Vermont has tried for years to speed up the construction of new housing, but results have been mixed. The state has invested nearly $800 million in more affordable housing since 2020, with fewer than 4,500 new or rehabbed units to show for it.
New laws now prevent cities and towns from banning duplexes without a compelling reason. And the state has exempted housing projects from environmental review if they’re in places that already have robust local development rules.
Despite these and other initiatives, the number of homes being built each year lags well behind the 5,000 to 8,000 per year that experts say is needed by 2030 to meet demand.
To pick up the pace, state officials have embraced a novel approach: They’ll design your new home for you. Three communities — Essex Junction, Hartford and Manchester — are participants in a pilot program known as 802 Homes that is meant to fast-track construction.
State housing officials have commissioned architects to draw plans for 10 home styles that builders and developers can use for free, saving them time and money on design and planning. In exchange, the three towns have agreed to explore speeding up the approval of the homes, which range from tiny grandparent units to small multiunit apartment buildings.
Instead of going through the time-consuming and uncertain process of seeking approval from a local design review board, someone proposing to build an 802 Home might only need a town official such as a zoning administrator to sign off. Correctly followed, the process is simpler, faster and virtually assures approval of a building permit.
Details are still being worked out at the state and local levels, including exactly what the homes would look like and how the local zoning rules can be streamlined.
Hartford, for instance, is still grappling with how to simplify its planning process. The Upper Valley town is open to changes, but it already allows administrative approvals for projects with fewer than four units if they can be on town sewer and water lines, according to Lexi Webster, the town’s housing and development specialist.
It’s not yet clear how much more streamlining is possible. Neighbors often bring up issues with projects that planning staff may not have considered, she noted.
In the meantime, this week the program reached a milestone with the release of the 10 proposed home designs and a public survey to find out what people think of them. (For a link to the survey, visit sevendaysvt.com.)
The Boston-based architecture firm doing the work, Utile, sought initial feedback on its drafts at public meetings in the three communities in February. The firm, which is being paid $500,000, has refined the designs and is now releasing them so anyone can weigh in.
The hope is that the designs will make it easier to build what Vermont really needs right now — homes for middle-income residents.
“We’re sort of stuck between our larger single-family homes and those larger multiunit buildings in downtowns,” said Jeff Dube, a planner in the Department of Housing and Community Development. “And we’re just not getting that missing middle.”
That’s why the 10 designs do not include larger multifamily apartment complexes such as those pushed by big developers, nor luxury homes, whose owners can afford the higher cost of a customized house.
The 802 Homes were designed to fit into Vermont’s existing architectural landscape. Each was modeled on actual homes common in the state. All are modest. The plans include a long, skinny unit called the Railroad Caretaker, an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, that is modeled on narrow homes with cute porches like those on Franklin Street in Montpelier and Lafountain Street in Burlington.
The two-story Four Square is a single-family home that resembles a simple farmhouse, modeled after versions in Hartford and Manchester. Other options include side-by-side and front-to-back duplexes, three-story structures with one apartment per floor, fourplexes, and townhouses.
The survey asks people several questions about each model: Does it look like a home in Vermont neighborhoods? Would you be happy to have this built next door to you? Would you be happy to live in this? How would you improve the design?
The answers will help the architects further hone the blueprints. Later this year, they’ll create the detailed construction drawings, available for free to anyone who wants them.
This may be the only time neighbors get a say in the appearance of future 802 Homes that go up in their neighborhood.
In Essex Junction, any structure built in areas visible from the main roads leading into the city must go through the Development Review Board. The five-member panel is appointed by the city council and holds significant sway over building projects. Review typically involves a public hearing, and any member of the public can show up to oppose a project for any reason.
To sidestep that, the city is considering whether to exempt 802 Homes from DRB review, according to Chris Yuen, the community development director.
That may speed things up, but it also means the 802 Homes will not receive the higher scrutiny that others do. Instead, builders would only need Yuen to sign off on their permits. He would base his decision only on whether the proposed home meets rules such as setbacks and not more subjective criteria, like whether something matches the character of the neighborhood, he said.
“Because these homes were designed based on the layout and aesthetics of existing homes,” Yuen said, “we can have a good degree of confidence that these will be more accepted by the community than just a random new design.”
The planning commission has yet to sign off on the exemption idea, but Yuen thinks it eventually will. Helping builders avoid a trip to the DRB can shave a couple of months off the approval process, which would help keep costs down.
“I think there is a strong desire to figure out if there are ways we can streamline the process and to make it more predictable,” he said.
Yuen acknowledged, however, that he won’t have the final say. Neighbors could still appeal his decision to the full Development Review Board.
Such appeals remain a major problem for builders like Jason Webster, copresident and owner of Huntington Homes. In communities across the state, people propose new homes that are allowed by zoning and approved by boards or zoning administrators but then get appealed by neighbors.
“One of the reasons we are in the problem that we are in today is because there are too many opinions and seats at the table for what’s happening on other people’s properties,” Webster said.
Huntington Homes makes modern modular housing in a cavernous facility in East Montpelier. It can assemble sections of a home there in a few days and put them together on a distant site in a matter of hours, Webster said.
His company is poised to benefit from the 802 Homes program because, as a cost-savings measure, the houses being designed could be built largely off-site in a factory such as his.
He’d like to see neighbors’ right to appeal eliminated entirely for homes that meet zoning rules. “If it’s allowed by zoning, then it should be allowed,” Webster said.
That’s something that housing advocacy group Let’s Build Homes is pushing hard.
Miro Weinberger, the former mayor of Burlington and the group’s executive chair, says the state’s housing permitting system is broken. Appeals can hold up projects for years. Even the threat of appeal allows neighbors to extract costly concessions from builders, said Weinberger, who is a former housing developer.
His group has proposed something called ROOT zones, which stands for Residential Opportunity Overlay for Towns. The idea is for the state to create a model “Vermont Code” that towns can adopt to replace their discretionary residential approvals process in zones where they want new housing.
Appeals of housing projects would become more difficult in these areas because subjective development criteria would be replaced by objective rules, Weinberger said. Cities and towns can adopt such rules now, but Let’s Build Homes has asked lawmakers to explore a statewide version. Lawmakers passed a bill commissioning a study on the idea, which is due by January 15, 2027.
“We’re hopeful this puts it on a trajectory that we can come back next year for binding action in the legislature,” Weinberger said. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “No Architect Required | To build more homes, Vermont drafts 10 preapproved blueprints that will be free for the taking”
This article appears in May 13 • 2026.
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