 Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I'm gonna start off. I know of this concept of vulnerable leadership and so I'm gonna start off and be super vulnerable, and I'm gonna tell you about a moment that happened in my closet this morning. I was choosing what I was gonna wear today, and I thought of my 11-year-old who's a fashionista, and she always has comments on what I'm wearing, and she calls these my party pants. And I pulled them off my closet rack because I thought today is a day for the party pants. It has been four years since we've been in this ballroom together for this event. Last time was 2018 when the executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency was Sarah Carpenter, and I am Mora Collins, the new executive director of VHFA, new for the past four years, because we had a little pandemic in the meantime. I don't know if you've heard, and since we do this conference every other year, it means it's been four years since we've been together, and I'm so excited to wear my party pants with all of you and get a chance to connect with you in real life and not just with, you know, the Zoom box. So, pop quiz hotshot. I'm starting with an impromptu poll. We're not doing the poll clickers this time. We're gonna do old-fashioned raise your hand. I've had too much technology the last couple years, okay? So raise your hand. We've done this conference every other year for over 20 years. So raise your hand if you think you've been at this conference five or more times over your career. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Now, put your hands down. Now, I want to see hands for someone, everyone who has never been here before it. This is your first conference. I don't know if you've heard, but housing is having a moment. Yeah, and so it's a hot topic. I take it you have heard. And and it's impacting all of us what's happening with housing and it has been for a long time. But I want to do another poll. Raise your hand if you are a part of a group or an organization that has helped deliver stimulus funding to Vermonters. Yeah. Yeah, and raise your hand if you or a group you work with are planning for the future of Vermont's housing and communities in light of all the changes over the last few years. Yeah, this is an amazing group of people we have gathered here today. Welcome to the Vermont Statewide Housing Conference. You are all very welcome, whether this is your first or your fifth or whatever time it is for you. Because we need all y'all. We need all of you. This is an all hands on deck kind of situation. We need all of you here today and all of you helping to address your piece of the housing challenge that's happening in Vermont. So before I thank our sponsors and our organizers, I want to thank you, each of you for lifting up your part. There have been times, especially in the last two and a half years, where the housing and care needs of our communities have been really overwhelming. I think a lot of us have at times felt that overwhelm and felt smothered by the enormity of what's happening around us. But in somewhere during the pandemic, someone helped me remember the parachute game from elementary school where, you know, you have that slippery parachute of multi colors and it was often round and everyone grabbed their colored slice and we all would billow it. Sometimes we'd popcorn balls up in the air, but the best part was when we all threw the parachute up and held it in our hands and then sat on it real quick back when we could fall to a wooden gym floor and be able to get back up. But the magic was what happened inside that multicolored parachute when you could see your friends across the way and there was a shelter over us and we were all protected from the overhead gym lights as we sat there under that parachute. And that is what I kept thinking about during the pandemic, that it wasn't my job to do everything. I just had to hold on to my colored little triangle and do my part and sit my little butt down in that seat and make sure to hold up because by doing my part, I kept kept the roof up over all of us. And it was all of us together. We have a sold out crowd today and I do think the weather may have kept a few people away, but we had over 450 people registered for today and it was together that we all had our little part of that parachute and did it. So thank you for what you have done and been through over the last several years. Thank you. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the 47 sponsoring organizations that made this conference be so affordable. They're listed in the slideshow that you've been watching and you're going to see them up again. I really want to thank our premier sponsors of the conference, both Raymond James and the Vermont State Housing Authority. Thank those organizations because a conference of this size and caliber can't happen without their support. As I said before, the conference is breaking all sorts of records even when we had the HUD secretary years ago. We did not have as many people registered as we do for today. And so with that comes a few logistical realities. It looks like we're okay with seating, but if those of you are walking in and you want to be brave enough to come find seats this way, you're welcome to. Also, some of us are a little rusty and out of practice with being around so many people. So let's take care of ourselves and each other and please respect those of us wearing masks and understand that some of us may want a little extra space, but recognize that we're going to have to do our best to have this conference be as smooth as ever. And in with the glitches that are bound to happen because we're all a little out of practice, there is a workshop that is not going to happen today that you may have signed up for. It's the 3 p.m. breakout session on housing discrimination, but thanks to CVOEO's fair housing project, Jess Hyman. She is going to be in that room at the beginning of the session. She's going to have handouts and materials if you're really interested in learning more about housing discrimination in Vermont and she'll be there for a bit to answer some questions and connect with folks. There are other workshops happening at that time, so you could think about choosing another one like maximizing our impact with Kerry Seacrest. There's the coordination of housing and services roundtable, preparing Vermont communities for a more inclusive future, or Washington Insights on Development Costs and Federal Policy. So there's lots of other choices for you. Sorry about that change in schedule. So with those logistics of the way, we are very happy to have our state legislators and staff from our congressional delegation here today. I'll start at the federal level. At lunch, we're going to hear from a video from retiring Senator Patrick Leahy and you'll be invited to share messages of support with him, which the conference organizers are going to share after today's event. We do have staff registered to be here and I've seen some of them from our congressional delegation. I saw, well, Tom Berry is here from Senator Leahy's office. Erhard Monca is here from Senator Sanders office. Congressman, oh, Senator-elect. Well, just staff here today and our current delegation has to be in D.C. fighting for what's a very important lame duck session right now. And I know we invited Congresswoman, Congresswoman-elect Becca Ballant to be here today and she is at new member orientation in D.C. So these excuses do feel kind of warranted. So a little closer to home, could I have all of our elected legislators, senators, representatives please stand up so that we know where you are and who you are? So they have a special colored indicator on their name tag. Please feel free to go up and accost them and ask them for more money for housing and whatever else comes to your mind. So thank you for being here today legislators. It shows how important housing is to you and we all look forward to working with you in the session to come. And so we had a great team pulling together the conference today. I want to recognize the 17 organizations that created today's event. You can see their names here. I'm not going to read them all but I do want to appreciate that staff from all these organizations have been working for over nine months to put on this conference. And of course I want to thank the staff at the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. Many and most of our volunteers today are VHFA staff and they help prepare for this conference led by Laurie Gilding and Leslie Black Pluma. So I've already mentioned our record turnout and what an impressive group it is and I just want to make sure we know what we've accomplished since we've last been in this ballroom together. It's been tremendous and yet we know that it's not just about the numbers and what's happened but it's that magic happened because of the connections that we have and that we're forming. And so you'll notice a change in the agenda today, change from years past if you are a repeat customer is that we've doubled the amount of networking time. There's going to be lots of time in between sessions to get together and connect and go through work together. And in that spirit I think I'm going to invite up Carrie Seacrest next to talk a bit about the theme of the conference and what we can expect in those in-between sessions. Thank you. Good morning. And first on a personal note I really want to say thank you to all of you who made such an impact in finding housing for the most vulnerable in our state. As someone who lives in the state in Brattleboro but isn't affiliated with housing I really understand and know that you worked above and beyond the call of duty these last several years and continue to do so. So from the bottom of my heart I really as a regular citizen want to say thank you. So today's theme is inspiration to action. And at today's conference we really hope that you'll be have sparks of inspiration and new energy because it can get draining out there on our Zoom boxes. And so here we are with this collective of energy and people. We hope you'll learn new information to inform your thinking on the topic. We hope that you'll meet a few new people. And we also hope that you'll leave with a few concrete actions to take back home. And I'll say it can feel overwhelming sometimes. This isn't a topic that's going to get solved in a day at the Hilton. Especially you know bumping elbows with our favorite 400 people most of which whom we don't know. As you saw from that hand raising there are so many new people here and how amazing that is. And so the question is how do we get most out of the day? So the first thing that I want to open with is just to remind us that great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Everyone has their small piece in this world of housing and collectively everyone taking meaningful action can have a huge impact. I chose this photo to remind us that we bloom where we're planted. So whatever that means for you your organization that you're in the population that you serve and the the kind whether you're at the local the regional or the statewide level it all has an impact. The second thing I wanted to share is that the organizers have done an incredible job of creating focus for today's session and the whole conference theme. So there's four questions and you'll see them on your table tents they're in all of the rooms they're also in all of the common areas. And the idea is that throughout the day with these handy dandy beautiful journals that you reflect on those questions and kind of walk away with some inspiration and we'll be going through that. So the first question is what is inspiring to you today? Are there aha moments new ways of approaching your work? Is there a person an organization something that you want to know more about? What is what's the inspiring piece? The second question is what do you want to explore further? Are there strategies, ideas, funding sources, partnerships like getting all those synopses working together? What's got you there that you are creating some new ways of thinking about things? The third question is about who do you want or need to connect with? And this is you've got such an amazing group of people here today. This is an amazing brain trust if you think about 400 over 450 people registering for this event and COVID has done a number on personal relationships in the last three years and there have been a lot of staffing changes in the housing world and there are a lot of new people here. So the opportunity is how do we reweave our roots and there's this concept I want to share with you called in our social world about strong ties and weak ties. So those people who are in our inner circle the people who we know well talk to all the time those are our strong ties and we've got that circle of them and then there's the outer circle of acquaintances and people that we see you know on occasion that we know to say hi to or we know their name but we don't see them as much and those are considered our weak ties and for new information and ideas weak ties are more important than strong ones and how great because we are at an event where we can create lots and lots of weak ties. So if you think about it we've got that small connection through with our with our strong ties but those people are all swimming in the same information right the people you work with every day your loved ones your friends you all are kind of swimming in that same pool whereas we need the weak ties to open up and give us friendly opportunities for new information and new ideas and so from that perspective the more weak ties we have the better they actually say that in some research that those people who have robust weak networks actually feel happier overall and if we think about it in COVID this really got diminished those small connections with the local barista or the person you know your people that you go to yoga with or the your neighbors all of those connections dissipated but we need them because that enhances our sense of belonging in community. So my invitation is that during the breaks and the hangouts and at your tables is not to sit with the people that you already know but really to go out and try to make and meet a few new people. I know for me there was when I lived in Washington DC when I was young at 21 I remember totally feeling intimidated by going to networking events and I used to play a game with myself was I could go home if I had three business cards and so and so whatever it is your number of the day I invite you to think whether it's one or three or ten whatever it is but at each opportunity to try to re-weave and meet new people here today there's a lot of change going on. The other thing that I want to invite you to alert you to is that the organizers put together that list of attendees on purpose. There's two ways you can access it there are some at the registration table hard copies and then it's also on the front page of the conference registration on the on the website on the front page and really you're invited to look through that identify a few people that you want to meet and then go look for them because because there's different organizations and how do we re-expand those networks. There is also if you saw there are two big boards two sections one on the second floor and one on this floor of all of these four questions and there's sticky notes and there's sticky notes right here on all of your tables. If there's someone you want to meet or if there's some information that you want to get or learn about put it on the stick take the sticky put it on those common boards and the organizers are actually going to try to help connect you. So if you're saying hey I want to meet someone so-and-so and then check it throughout the day and if you're a resource and you can offer that do that. I mean this is one of those things that it's only going to work if we all play so I'm going to invite you to play. So that brings us to that question again who do you need and want to connect with today so that you walk out not with I sat next to 400 people but that I met five people and here they are and now I can I can reach out to them after today's conference. So the last question of course is what can you do to help solve the housing crisis and the idea is to think about one takeaway and it could be something that you're already doing and you want to recommit because sometimes we're like yeah yeah I do this every day but with that new energy or new thought on it how you want to move something forward and it can be again in your work your personal or your community life so if you come out of today saying I realize I got to go for a walk every day or I'm going to lose it please do that because we we need we need you not to burn out in this really hard field so I'm always like if what you walk out of like wow what a great day to be away and I realize I need more time away and I need to take some breaths that is a completely valid honorable and I welcome it and invite it kind of goal so for our last few minutes we've got about five minutes left and the game we're going to play is called meet a neighbor so what I'm going to invite you do if you'd like to stand up stand up again in case you already know everybody at your table but just introduce yourself and your name your org in what way do you support alleviating the housing crisis in Vermont and why did you say yes today so stand on up meet make eye contact with someone meet someone thank you so much you've already at least checked off one new person you've met have a wonderful day and I'll see you at the end of the session I'm Josh Hanford I'm the commissioner of Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development it's such honor to be here with you today you know after a few years off of this conference it's incredible to be in a packed room with everyone in person that just warms my heart so thanks for coming you know as many of you know zoning has been a bit of a sleepy policy backwater in Vermont for many years now this surprises me that the rules that shape our communities in Vermont's quality of life were so easily ignored for so long as we work together to build the housing we need zoning modernization is a hot topic among policy state policy makers and local leaders alike in a recent Vermont digger story community life and our connections to each other about community life and connections to each other my friend Ben Doyle who is the president of a preservation trust of Vermont said even just basic zoning minimum lot size things like that maybe aren't designed to be exclusionary but on a functional level kind of prevent people from a variety of incomes from getting to know one another and I'm certainly not a zoning expert don't pretend to be but I think he's right the outdated zoning can create barriers but good zoning can lead to better neighborhoods and stronger and more inclusive communities given Vermont's recent focus on the obstacles and opportunities of zoning we're lucky to have Sarah Bronin here with us today to share her work on the connections between housing zoning and how zoning data can better inform policy and advocacy Sarah Bronin is a Mexican American architect attorney professor and policymaker who works at the junction of property land use historic preservation and energy her work asked the question how can law and policy foster more equitable sustainable well designed and connected places she's a pioneer in making zoning easier to understand and through media appearances and extensive publications with great titles like zoning by a thousand cuts Vermont has so much to learn from her innovative innovative research real-world work including desegregate Connecticut an effort to expand housing opportunity in Connecticut by mapping zoning restrictions promoting transit oriented communities advocating for sensible lot sizes for homes and reducing bureaucracy which successfully advanced the first major statewide zoning reform in several decades she's now working on a to create a national zoning atlas based on her work in Connecticut hoping we can talk about that here in Vermont Sarah's work can help us better understanding zoning relationship to housing affordability accessibility and diversity and offers new hope for improving zoning decisions in the future she's a professor of the Cornell College of Architecture Art and Planning an associate faculty member of Cornell Law School as well as a Biden nominated chair of the US Advisory Council on Historic Preservation she holds a JD from Yale Law School Masters of Science from University of Oxford and Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from University of Texas please join me in welcoming Sarah Bronin for a keynote unlocking zoning potential to improve Vermont's housing stock good morning everyone how is everybody today good you guys are chatty that's great that's one thing I've noticed in my short time in this room so I'm really happy to see everybody get together thank you to Mora and Leslie and VHFA for having me here today and to Commissioner Hanford for that very kind introduction so I'm going to talk today about one of the many tools that people in this room have used and I know that you come from a variety of backgrounds public sector private sector real estate development planning finance and I know that each of you has an interest in leveraging all the tools in your your toolbox to promote more equitable and more housing so today I'm really honing in on this one small piece of the puzzle which is zoning and the reason is is zoning as Commissioner Hanford said really is the zoning codes are the rules of the game and so unless you have good zoning rules everything else that you're doing in all those other tools in your toolbox might not be able to be used so with that all right great with that I'm going to start with what zoning is and so people everybody in this room is familiar with zoning right raise your hand if you know what zoning is okay so my definition of zoning is the local government regulation of land uses structures and lots so sometimes people say well zoning is land use regulation and and that's true it does regulate uses but it's really important for us to keep in mind that it also regulates the size and bulk of structures as well as the way that lots are developed so I see it in in in three parts really zoning can also regulate specific details of construction so the images that you're seeing here are images from Hartford Connecticut where I was a planning and zoning commissioner for seven years and helped to rewrite the zoning code and these are images of our new code in the last image you saw a map because of course zoning codes have both a map which designates districts and puts land in in specific districts and text so you have texts like this this chart that that looks at our our downtown codes so where does zoning come from it comes from state zoning enabling acts let me see if I can advance this slide it's not advancing quite yet we're a little behind today a little sleepy but zoning comes from state standard zoning enabling acts and so those have been around for a century they were first doesn't put out by the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Herbert Hoover era and 1920s mid 1920s and it's pursuant to those model state zoning enabling acts that zoning was enacted all over the country from state legislatures providing local governments with authority to zone so in a way zoning is a hundred years old and lots of communities in Vermont probably adopted zoning in those early stages and then continuing on throughout the century so without slides I'm going to just keep going yep so that's what I'm that's what I'm on now projectors frozen I think the projectors frozen so you're just going to have to to to imagine that you can see the words that I'm saying but it doesn't really matter because it's all really the same thing all right so next topic I wanted to talk about was why zoning is important and so again lots of you raise your hand you're familiar with zoning you know what the consequences of zoning are and so putting these in in maybe big buckets the most obvious consequence of zoning is its its impact on the affordability and the supply of housing so fair housing that's what the topic of this conference one of the reasons you are all here but of course along with that comes zoning's consequences on transportation so if we are regulating our land development through zoning in particular ways we are regulating land in a way that enables us or prevents us from using cars using mass transit if zoning puts us puts lots of uses together in dense areas that it supports transit if zoning has large minimum lot sizes that promotes sprawl and car dependency so zoning has a huge impact on transportation it also has an impact on how our infrastructure can develop so not just our our transportation infrastructure but water sewer lighting energy zoning and infrastructure interact in really important ways so so that may be one bucket housing and infrastructure a next bucket of ways that zoning impacts our our lives is in the area of environment so the way that we zone has huge impacts on environment on our ability to respond to climate change again thinking about how we zone if we're zoning in ways that create sprawl we're requiring people to use cars we are requiring essentially requiring greenhouse gas emissions we're making it harder for people to walk and bike especially with things like large minimum lot sizes zoning also ensures or prevents our ability to access nature so if we have zoning that has things like an urban growth boundary where we develop within the boundary and we have access to nature around us that is a way that we can that that is a you know again has consequences zoning has impact on our food supply and of course I guess the last bucket is the area of opportunity so economic opportunity educational opportunity all of these things are impacted by zoning if we are zoning single family only residential only neighborhoods without a mix of uses we're making it harder for people to get back and forth between jobs and and educational opportunities so zoning has these really far-reaching consequences and in in all of our the areas of economy and society that that we can probably possibly think of and I think talking about that and just framing it in that way is really important because otherwise you know what's the why are we talking about this possibly arcane area of local government law and it's in my opinion anyway it's because we have these really important consequences okay so all right so we'll flip through all of these and now here we are so all right so zoning comes in lots of different forms and it's the particulars of zoning that make these impacts on all of these areas that I've just discussed even more salient in some places more dramatic in in some places and so this really brings us to this question how do we zone now and how exactly does that particular zoning impact our lives and I guess I would say that given zoning's importance I've just told you all of the different areas that zoning has an impact you'd think that we know all the answers to those questions but the truth is is that we we really don't we don't even really know how we zone today so you may be familiar with one or two well probably lots of you in this room are familiar with lots of zoning codes because that's your area specialty but you know do you can can you easily compare jurisdictions to each other do you know precisely the amount of land that's subject to different zoning rules and the answer is probably probably not because we don't have good tools to do that now the reason this question about zoning became really has become really important to me over the last few years of course I research in this area I have for the last couple decades I guess but the real reason that it became important was through this advocacy effort that I helped to found two years ago in Connecticut called desegregate Connecticut so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that effort and why these questions became particularly important so desegregate Connecticut is an advocacy effort based in and obviously Connecticut that really was pushing for statewide reforms and convened in the wake of George Floyd's murder to investigate and interrogate how Connecticut's land use laws impact social equity we expanded our thinking beyond equity and inclusion to include thinking and convening conversations about zoning's impact on prosperity and as well as the environment so some of these themes that we just discussed in general our team primarily young people and I'm happy to talk about that in the Q&A really powered this effort that over it's since June 2020 there's been dozens more students and young people who've joined the movement in addition to our seasoned folks at 80 nonprofit coalition members that have joined the coalition and I'm just gonna pause on this slide because you can see some of the traditional groups that are involved in planning and architecture like the AIA the Connecticut chapter of the American Planning Association environmental groups like Save the Sound the Sierra Club as well as preservation groups how many preservation preservationists are represented in this room preservation organizations all right good job thank you for being here I think preservationists are key to the housing conversation and we had all three of our major preservation statewide involved but one of the ones that I that I really wanted to point out because I see that the Vermont League of Cities and Towns is here today is that one of our coalition members was the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities which was all the municipalities in the state of Connecticut and in many other states the that organization or the equivalent I assume this is the equivalent has not been involved in local zoning and statewide zoning conversations in part because I think that they fear well what what might happen if the state gets more involved in zoning and that's what Desegregate Connecticut was advocating for but we were really fortunate that CCM in our state kind of saw the that this was the way that we zone was hurting our ability to grow as a state and our town's abilities to to really provide for their individual residents and so to their credit they got involved and really helped to shape the legislation in a way that worked for towns and I think I'm hopeful that with that the presence of the Vermont League here that they can also continue to be involved in that conversation so as we emerge and convened all of these these folks we really just kept getting the same question which is okay so generally you're talking about zoning generally you're talking about that it causes these problems but what about my town what is my town doing wrong how does my town compare to other other towns and what exactly does the state as a whole do when it comes to zoning and the truth is we could not answer that question so that was the question that kept coming up over and over again and that's when we decided that it was time for us to really start digging into the zoning codes themselves digging into the data and trying to answer that question so as you know and here's those Hartford images again zoning codes include both a map and a text so what we started to do with our team of actually that started off with the core team of 10 undergraduates from Yale they started to gather up all the zoning codes in the state so it turned out well I'll tell you how many in a minute and we developed a google sheet and we just started collecting information about the districts whether they were mapped whether they were in overlay what type of district was it elderly housing affordable housing did it permit one two three and four more family housing so we developed a methodology for that our team and that was very an iterative process we also started collecting maps so some maps look like this map from Stanford Connecticut a larger city which has a lot of different parts and a lot of different codes I think Stanford's code was one of the longest at 400 pages west ports was as well and some of the maps look like this in the smaller towns rural areas where they were digitized but they wouldn't give us the files so we had to digitize them ourselves or they were hand drawn and these I don't know if you can see but the one on the right I mean you can hardly tell which district is which this is one of the the beach associations that happens to have been given a special authority for zoning from the state legislature so we were taking these maps and digitizing them putting them into a coherent statewide GIS file so this was pretty time consuming and so we ended up having about 20 25 different people including GIS professionals including staff at at UCONN's center for land use education and research including students master students law students putting this all together and it was very ad hoc because it was the first time to our knowledge that anybody had ever tried to pull all of these pieces together the zoning code analysis and the mapping into one coherent framework so we this is an image of Connecticut and this is actually an image of our zoning map but it shows the 169 towns we actually found that they were 180 zoning jurisdictions because of the legislature's special act authority that had been giving that had given to non-municipal governments we found that amongst all of that there were about 2600 zoning districts and we reviewed in total over 32 000 pages of zoning text so this is not for the faint of heart but it resulted in the Connecticut zoning atlas so I'm just going to go through like if you you can look at this online at zoningatlas.org and then just click on Connecticut the zoning atlas works like this first you select what it is you want to see on the map so here we've selected one family housing then the land meeting the criteria shows up in some shade of purple and the purple shades relate the slight differences in purple relate to whether it's primarily residential mixed a mixed zone or non-residential zone the atlas can show if a town primarily zones for single family housing allows accessory dwelling units or accessory apartments zones for multi-family housing zones for housing or in the one half mile radius around rail stations or we have a Connecticut fast track bus rapid transit stations near and around Hartford and also shows lot sizes so these are things that you can toggle on and off in our map in addition to these we also collected information about a wide range about 100 characteristics including setbacks minimum parking requirements lot coverage heights and so on our findings were pretty in my view pretty dramatic one of the findings was that 91% of land in Connecticut is zoned for single family housing as of right so that's probably maybe something to be expected in a state that's fairly suburban 91% though is is pretty large we also found that only 2% of land in Connecticut allows for four or more family housing as of right I would bet these numbers are pretty similar in Vermont maybe even more more so because we have more I think more larger cities if you consider 100,000 or more large which we do in Connecticut it's very large so I'm from Houston so I have to give a little you know Connecticut is the same population as the city of Houston and which has no zoning but we'll get on that topic maybe another another time but but 91% versus 2% and the only way we could have figured that out is by doing that time-consuming mapping process where we were mapping each and every zoning district and highlighting their housing related characteristics so just to give you an idea of how this works in New Haven so New Haven is the kangaroo in the middle there with the two train stations you'll see what I'm talking about see it now that was one family house this is where one family housing is allowed this is where two family housing is allowed as of right and this big block in orange is I think elderly housing two family elderly housing only on existing in existing structures so that's a little misleading here's where three family housing is allowed and here's where four more family housing is allowed okay so what does this map tell you so if you're familiar with New Haven you know that New Haven is an urban area it's a poor city compared to its surrounding suburbs it's also a much less white city compared to its surrounding suburbs and East Haven shares some of those characteristics and you see that multi-family zoning there as well work that I'm doing right now with Urban Institute confirms what we probably could have figured out without any of this mapping which is that multi-family zoning is really corresponding with lower income a higher percentage of minority areas so but but if you look at this map and then you wonder if you've ever wondered why is New Haven more affordable why is New Haven the place where lower income people tend to gather in the region it's because there's no way for them to find housing in other areas when much of the surrounding area has large minimum lot sizes and a single family only those two characteristics probably alone contribute to the cost of housing in the area so as I said we logged many different characteristics when it came to housing so we have accessory apartments and we have logged lots of different features related to their being permitted we logged whether public hearings were required so when I say as of right that means without a public hearing that means an administrative approval I know that these two issues accessory housing and public hearings and minimum lot size are things you've been talking about in Vermont in that Act 179 from 2020 address the accessory apartments and minimum lot size to some extent so you're probably familiar with what minimum lot size is we log those numbers the specific number of acres required per lot density minimum unit area so how big apartments have to be we found that Darian Connecticut for example required apartments to be 2000 square feet we also found Darian required three parking spaces for a studio apartment three just in case you needed more parking for your three cars than your studio apartment square footage so minimum parking requirements we also looked specifically at affordable housing provisions within zoning codes the maximum number of bedrooms that were permitted so many towns had you could build apartments but they can only be one bedroom they could only be two bedrooms or you could build apartments but they can only be six units total so there are caps on number of bedrooms and caps on number of units and apartment buildings so these are the things that we logged across again all of these different different towns and there's a lot to unpack in all of that and today I'm just going to focus on two areas and these two areas again are areas that you've covered at least in part through statewide legislation here in Vermont started to open the door so I'm bringing you some stats here and some strategies that we use in Connecticut just to kind of let you know what we what we were doing there so accessory apartments accessory dwelling units these are small independent units that are built in the same lot as the larger units so what did the zoning atlas tell us when it came to accessory apartments if you just click on the zoning atlas and you say where are adus allowed it looks like they're allowed a lot of the state good job Connecticut pat yourself on the back even without statewide adu legislation look at how many adus are permitted except when you get down to the details and this is what you're bringing up that topic zoning by a thousand cuts this is where these little other requirements that unless you log them you don't really understand whether these types of housing these these types of different types of housing are permitted including adus so if you're looking for an adu that allows for non-owner occupancy that allows for people who are not family members or employees that allows renters because there are prohibitions on renting in some codes and that are not restricted to elderly only this is what you get so this is a different chart than this which looks oh great good job but if you're really thinking about an adu that might be available on the open market for rent this is what you what you see instead and then here if you add to that these two physical requirements that there's no maximum size so there's often a cap physical a number of square foot cap on adus or it's not restricted to the primary structure so in other words it can be detached let's say over a garage or in a detached unit you get essentially nowhere so where could you build a detached unit that's not subject to occupancy requirements it doesn't have a maximum size limitation nowhere so or very few places you can actually build that in Hartford but so we really started to advocate for this and and the law that we passed the legislature passed last year addressed this issue in part and addressed a lot of those little provisions like the maximum size number of parking requirements number of parking spaces required capping that at one and so on so we produced a couple of videos I encourage you to go to to desegregatect.org which is the site where you can watch these videos and I think they're pretty pretty cool but in terms of advocacy what we tried to do was we paired the data that we had with these more I guess video type and social media type advocacy tools the second topic I wanted to talk about was minimum lot sizes so again you're probably well familiar with this zoning codes can dictate how big a lot has to be for a unit of housing to be built the larger the lot the fewer homes it can be built that what you're seeing here is actually pretty small minimum lot sizes with shared space in the middle crazy finding in my opinion of the Connecticut zoning atlas again using that data 81 percent of residential land in the state requires essentially a one acre minimum how big is an acre is big right I'm sure lots of lots of you who live out in rural areas you know can that acre is not uncommon but this went for our suburbs too this went for areas in cities look at Stanford half of Stanford Connecticut is over one acre one acre or more zoning if you look at Greenwich which is the community closest to New York City it's four acre zoning as is as are New Canaan and Enderian and some of these other towns close to New York City even more shocking half of the land requires and you can see Greenwich is still purple half it's purple there requires two acres per single family home so what does that do to home prices but more importantly or just as importantly what does it do to sprawl and our ability to build compact developments that people actually want to live in not everybody wants to live in this kind of housing so again here we use the data we issued a maybe 30 40 page issue brief specifically a minimum lot sizes we did reports videos we assembled graphics that we hoped would show people lots of different options for how you can get in the case of the bottom right 15 units on one acre of land as opposed to one and so again you know feel free to check out this paper it's on the social science research network it's a free download and it's will be published soon okay there's lots of other information in the zone that the zoning atlas can convey one piece of information minimum parking requirements which I'm happy to talk more about in the q&a we should just completely abolish parking requirements for lots of different reasons that's a that's a no-brainer this whole state should do it actually Connecticut did cap in its legislation minimum parking requirements although individual towns can opt out of that any but anyways so that was bad but at least we started and lots of towns are cities across the country are eliminating them but this image shows you that if all of these other zoning provisions remain the same how much housing could be built within three of the 15 walkable cities that we studied this is bridgeport no walk in waterbury what we saw in this data and it's you don't necessarily know these cities but you can probably tell that there are these white lines that are corridors main streets so historic means the historic main streets of these towns and a lot of the housing that it could be built so the darker purple means lost opportunity the darker the purple the bigger the lost opportunity a lot of the housing that would be built if it were not for minimum parking requirements is housing along those historic corridors so if you think about what minimum parking requirements do to our historic our small towns they basically prevent those buildings that are already there from being reused because to change their use that triggers the zoning compliance that triggers parking requirements but it also promotes a demolition and it also shrinks the amount of building that can be built which shrinks the amount of housing that can be built if we're focused here on housing but really this parking requirements go for you know of course go for a mix of of uses I encourage you to check out the issue briefs that desegrate Connecticut wrote the environmental case for zoning reform transit oriented communities economic case for it as well as our playbooks that we made for land use board candidates commissioners and just a general advocates how do you talk about zoning what are the things that you ask for what are the strategies that you can use feel free to plagiarize the language and modify it for Connecticut I'm happy to give anybody those files okay so with that in mind so that was our Connecticut approach we really based our advocacy in this data because people were asking us these really good questions about what Connecticut actually was doing and how we were actually zoning and now people can go to that zoning atlas and they can click on their town and get all the stats for their town that pops up right on the atlas so I was asked to just say a few things about what Vermont can do of course you're already doing a lot of stuff statewide you're convenient you're here you're talking today with each other and I know you'll have some great plans for this really great conference as the day unfolds but I wanted to talk to you make a pitch for Vermont to join the National Zoning Atlas effort so that you can get some of these advantages of both collaboration with other researchers but also just the data itself so we launched the National Zoning Atlas in May using the Connecticut zoning atlas as the example and hoping that other states would use our methodology and join in and to our surprise 13 other states have already launched their zoning atlases and we are working with all of them convening them through my lab at Cornell to develop their atlases I'm just going to point out I'm not putting any pressure on you here I'll just let this let this image speak for itself I'll say too that we have teams in Pennsylvania New Jersey and Maryland forming so that's going to look like a sea of blue and Vermont's not there yet the goal of the National Zoning Atlas is to translate and standardize all this zoning information in hundreds of really indecipherable to the common person pages across these jurisdictions into a standard zoning interface where people ordinary people advocates policymakers elected officials I love that elected officials are in this room can use the information and the chips are going to fall where they may you know there's no manipulation of this zoning data that you're just going to see what's out there and you know you can you whoever's wants to use it can can start to use it developers all of these states are using this guide that we wrote called how to make a zoning atlas it's also a free download if you want to check it out it's just been updated we update it every month almost to address questions that arise in different places so some states for example have extra territorial jurisdiction some states have different zoning procedures so we include all of those scenarios in our updated guides again with the map and the text the biggest requirement is collecting that information that is sometimes harder than it needs to be so not every jurisdiction wants to just hand you their zoning codes even though it's a public document they sometimes they make you go to their office and physically photograph or Xerox a copy of the zoning code the methodology requires that all of these types of features of a zoning code be logged so the type of zoning district you saw some of these in that initial screenshot different characteristics about accessory dwellings planned residential developments so here you see again my own definition of zoning is uses lots and structures and so that's how this guide is organized under lots we have lot size density setbacks lot coverage parking connectivity requirements you probably don't have so much of that here but we have things like housing can only be built if it's near public transit stop or connected to water or sewer actually you do have that here actually in your state law but we have some of that in Connecticut and some other places do too and then structures floor to area ratio maximum bedroom and maximum unit and so on so different states are taking different approaches my lab is running the New York zoning atlas with lots of different project partners there's one of my students he was a project manager doing a presentation Montana is so our project partners are our university's state agency and nonprofits like the regional plan association Montana is another example of they've started to they're almost done collecting their data and that's being done by entirely by a nonprofit organization called the frontier institute a libertarian leaning institute so there's a big tent here in terms of ideologies why people are collecting this information some people might say well this is good for deregulation and the market other people might have that social justice angle so going back to you know all of these motivations is you motivated by fair housing are you motivated by climate are you motivated by opportunity the zoning data can be overlaying on other geospatial data that that can really tell us not only just those questions about where people live but also climate threats sea level rise why are we putting apartment buildings in places that are vulnerable for sea level rise and and so on so will Vermont join the national zoning atlas I hope so if you do you have I think almost 300 local governments if you use the Connecticut numbers that means there's about 4,000 zoning districts and maybe 50,000 pages of zoning text however I bet a lot of your communities don't have zoning so in Connecticut we so you know your work might actually be pretty light depending depending on how many of those towns actually have zoning in Connecticut we basically have universal zoning because it is so urbanized and it's sort of sandwiched between New York and Boston and so I guess I don't know really popular there but I bet you don't have as much work work to do here if you're interested there's a page on the zoning atlas website that's called want to make your own atlas and there you can find information about assembling a team links to the how-to guide and kind of our approach for as in terms of our collaborative we do have four staff members existing and incoming in our national zoning atlas I guess headquarters in our lab that common how-to guide which is 100 pages so it's extremely detailed how you're supposed to collect that information and a community of researchers and collaborators so here are again you see universities non-profit organizations metropolitan planning authorities like the Chicago Planning Authority and the MAPC in Massachusetts as well as funders from different capacities so please feel free to be in touch with me I'm going to open for Q&A there's my Twitter handle if anybody's on Twitter I'm always happy to connect and I think I'll just stop there is that good all right so I think you're supposed to use the microphones that was the one thing that I was supposed to say so there's one here and then there's one here is that on okay here's my question so who in this room do we have to convince like all of these people to get us to join the zoning atlas thanks oh gosh I mean it just takes one person so you know we found there's a team emerging in Virginia and it's basically a grad student who said I'm gonna have to I want to do this so he contacted the APA local or local universities professors asking people to take specific regions he's just sort of taking it on himself I mean it really I mean there's lots of different ways project teams can emerge it could come from one of the state agencies it could come from you know legislative authority it could come from a few regional planning authorities banding together so there's lots of different ways we the way that we've been taking on project teams is you know essentially just talking with them seeing if they have a credible team and then connecting them with funding resources so if you don't necessarily have funding resources here you know we can probably help find some at least some startup funding yeah is zoning strictly a state rights issue um does the federal government have any role in this or do the does the federal government have plans possibly in the future to address the inequalities by the zoning issues um as a as a federal issue yeah so you might have seen a few months ago president biden released an executive order indicating that um that the administration aspired to connect um certain housing or certain federal programs with zoning progress um and so after announcing that um I think maybe they realize well we don't have a baseline for how communities zone now so how are we going to know whether they've made progress and so we've been talking a bit with the White House and with HUD about how the National Zoning Atlas can be used to help them at least establish a baseline now and see what aspects of zoning might be important to incentivize so you know for example if it's minimum lot size that's driving housing supply and affordability issue which it probably is and our research will can probably show that um then you focus maybe on reducing the amount of large lot zoning in a community um so what is that differential on how will the administration reward that beyond that incentive type arrangements I don't think that the federal government has any specific plans although there's definitely some um discussion in the senate um and particularly in the senate about the federal government's role in zoning because of its impacts on interstate commerce so there at least there is a some kind of hook there but for now and for the last century it's really been states that are in charge of enabling and making the rules yeah is this it hey we've got it thank you so I'm wondering how the state and the legislature dealt with um cooperation or pushback from the local towns who have had zoning in place for a long time and how did you deal with red line districts so-called red line districts which I would imagine Connecticut has quite a few of well you know redlining really refers to at least in my um um my experience that that historical uh this bank more of a bank policy um type uh uh districting as opposed to zoning which is land use regulation so um I think we can probably um and in fact some have started to overlay those historical red lining maps with uh current zoning finding that the areas that were zoned you know c and d sort of lower quality neighborhoods tend to be those neighborhoods that still have um lower income demographic characteristics but also are zoned for multifamily housing so I think there's a correlation there um your first question about resistance um so I actually think that with knowledge about what zoning is and does uh people get very interested in in changing it and certainly there's a knee jerk reaction out there um by uh by individual people by local some local elected officials that might say well it's always been this way we don't want to change it and I think that status quo bias affects policymaking across lots of different spheres the opportunity we have and in you reference that housing is having a moment uh this morning um the opportunity that we have right now is that people are taking more of an interest um and so although we saw some pushback um from especially towns down on in the fairfield county close to new york city area we actually saw elected officials from small towns uh and big towns um new haven heartford uh pomfret small town um it testify at that hearing for the bill that that eventually passed in favor of the legislation because again I think the the as people gain more understanding about what zoning is they realize that what their neighbors do what they do it's sort of all related and so to have guidance that presents a more uh unified approach to uh land use regulation across jurisdictions actually can help some of these towns um uh achieve their population goals population growth goals uh in a slow growth state um so I yeah there's definitely always going to be resistance but I think part of what we were trying to do through desegregation connecticut is arm ordinary people with information about their own zoning so that they could go to their elected officials and try start to turn that tide away from just the status quo bias is there a type of current use in connecticut for your rural areas current use program um use value program I should say uh not the way that I maybe not the way that Vermont does it no yeah we don't have an act 250 thank you hi good morning my name is Ariel Jensen Vargas um one of the things that you mentioned very briefly is something just that I would kind of bring into a focus is um the ad use allowing for farm workers to live on the property um there is a significant population of Mexican farm workers in Vermont um and those people are actually living on the property of the farmer some of those Mexican farm workers do not are not actually legally here in this country so this kind of emphasizes the fact that these are people that are not that are living at their on their employer's land giving that land owner a lot of power when we're talking about Connecticut we're talking about the fact that with such a scarcity of rental housing that means that if you lose your rental housing the um the ability to find another rental in a maybe 30 day block of time is so difficult that that actually adds to the disparity of power between the landlord and the tenant and that's just something that I would like to emphasize is that these zoning laws are really impacting the tenants as well in terms of that having no power to control their lives yes and I think that's a that's a great point so in across the country we have a housing shortage we don't have enough housing um for people and what that means is that in especially in the renters context um we see that landlords have much more power because renters can't move they don't have that ability to exit as we talk sometimes in in the economics literature they they can't they can't move and even when they would like to the housing that they want to find is more expensive if we created more housing tenants would have more opportunities to do that the issue of the farm worker housing is interesting um we don't have good data on that because what that is so in one way you could that you could consider it well maybe this is multifamily housing because you have multi multi unrelated people living on the same lot but it's not really you know kind of skew the the numbers to count that sort of temporary work dependent housing as um multifamily housing equivalent to say an apartment building in burlington um so one thing that states have been doing is where you have those specific conditions so if there's lots of um farm worker type housing here there's you create a new column or you collect that data for vermont even if it's not collected in in a kinetic it um so that's definitely an option thanks hi thank you very much um one thing that i've been very curious about for a long time my observations uh which i'm sure you've seen plenty of times the wealthier communities declining to have to accommodate uh housing for lower income people so i've always thought that it might be appropriate for the state to say every community needs to zone for housing to accommodate their share of the state's entire population um just to make it fair just to say across the entire state okay every rich town has to be be ready to provide housing for a low income component of the entire state yeah so so what you're talking about is fair share legislation um so new jersey is a state that has a fair share regime um as a result of court cases the mount laurel decision that have in turn resulted in state a state agency being created and housing being constructed that enables municipalities across new jersey to bear more of what is their fair share than they have in the past that has resulted in housing being created in new jersey but in some ways it has resulted in housing that's not necessarily in the right places so for a state like uh kinetic it where you have a lot of um rural areas and suburban areas um my bias is and this is just my bias my bias is that what we should be doing is building um uh new housing in places where we have existing infrastructure not dispersing housing out to places where people can't even if they do have an inexpensive apartment they can't access the services that they need so our thought through desegregate kinetic it is that instead of focusing on the fair share model which was developed in the 1970s and 80s um of thinking is that we should focus on areas that already have water and sewer um which is not all of kinetic it um but also areas around transit stations so we have 61 transit stations 61 62 if you count up the rail and the kinetic at fast track stations and simply by rezoning those to allow for 15 units per acre could create hundreds of thousands of of new housing units as long as that uh that that housing is permitted as of right so the the I I haven't emphasized enough the the power of public hearings to kill housing um because people who show up at public hearings are the people who already live in a town they're not people who don't yet live in that town but want to live in that town and even when those people show up at hearings they're shouted down or things get right I'm sure not in Vermont but in some places um people are not very polite um so the the reason I think Vermont has a lot of respect for planning and but the planning has to translate into regulations that enable those plans to be developed and once you've planned and once you've changed the regulations to develop that kind of housing in the way that you've planned for there really should not be a need for additional public hearings for individual housing applications oh wow great so eliminate public hearings for housing as long as you write the rules so in Hartford for example we have a form-based code um every we know exactly what's going to be built we know how tall it's going to be we know where it's going to be situated with respect to the street line um we know even what kind of roof it's going to be maybe that's too prescriptive but Hartford is very historic lots of historic neighborhoods so we wanted to kind of provide some parameters there are no public hearings in the city of Hartford for any housing um and that's just that's how we wanted it and there's no there's no parking requirements either there's a bike parking requirement it's like lawless over there um but uh that's how we wrote wrote the rules um intentionally because again in a slow growth state in a struggling city what we want is development that fits is compatible with with our neighborhoods but also is easy to build so if you're frustrated here in Vermont your real estate developer come to Hartford um put that little plug in here too my husband would be uh would be uh who's the mayor of Hartford would be uh mad at me if I didn't put that plug in all right I think this is the last question hi um uh thank you so much for being here that was a really cool talk um I'm a computer science student at the University of Vermont so I'm really uh super interested in what you had to say um I don't know if you noticed but there's a big hole in the middle of Burlington um we call it the pit um and it's uh one of the problems that kind of created the pit was like a reliance on private development um and a lack of community control and equity in development and I'm just curious um how you think of uh zoning balancing encouragement of private development while also considering equity um and community control so I think the the the best path to equity is kind of what I was just saying is that if if you have parameters within which private development can occur and you make it so that people can't block especially housing I'm really talking about housing um then you will be it'll be much faster for community to create housing and create opportunities um I'm not familiar with with the pit um but I'll have to check it out sometime today um uh so I mean I think so for me I mean I've worked in real estate development I'm obviously care about equity too um as you can see through Desegrate Connecticut I think there is a way to balance I mean just the way I mean I've written about in other areas there is a way to balance historic preservation and affordable housing and historic preservation and renewable energy to me these are design problems in the case of zoning it's a legal design problem in the case of um historic preservation and ADA compliance that's a architectural design problem these are design problems um and if you design the system with that goal equity in mind and you say um you know we're gonna approve in this town apartment buildings with x percent affordable units just as a right we're just going to do that um you know that that may even be a start of it I do want to say one more thing since you're a computer science major one of the things that we are hoping to do with this national zoning Atlas projects is use machine learning um to more quickly read zoning codes and code them um and if we're able to uh get some funding for that um we have a grant into the National Science Foundation um we will but you know be one of the first projects that has these really complicated 200 page legal texts where a machine can go through them and actually um spit out at least a good chunk of information that we might be able to use for the zoning Atlas so don't wait too long Vermont um but if you you might benefit from some of that research um and accelerate uh accelerate your work but I think that's going to be a very cool new frontier in computer science um and at the intersection of computer science and law so stay tuned for that thank you so much for having me I really appreciate it