The Housing Crisis Part 1: A Brief History
This is part of a series on the housing crisis that is impacting Burlington, VT. These are all of the published parts of this series:
Housing is not a new problem for Burlington. A healthy vacancy rate for both rental and ownership is 5%: we have been hovering far below this threshold for decades. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a major change in migratory and economic conditions, it was the straw that broke our housing system's back. Our vacancy rates are now so close to zero that they might as well be zero, and this almost complete lack of supply has caused both sale prices and rents to skyrocket. However, the housing crisis is not a story of a recent blunder, but of nearly a century of policy decisions at both the city and state level that have slowly been pushing us towards this cliff.
Let's start with the history of zoning in Burlington. For the first 162 years of Burlington's existence, people built structures without any zoning ordinance. People built whatever they needed, where they needed it, and when they needed it. This development pattern gave rise to nearly all of our most beautiful and historic neighborhoods; the Old North End, the majority of Downtown, and the Lakeside neighborhood were all built before any zoning laws existed. In 1947, we adopted our first zoning ordinance which largely separated industry from residential uses, imposed a city wide building height limit of 55-feet, and perhaps most detrimental created the first minimum lot size requirement. This meant that all new development needed to take up potentially more space than it needed, instead of allowing people to meet their needs with the space they had.
In 1973, however, Burlington passed its biggest revision of the zoning ordinance with a massive "down-zoning" project. Effectively, every neighborhood in the city that had been growing organically became frozen in time. Instead of low-density neighborhoods growing when they needed to, those neighborhoods became permanently designated "Residential – Low Density (RL)", and were legally forbidden from growing at all. Even worse is that many of the historic neighborhoods suddenly became "non-conforming" with this new zoning code, meaning that most of the buildings in our city became retroactively illegal. A follow up in 1994 made things even more restricted. At the state-level, 1970's Act 250 created environmental regulations that further restricted housing development and added even more barriers for urban development in Vermont's cities. As a result, the only type of housing that could legally be built at scale became suburban-style detached single-family homes, not just in the suburbs but also in Burlington itself.
The easiest way to understand the impact of these policies is to look at the population growth in the region. In terms of numbers, Chittenden County's population has been rapidly growing since 1950 (+275%) while Burlington itself has stagnated (+35%, with most of that growth between '50 and '70). While our neighboring municipalities have doubled or even tripled in population over the last 50 years, Burlington has seen its share of the county population decrease from its peak of 53% in 1950 to 26% today. This means that nearly all of our regional population growth has been in suburban sprawl, and that while Burlington now plays the role of a central city that serves a region of about 200k people, we have nearly the same number of tax payers as when the region was 60k people.
Here's the takeaway: the restrictions on urban development have not stopped people from moving to Chittenden County or the greater Burlington region. Instead, our lack of development has pushed the housing pressure both inward and outward, increasing costs in Burlington and forcing suburban expansion in neighboring towns… essentially upending the housing market of the entire region. People who work in Burlington can't live here and have to take up housing in other towns, causing a ripple effect that moves people further away from their jobs, congesting our transportation networks and burdening Vermonters' with the costs of housing and transportation.
In future posts, I'll outline the consequences of this pressure, the current housing needs in Burlington, the barriers to solving the problem, and visualize a best-case scenario for the future.