When Vermont’s “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” was completed in 2012, it listed as one of Vermont’s “fair housing achievements” the designation of ski areas as possible sites of affordable housing development.

The analysis noted that ski areas are “generally rural, more affluent, and predominantly White areas with high cost housing.” Locating affordable housing in these areas would help spread such housing around the state and avert concentration in urban centers. Moreover, some resorts promote themselves as year-round destinations, so the housing needs of their employees aren’t necessarily seasonal.

In fact, the Vermont’s Allocation Plan for federal and state affordable housing tax credits explicitly mentions, as one of the possible qualifications for receiving such credits, providing “workforce housing in ski areas” – particularly when locating such housing in the nearest town center is not feasible and when the community’s need for affordable housing is underserved.

Fine. How much affordable housing has been developed in ski-area towns under those criteria over the last three years?

None. This fair housing “achievement” is in the vision, not the doing.

OK, so how do ski areas stack up when it comes to providing affordable housing?

Again, we can look at these areas as employment centers (how many jobs they offered in 2014, from the Labor Department’s site)

and total their subsidized housing units, if any, from the Directory of Affordable Housing on the Housing Data website. As you might expect, the results vary widely.

Killington, for example, had 1,735 jobs in 2014, but no subsidized housing units.

Here are two others that come up empty…

Jay: 2014 job total “confidential,” 0 subsidized units.

Stratton: 887 jobs, 0 subsidized units.

Ski-area towns that are at least on the board for affordable housing:

Stowe: 4,155 jobs, 95 subsidized units

Ludlow: 1,554 jobs, 85 subsidized units.

Waitsfield: 1,355 jobs, 42 subsidized units

Jeffersonville/Cambridge: 1,390 jobs, 39 subsidized units

Dover: 1,161 jobs, 33 subsidized units.

Woodstock: 2,115 jobs, 26 subsidized units.

Warren: 1,029 jobs, 18 subsidized units.