If you’re fed up with the high-priced housing here and want trade the Champlain Valley for the Treasure Valley (Boise, Idaho), be careful.  If you’re making less than $35,000 a year, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an affordable apartment, according to this article in the Idaho Statesman. (“Low-income housing crisis,” blares Idaho Public Radio.)  Sure, average rents are lower there than in Burlington, but they’re rising fast. What’s more, developers say they can’t make a profit on affordable housing without more incentives than Idaho makes available.

If you think you’ll be better off in Illinois, be aware that you probably can’t get on a waiting list for a housing choice voucher (72 percent of the Section 8 waiting lists are closed, we learn from a report whose title says it all, “Not Even a Place in Line.” True, average rents in Illinois are a bit lower, as is the “housing wage” — the amount you need to earn an hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment.  (“Afford” means you pay no more than 30 percent of your income for housing.) Vermont’s 2BR housing wage is $20.68 an hour; Illinois’ is $18.78. Don’t spend the difference all in one place.

If you still hanker for California in hopes that you can make do outside the glitzy metro areas, think again. Even Bakersfield, site of a recent “Affordable Housing Summit,” is brooding about a housing “crisis,” with rent inflation far outpacing wage growth. (Bakersfield!)

In Denver, described as “a landlord’s market,” at least you can call a housing hotline for advice, but you might be put on hold. Calls are coming in steadily, with affordability the main concern and callers reporting rent hikes of $200 to $400.

If you think a career in academia will spare you housing-unaffordability travails, you might be right in the long run … but not necessarily in the short run in Ithaca, N.Y.,  where junior faculty at Ithaca College are reportedly struggling.

If you’re a prospective student at Middlebury College with an ambulatory disability, you might wonder if a new townhouse-style dorm under construction – sans elevators — will fully accommodate you. But you can take heart that scores of accessibility/visitability advocates at the college are in your corner.

If you’re an artist hankering for affordable artists’ housing – something that is emerging in warehouses and abandoned factories around the country, as we’ve noted before – you can forget about Burlington’s celebrated artists’ enclave, the Enterprise Zone in the South End. The mayor said no to housing there, as did the City Council, as did the Housing Action Plan. Did anyone take a serious look at whether affordable housing could be introduced there without gentrifying the neighborhood? Not that we’ve heard.

Oh well, Kingston, N.Y., had another idea. An old lace factory there has been converted to affordable housing  for “writers, dancers, graphic designers, musicians, painters, photographers, and even a puppeteer,” we learn from a local news account.