom are severely cost-burdened, that is, spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing and utilities.

Inclusionary zoning does serve the purpose of ensuring that new development isn’t entirely upscale and out of reach for people of average means. But it’s just one tool in the affordable-housing planner’s proverbial toolkit. One of the most effective tools of all — in Vermont and everywhere else — would take the form of substantially bigger public appropriations for housing subsidies.

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Do you suppose we’ll be hearing anything about that, or about how to address the affordable housing crisis, in the coming presidential campaign? Don’t all speak at once.

 

Cayuga’s waters trickle down

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When it comes to fair housing, Burlington might be able to learn something from Ithaca. Ithaca issued its “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” in May; Burlington’s most recent AI came out in October 2010, so it’s a bit dated.

Ithaca has about 10,000 fewer people, but the two cities have a few things in common – among them, the university/college presence and predominantly white populations. What’s more, they both happen to be listed in somebody’s “17 Best U.S. Cities for Hippies.”

ithacaoverview

Here are some of the Ithaca findings that might raise parallel questions in Burlington:

  • “People with disabilities report higher levels of discrimination and lower levels of housing accommodation than other residents.”

This appears to be the case in Vermont generally, judging from Human Rights Commission reports, but the extent to which it might be true in Burlington is worth a look.

  • “The City of Ithaca does not currently have a Language Assistance Plan, nor is the need for one mentioned in its 2013 Limited English Proficiency Plan.”

Ithaca’s largest minority population is Asian, and four of the seven languages for which translation services are most needed are Asian. Burlington appears to have a more diverse population of refugees, but the question of how Burlington handles assorted language needs is worth asking. After all, as the Ithaca report notes, “Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that federal assistance recipients provide language assistance to individuals with limited English proficiency.”

  • “The obligation of sub-recipients of City Community Development Block Grant/HOME funds to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) is not effectively communicated by the City nor understood by its sub-recipients.”

Well! Dare we suggest that AFFH is not terribly well understood in these parts, either?

  • “Exclusionary tactics against households who rely on public and private subsidies for housing is prevalent in the City and has a disparate impact on protected classes in Ithaca.”

The report notes that 15 percent of the county’s residents have disabilities, but 40 percent of Housing Choice Voucher recipients (Section 8) have disabilities. Similarly, African Americans comprise 6.5 percent of the county population but 20 percent of the Section 8 population. Fair housing testing showed that discrimination against voucher holders was widespread.

Now in Vermont, housing discrimination against people on public assistance is illegal. How commonly the state’s fair housing law is violated remains an open question, though. What share of Burlington’s Section 8 population is disabled or minority, and how do these people fare in the rental market? Perhaps the city’s next fair housing assessment will address these questions.

 

Side trip to Seattle

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While our “Thriving Communities” campaign focuses on Vermont, we’re not going to wallow in the parochial. An interesting public dialogue on zoning, affordability and housing density is going on in Seattle, and who knows, maybe there’s a takeaway for us.

What does big-city Seattle have in common with small-town Vermont, besides a foliage season?

seattlefoliage

Well, much of Seattle is zoned for single-family residences, as are many Vermont municipalities. The news is that a housing advisory panel is poised to recommend scrapping single-family for zoning that allows duplex, triplexes and so forth. Part of the rationale is that single-family districts are perceived to have had an exclusionary effect, by race and socioeconomic class.

The housing advisory panel  reportedly wants to forestall Seattle’s becoming a haven for the rich, and one approach is to promote more density — not just in single-family neighborhoods, but also in zones where multifamily housing now limited to four stories could be redrawn to allow six.

If there’s a lesson in this for Vermont, it’s certainly not in the particulars. Seattle’s population exceeds Vermont’s, after all, and Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, could be fit into one of Seattle’s neighborhoods. (Below is an overview photo of two storied Seattle neighborhoods — Queen Anne and Magnolia — that are laced with single-family residences.

seattleneedle

No, the Vermont takeway is that people here, too, should be thinking about making their zoning and town planning more accommodating of greater residential density near municipal centers. Not high rises, of course, but affordable multi-family housing on a Vermont scale.

Burlington’s housing-wage gap

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Burlington needs more affordable housing, lots of it. Affordable rentals, especially. After all, renting households far outnumber owner households in this city, and by any measure, they’re financially stressed. On average, according to a city report last year, Burlington’s renters pay 44 percent of their income on housing. More than one-third of Burlington’s renters pay more than half their income on housing. That’s what’s known among housing specialists as a severe burden.

Because of inclusionary zoning, we can be fairly confident that new, affordable rental units will be made available wherever big new developments go in. The hope here, at the Fair Housing Project, is that such developments be spread around the city. Not all the new affordable units have to go in the Old North End!

The South End would seem to be prime candidate for more subsidized, multi-family housing, and as far as we’re concerned, the Hill should be another possibility. Granted, there’s a trade-off between the price of land and the number of units that can be developed on a given tract; but still, we support the idea of locating a decent share of new affordable housing in low-poverty areas.

Here’s an interesting perspective on Burlington’s unaffordability from the point of view of low-wage workers. Consider five occupational categories that lead the state in numbers of workers: cashiers, personal care aids, retail salespeople, food prep workers and wait staff. Look at this graphic (courtesy of the National Housing Conference’s “Paycheck to Paycheck” that shows what annual income is needed to rent an apartment in Burlington without being burdened; and how their incomes compare:

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Incidentally, personal care aide is one of the state’s fastest growing occupations. That’s a testament to the greying of Vermont, because personal care aides assist elderly or disabled adults. Is it too much to ask that personal care aides be able to find affordable housing in the same communities where they serve their clients?

What about home ownership in Burlington for these workers? Similarly out of reach:

paycheck