People who arrived at the housing summit with concerns about unbridled development probably didn’t leave feeling any less worried.
The keynote speaker, Tom Angotti, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, came bearing stories of gentrification and development gone awry in New York City.
“We’re seeing that happen here,” a woman in the audience told Angotti. “So what do we do?”
“Three suggestions,” offered the visiting professor: “Organize, organize, organize.”
Burlington residents have been doing plenty of that already. Members of Save Open Space Burlington, which formed when Burlington College was selling a large tract of lakefront land to developer Eric Farrell, have joined forces with people concerned that putting housing in the South End’s Enterprise Zone will squeeze out artists and business owners.
Both groups came together to plan Wednesday’s event, along with members of the neighborhood planning assemblies. Held at Contois Auditorium in Burlington City Hall, it was billed as a response to Mayor Weinberger’s 18-point housing action plan.
In a plan presented to the city council last month, the mayor offered a number of strategies to fix what he’s termed a housing crisis. He’s repeatedly made the case that a severe shortage of housing has made rent and home prices untenably high for many. This issue dominated the mayoral election last March. Key to the solution, according to the mayor’s plan: constructing more units.
But Wednesday night, people pushed back. “New market-rate housing raises rents,” Angotti argued. “And that forces out people who operate at the margin.”
“Do we have any idea how many units will have to be built to bring down rents?” asked Charles Norris Brown, one of the organizers in the South End. He suggested that the city’s “obsession with housing” may “kill the creativity” in the South End.”
At least eight of the 12 city councilors attended. The body agreed to postpone a vote on the mayor’s housing plan until after the summit. Weinberger didn’t come, though his housing point person, Brian Lowe, was there.
Attendees weren’t totally opposed to new housing. People plugged construction of “tiny houses” — a suggestion also included in the mayor’s plan. Ruby Perry, a member of Save Open Space Burlington who lives in one of these houses, told the audience that, particularly in light of climate change, it’s important to “live lightly and to build lightly on the earth.”
To expand the stock of student housing, Charles Simpson suggested developing cooperative housing instead of allowing “circling sharks of opportunistic investors” construct large, profit-generating dorm structures.
At the very end of the meeting, Michael Monte, chief financial officer for the Champlain Housing Trust, which builds and manages a large number of affordable housing apartments in the region, stood up in the audience and attested to the dire need for housing. “There’s a real crisis in Burlington and Chittenden County,” Monte said, choking up. Referring to the homeless population, he added, “They’re living close to the earth, but they don’t want to be there.”
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As a former UVM student, my experiences lead me to believe that the city does not need to construct more housing but rather needs to work with the college campuses to further modify on-campus housing. Unless the policies have changed, only freshmen must live on campus unless able to prove residency. If colleges required all but seniors to reside on campus, perhaps the housing crunch would be alleviated forcing the private landlords to reduce their exorbitant monthy rates.
Anybody who says Burlington doesn’t need to construct more housing has obviously never tried to buy a house in Burlington, or has owned one long enough already that they got in ahead of the crunch. People who work here want to live in town with their families, as evidenced by the increase in home prices and lack of inventory. If people can’t buy here, and nothing is being built, people will continue to move out to surrounding towns where sprawl is impacting our state in ways that are totally unsustainable. All these people then need to drive into and out of the city every day, meaning more traffic, parking needs, pollution and projects like the Champlain Parkway. Sprawl will do more damage to VT than could ever be done on the parcel of land at the center of this debate.
Burlingtonians are totally fine with development outside the city, because they don’t see it and it isn’t their problem. The resistance to the housing plan and a piece of private land being developed by a private developer is NIMBYism at its finest. Anywhere else, the developer would have gone ahead and built whatever they wanted on that land, with no public input. Here, people are given the opportunity to participate in the process, and they still complain about it.
Density and development are not bad words. Cities all over the world figured that out, and hopefully Burlington does too, otherwise our downtown will turn into a giant parking lot and our roads will be clogged with commuters. With the right density and development, people could live close enough to work that we might finally get a functioning transit system and a decent network of bike lanes that would make our city a lot more livable than it is today.
Unfortunately, subsidies for housing only end up making housing more expensive. I know, it sounds crazy but it’s true. For every apartment that is subsidized, that is one less unit that is not on the market and competing with other units at market rates. The more subsidized units there are, the fewer there are to compete at market rates, driving rents up even more.
I think the NIMBY problem is everywhere, not just in Burlington. Do we ever see simple new home developments anymore? Nothing fancy, just ranch houses, like what they built over in Essex years ago after IBM came. The only new housing built is for the high end of the market. If they would allow some inexpensive, less frills, starter houses to be built, it would take a lot of pressure off the existing market at all levels. But try getting that thru Act 250.
Face it, we are a victim of our own success: one of the reasons people want to live here is a result of the policies that make it so hard to build here, yet those policies make it very difficult to live here. At some point, gentrification becomes inevitable because people with money tend to get what they want. And that will end up ruining it.
I guess there is always everywhere else.