Tag Archives: Vermont

Tale of two cities

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Consider Burlington times three. That’s Ann Arbor, sort of.

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Ann Arbor, like Burlington, has a big student population and a big housing-affordability problem. But now all of a sudden, seemingly, it has something else that Burlington doesn’t: a rental housing glut. Thanks to a profusion of new housing, both on-campus and off, the vacancy rate is up, empty apartments are going begging at the start of another academic year, and some rents are coming down.

Let’s pause here to run the numbers: Ann Arbor’s population is 117,000; the University of Michigan’s enrollment is 43,625, or about 37 percent.

Burlington’s population is about 42,300; UVM’s enrollment is about 12,700, Champlain College’s about 2,000. So, students here comprise around 35 percent.

Ann Arbor’s rents look to be roughly in Burlington’s range. An older, four-bedroom home rents for $2,800, or $700 per bedroom, according to the Ann Arbor News.

Before the surplus in rental housing became apparent, Ann Arbor officials were talking about how to address the affordability problem. The idea of rent control was floated – as it is occasionally in Burlington – but remains impossible without legislative authorization. As things stand, thanks to a 1988 state law, Michigan’s towns and cities can’t do anything to control rent. That means inclusionary zoning is banned, too. Burlington at least has that.

How many of Ann Arbor’s new high-rise rental units are affordable? Probably very few – developers seemingly have no financial incentive to provide any. The good news, for renters, is that some rents are dropping because of all the housing that’s been built (including graduate-student housing by the university). That’s what officials in Burlington like to imagine happening here, too: more student housing plus more private housing development alleviating the upward pressure on rents.

Sounds promising, but Ann Arbor has paid what some might consider an unsightly price: a surfeit of luxury high-rises downtown:

annarbordowntown

Familiar struggles to the south

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 Fresh off yesterday’s post on single-family zoning comes this news out of Louisville: a proposal to allow developers to build multi-family housing in single-family zoned districts. Developers would also get to build denser projects if a percentage of the units are affordable – a variant of inclusionary zoning.

louisville

But alas, density bonuses aren’t enough, as this editorial out of Charlotte, N.C., makes clear. They resulted in zero affordable units from private developers in that city over the last couple of years, so other planning tools are needed to meet the massive affordable housing gap in that city.

Ostensibly these big cities to the south have little in common with any place in Vermont, but it’s worth noting that they’re both struggling with the same overall problem we face here – an acute affordable housing shortage – and that there are no silver bullets. It’s a complexity that requires a mix of policies to alleviate.

 

The finer points of rent inflation

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This may come as a shock, but when it comes to development of multi-family rental housing, new luxury units far outnumber the mid-tier ones across the country. Little wonder, when they’re built on a scale like this:

miamitower

And because of the abundance of luxury units, luxury rentals are rising less rapidly than mid-tier rentals.

So says a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, which featured this graph on rent inflation that makes the point. Class A is luxury, Class B & C are for middle-income and working-class people:

rentclassgraph

Whether this sort of thing is going on in Vermont is up for discussion. We can’t say for sure. Anecdotally, though, we notice that rents in new mid-tier buildings – never mind the luxury ones – are getting rather pricey.

There’s a new apartment building on South Winooski Avenue in Burlington, for example, where a one bedroom runs $1,350 and a two bedroom, $1,625. Those rates look to be above average, although of course the average is forever rising.

Then there’s a new high-rise complex in Williston where a one bedroom goes for $1,425 and two-bedroom for $1,825.

Both of these places have apartments that are above HUD’s 2015 fair market rents, so they’re off-limits to Section 8 voucher holders.

By the way, HUD’s fair market rents are the same for Burlington, Williston, South Burlington, Winooski, and so on. How do they compare to averages in these places? You be the judge:

1 BR, $1,003; 2 BR, $1,309; 3 BR, $1,639; 4 BR, $1,925.

 

Spurning another national trend

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New population estimates have revealed a startling trend, as described in this blog post on the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies website: urban cores growing faster than suburban fringes. Nationally, city populations were up 0.91 percent on average in 2010-14, compared to 0.77 for the suburbs.

“This recent trend of city populations growing faster than those of suburbs is a dramatic departure from prior decades, when suburban population growth significantly outpaced that of cities,” writes Rachel Bogardus Drew, a post-doctoral fellow.

Naturally, this set us to wondering about Vermont’s own megalopolis. Not surprisingly, especially in a state that likes to think of itself as idiosyncratic, the trend doesn’t hold here. If anything, it’s operating in reverse: suburbs here are still outgrowing the urban core of Burlington and Winooski.

chittco

Before getting carried away with this, we remind ourselves that the latest estimates are just that, and the Vermont-scale numbers are so small that errors could easily swing some totals the other way.

Still, we can’t help but notice that the populations of Burlington and Winooski are both down, and those of all the other Chittenden County towns, save Westford, are up:

 

       2010 census        2009-13 estimate
Bolton town 1182 1204
Buels gore 30 46
Burlington city 42417 42331
Charlotte town 3754 3776
Colchester town 17067 17167
Essex town 19587 19908
Hinesburg town 4396 4427
Huntington town 1938 1965
Jericho town 5009 5021
Milton town 10352 10429
Richmond town 4081 4086
St. George town 674 728
Shelburne town 7144 7332
South Burlington city 17904 18163
Underhill town 3016 3030
Westford town 2029 1947
Williston town 8698 8820
Winooski city 7267 7257

 

Let’s face it, though, the rises and falls are pretty small, in most cases – further evidence of Vermont’s much-lamented population stagnancy, or graying, as the Millennials flee and the old-timers hang-on. Could it be that some of the Millennials are leaving because they can’t afford to live here?

 

The renter minority

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Yesterday’s post took note of the housing burden borne by Burlington’s renters (they pay 44 percent of their income, on average, on rent/utilities). Demographically, that’s a significant burden, because renters in this city are the majority.

In a state where the home ownership rate is over 70 percent, about 9 points above the national average, not many other municipalities can make that claim. Only one other can, in fact: Winooski.

According to the Vermont Housing Data website, 62.2 percent of Winooski’s residents who live in occupied units are renters. In Burlington, the figure is 57 percent.

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These are the only communities in the state where the renter population outnumbers homeowners. The renter-occupant figure for Vermont as a whole is 25.9 percent.

Conscientious readers may recall that Winooski scored No. 1 on the workforce housing index we introduced last month. In case you missed it, that index showed the number of subsidized housing units for every 100 in Vermont’s major employment centers. (We defined major employment centers as municipalities with 2,000 jobs or more in 2014.) Burlington came in at No. 5.

As it happens, several other employment centers that do a relatively good job of providing affordable housing also have big renter populations.

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Barre City’s renter population is 48.5 percent; Rutland City’s, 42.7 percent; Brattleboro’s, 43.2 percent; St. Albans City’s, 46.9 percent; and St. Johnsbury’s, 40 percent.

Of the big suburbs surrounding Burlington/Winooski, South Burlington has the highest renter proportion (30.8 percent). The others are all below the state average: Colchester, 25.8 percent; Essex, 20.6 percent; Shelburne, 17.3 percent; and Williston, 14.9 percent. (All of these communities are “major employment centers,” by the way.)

When people talk about the need for affordable housing in Vermont, they’re talking mostly about multi-family housing for renters (although, yes, efforts to promote accessory rental units, as well as single-family homes/condos for purchase, are important). So, here are a few things to keep in mind about renters in Vermont generally, as compared to homeowners:

  • The median household income for a Vermont renter household ($30,943) is less than half that for the homeowner household ( $64,771).
  • The housing cost burden falls more heavily on renters. Among renters:

— 52.5 percent pay more than 30 percent of their household income on housing, as compared to 32 percent of owners;

–26.4 percent pay more than half their household income on housing, as compared 12 percent of homeowners.

 

 

Housing Action Plan revisited

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The latest draft of Burlington’s Housing Action Plan, out last week, deserves a few pointed comments. Aside from two additional proposals (bringing the total to 20), there aren’t many substantial changes, but we noticed a few subtle revisions worth noting.

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We all know there are no simple remedies for the housing affordability problem, which the action plan declares to be one of the city’s “most significant challenges.” The two new proposals certainly don’t qualify as silver bullets.

One is for Burlington to take the lead in “regional housing initiatives that strengthen transportation corridors.” Clustering new housing near transportation nodes or corridors makes sense and is being pushed in various metro areas around the country. Certainly, if any municipality around here is going to take the lead in this sort of planning, it might as well be Burlington. On the other hand, in the absence of county government or targeted oversight by the legislature, regional planning in these parts is largely a hand-waving exercise.

The other new proposal, to improve home energy efficiency of rental units, could help diminish some of the prevailing housing burden (58 percent of Burlingtonians are renters, and they pay an average of 44 percent of their income on housing, the report states), but not the lion’s share of that burden –monthly rents.

The new draft adds language in its first paragraph acknowledging the need to “continue supporting efforts to protect tenants’ rights, prevent displacement, and ensure fair housing” — a commendable revision. Granted, the action plan doesn’t have much to say about fair housing, but that’s OK, because Burlington will be giving fair housing a detailed look in its forthcoming “assessment” mandated by HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing regulation.

As before, the plan recommends considering revisions in the inclusionary zoning ordinance. The new draft adds “triggering thresholds” to the provisions to be rethought, but in any case, all the serious rethinking of this ordinance is being deferred to a consultancy-to-be-named later. Ultimately, we’ll be looking for recommendations on how the ordinance can produce affordable units at a higher rate than it has in the past (fewer than 250 units in 25 years).

Another pending review (or moving target) focuses on Plan BTV South End, which we mentioned in a previous post and is in a comment phase now.

Here’s one area where the action plan draft comes up short: addressing the housing burdens of middle-class people, including the proverbial young professionals. The plan’s introduction lays out the affordability “challenge” for “residents across much of the income spectrum, and in particular those who make enough money that they are not eligible for subsidized housing, but struggle to compete in an unhealthy housing market where demand has far outstripped available supply.” What does the plan offer for these residents in particular? Not much, beyond vague references to “workforce housing” and the familiar argument that increasing the housing supply (in part by pulling students out of the rental market and into new residence halls) will ameliorate upward pressure on rents.

 

There but for the grace of God go we

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A report is out from The Century Foundation that exposes interesting national demographic trends that appear, on their face, to have little to do with Vermont. We’re not so sure, though.

“The Architecture of Segregation,” by Paul Jargowsky, argues that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods nationally has increased significantly since 2000 and that poverty has become more concentrated – in part because of policy choices that could be changed to produce a different result. As is typical with national-scale reports like this, the focus is on major metropolitan areas, such as Detroit or St. Louis, so the Vermont reader is left wondering what any of this has to do with us – even if we do want to understand sociological trends around the country that help explain events in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. (Note of regional interest: the metro area with both the highest black concentration of poverty and the highest Hispanic concentration of poverty is a little more than a stone’s throw away: Syracuse, N.Y.)

Well, Vermont may not have poverty concentrations in the scale of the metro areas, but it’s still worth considering whether similar trends feeding disparate residential patterns have been at work here. For example, many suburbs have grown at the expense of cities they surround. Jargowosky’s word for that grown is “cannibalistic.”

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“In virtually all metropolitan areas, suburban rings grew much faster than was needed to accommodate metropolitan population growth,” he writes. That has a ring of familiarity around here. Burlington’s population has been fairly stagnant; the big housing growth is indeed in the suburbs. But to what extent does the new housing reflect the income distribution in the population? What share of the new rental complexes rising from the fields in Williston, for example, are “affordable”?

Jargowskyomes to two conclusions that could have some application here, or at least are worth thinking about:

“Our highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not inevitable; indeed, it is not the norm around the world. The two main changes that need to occur are simple to state, but hard to bring about. First, the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban development so that it is not cannibalistic: new housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan population growth.”

Exactly how state government here (in the absence of county government) would attempt to assert such “control” is an open question.

“Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole. To some, this suggestion may seem like a massive intervention in the housing market.  In fact, exclusionary zoning is already a massive intervention in the housing market that impedes a more equitable distribution of affordable housing.”

This brings us back to beating the drum for inclusionary zoning, which is sadly missing throughout the state, including the booming suburbs of Chittenden County.

 

Where can Section 8 families live?

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We’ve mentioned in several posts that low-income families benefit in various ways when they’re able to live in mixed-income, “high opportunity” neighborhoods. (And we contend that these inclusive neighborhoods benefit, too, in various ways – economically, socially and culturally.)

Here are two publications that document the benefits to low-income children. “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children,” which came out in May, found that children in poor families move to better neighborhoods before the age of 13, they wind up with higher educational attainment and higher salaries as adults.

Another paper, “Children and Housing Vouchers,” argued that public policy should promote locating families with housing choice vouchers under the Section 8 program — families who live predominantly in lower-income areas, nationally — in better neighborhoods. (Baltimore’s Housing Mobility Program was cited as an example with documented benefits.) This paper noted that HUD’s Section 8 program, in which voucher-holders rent from private landlords, is in a better position to spread voucher-holders among low-poverty areas than HUD’s project-based public housing program.

All of this got us thinking about housing choice vouchers in Vermont. According to Vermont’s 2015 Housing Needs Assessment, there are about 6,310 housing choice vouchers in this state, and about 3,100 households on the waiting list. To these numbers, add these, from the 2012 Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice: 23 of Vermont’s 184 census tracts had concentrations of low-to-moderate income people, as shown on this map:

map5lmi

So, here are our questions of the day, awaiting further research:

  • How many of these voucher holders live in the low-income zones, and how many live elsewhere? (Perhaps HUD’s new data analysis tools supplied under the AFFH rule will help answer this.)
  • What are policy-makers or housing officials doing, if anything, to encourage Section 8 voucher holders to move to low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods?

Granted, HUD’s subsidizable “fair market rents” may rule out units in some properties, particularly, one- or two-unit “non-conventional” housing that according to the Needs Assessment tends to be pricier in Vermont. Still, HUD’s Fair Market Rents for Chittenden County, according to the assessment, seem high enough to allow voucher holders a good deal of choice. They range from $1,003 for a one-bedroom apartment to $1,925 for 4 bedrooms.

 

‘Heated’ conflict over affordable housing?

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A provocative op-ed in the Times last week by Thomas Edsall has ruffled a few feathers. He took on the question of whether public housing subsidies should be directed to impoverished neighborhoods or to upscale areas.

subdivision

Pushing the former is something called the “poverty housing industry,” which he called “a de facto alliance of multimillion-dollar nonprofit housing companies, city politicians, state and local housing authorities” and others. Pushing the latter are those who advocate integration of poor minorities in more well-to-do neighborhoods. The result, Edsall wrote, is a heated conflict “within the affordable-housing community.”

He argued that some large nonprofit development companies benefit by confining their low-income housing developments to low-income areas. Bolstering the critique of that stance by the integrationists are three things: academic research that shows benefits to low-income children whose families are resettled in low-poverty areas; the Supreme Court decision upholding disparate impact; and HUD’s AFFH rule, which among other things calls for breaking up patterns of historic residential segregation.

A critical response to Edsall’s piece was soon in coming. A blog post on the website of the giant law firm Nixon Peabody took him to task for various alleged distortions and oversimplifications. Among other things, Edsall was said to have overlooked the obstacles to developing affordable housing in affluent areas – the high cost of land, the resistance by residents, and so on.

It’s also worth noting that Edsall, in citing the Supreme Court decision, did not mention the caveat in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion that left the door open to continuing to invest in poor neighborhoods:

“It would be paradoxical to construe the Fair Housing Act to impose onerous costs on actors who encourage revitalizing dilapidated housing in our Nation’s cities merely because some other priority might seem preferable,” Kennedy wrote, adding:

“The FHA does not decree a particular vision of urban development; and it does not put housing authorities and private developers in a double bind of liability, subject to suit whether choose to rejuvenate a city core or to promote new low-income housing in suburban communities.”

What does all this have to do with Vermont? Edsall’s primary targets are big, national nonprofits working in impoverished sections of major U.S. cities. His critique doesn’t seem to apply much in this rural state, although socioeconomic integration does present a challenge here.

Comments, anyone?

Nuggets from Vermont’s civil rights hearing

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Monday’s half-day hearing on “housing issues” held in the Statehouse by the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights broke little new ground on the fair housing front. A few points worth highlighting:

  • Housing discrimination by race and national origin is still very much with us, as evidenced by Vermont Legal Aid’s 2014 testing. (White American renters received preferential treatment in 46 percent of the national origin tests and 36 percent of the race-based tests, for example.) The new Vermont NAACP chapter reported having received about 50 housing discrimination complaints since September; how many of those complaints were referred to investigators at the Human Rights Commission or Vermont Legal Aid was unclear, however. Parts of Burlington and Winooski, in part because of an influx of refugees, are becoming residentially segregated.
  • Race-based discrimination, often disguised with “a smile and a handshake,” tends to be more subtle than disability-based discrimination. The latter category regularly draws the most complaints to the commission and Vermont Legal Aid. Affordable housing accessible to people with disabilities is in chronically short supply.
  • Vermont’s low vacancy rate can exacerbate discrimination, as landlords have more latitude to be “choosey.”
  • Small-time landlords, who own one or just a few rentals, are more likely than their large-scale, professional counterparts to be ignorant of fair housing law; and the great majority of the state’s roughly 7,000 landlords are not members of the landlords’ association. One remedy is more education and outreach, to landlords and tenants.
  • One proposal that might ensure better fair-housing-law compliance, not to mention code enforcement: a state rental registry, coupled with mandatory fair-housing training for landlords.