 Hello everybody, my name is Waseya Lawton and I am a senior at the University of Vermont. Today on the podcast we are going to be diving into the discussions surrounding affordable housing and development in both Burlington and the state as a whole. Joining me today is Thomas Chinden, a state senator, a professor at the UVM Grossman School of Business and has years of experience advising on sustainable growth solutions for the state. Thomas, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, I'm really glad to be here. So to start off wondering if you could introduce yourself a little, maybe how long you've lived here, um were you going to school? I did go to the University of Vermont for both my undergraduate as well as my master's degree. I studied at the business school, I earned a concentration in management information systems and after graduating I did move up to Colorado where I lived for a couple of years getting some professional experience at Janus Mutual Funds and Level 3 Communications. Then I came back home to Vermont, I got a job at UVM and while I was working as a as an in the IT help desk area, I earned my master's degree in the evenings and I graduated getting my MBA and then I left UVM. I was working at competitive computing for some time and I went back to the University in 2010 as a lecturer and I've been there since. Amazing and is it in the business school at university? Grossman, yeah. How do you like that? Just interacting with students and sharing your knowledge? I love the work, I really do. What I say, I've worked in private industry and in academia. What I love about academia is working with students, setting my own schedule, a lot more flexibility. I will say I went back when we had our second child and I just found that I had been teaching in the evenings but I like teaching because I get to decide when I grade and besides being in class and office hours there was a lot of flexibility and latitude given to faculty to set their schedules to work around their other family obligations. That I just love it when people ask me questions and I know the answer it just feeds my ego. That's my standard joke. No, I do like working with students and working at UVM and the Grossman School of Business. Yeah, it's an amazing program there and I understand that you're also a Vermont State Senator, wondering kind of how long you've been in that position, talk a little bit about the role, maybe a little bit of a day in the life. So I'm just starting my second term so I started at my first term right in the middle of the pandemic. I ran in the primary back in 2020 so I served my first two-year term from 2020 to 2022, really 21 to 23 the way it works out but that was almost 75% on Zoom. This is my first session that's really in person and I will say it is night and day. It's completely different. Another thing is I prior to and up until this last March I was a South Burlington City Councilor for eight years and housing was a major topic of a lot of our local permitting and local zoning issues so I have that elected experience as well. So working with the Vermont Senate, do you work down in Montpelier most days in person? Yeah, good point. So yes, when the legislature is in session we are a citizen legislature so we only meet approximately three and a half, four months really from January until May. I think it's a total of 18 weeks that we budget for. So from January there are about a little less than three weeks left of the session. This is the busiest time when a lot of things are moving very quickly. In the Senate where there are 30 senators, every senator serves on two committees so one in the morning and one in the afternoon. My two committees are Senate transportation which I served on my first term and this second term I'm now the vice chair of Senate transportation and in the afternoon I'm now on Senate finance. So those are my two focus areas. I have other committees and boards and commissions that I've been appointed to as a state senator. I'd be happy to speak to some of those but they don't necessarily intersect the housing topic as much as what I do in the Senate and also in some of my city council previous role. Okay, what are the other kind of topics that you're working on? I guess as well to just some of the issues that you know you take interest in can kind of speak on that you help with. So in Senate transportation we just passed out this last week and we'll be presenting it on the floor. The omnibus transportation bill. So every year there's this big transportation bill. It's called the T bill affectionately. I think it's H 479 this year and that's done that's where I spent a lot of my time and attention and there are many aspects to it but the one that Garner's the most headlines and interest is we're starting to set up the process to collect fees from electric vehicles. Right now electric vehicles don't pay anything for gas tax and our fuel consuming vehicles pay to with their fuel of gas taxes to pay plow and paint our roads and those revenues are declining which is not a bad thing from the perspective of less fuel being consumed but we still need to pay plow and paint the roads and so what we are looking at is a fair way to collect some assessment some amount of money in different ways for entirely plug-in vehicles for hybrid plug-in vehicles as well as from out-of-staters through a three pronged approach. So that's one thing and then there's a lot more transportation I could talk about but that's usually a great interest. In Senate finance we see a variety of topics and so it is anything that affects the revenues of the state comes through Senate Finance and so with one of the benefits of Senate Finance is you get to wrestle with and see a lot of topics like this week we've been working on how cell towers are permitted in the state renewing a alternative track for that we also have been working on sports betting so Vermont all of our neighbors now allow online sports betting Vermont is on track don't want to jinx it but it's moving its way through the system but we've been looking at the fee structure for allowing and recognizing operators of sports betting in Vermont that's been a big topic we've been looking at regional dispatch and so on as for housing I did get a little bit oppressed because this is the topic I'm very passionate about I did introduce an amendment to the home bill which I'm very excited I still support the home bill my amendment was not successful and I'd be glad to talk about why but I ran for this office I didn't hot run for this office to get rich because Lord knows you don't I did not run for this office to get more sleep because Lord knows I don't I lose a lot of sleep over this office I ran for this office and I'll give you my my sort of pitch my head I always say to people and there's truth to this this isn't me just you know politicking here but I ran because I wanted to see more opportunities for current and future generations of Vermonters to be able to stay here live here work here and drive here I've seen in my my role on the South Burlington City Council and through growing up here and seeing my three sisters all leave the state going to areas where there is housing where there is jobs and there is opportunity I just see it being too difficult to build a house or a business in the state of Vermont and so I I ran because I did not hear enough of my elected officials elected representatives advocating for Vermont to grow I want to see it easier to build houses in the state of Vermont so that we can have more Vermonters and more people appreciate and enjoy and become the next generation of Vermonters a great segue kind of into the housing problems that are going on in Vermont um and I completely agree I mean I grew up in Vermont as well and just in this past few months of it's kind of come to my attention just the same issues that you're seeing too it's becoming increasingly expensive and a lot more people are moving here and rent prices are going up I was like talking to my mom the other day she's like how much are you paying in Burlington like I didn't pay that when I went there um and it's definitely sparked my interest to like how can we still build new housing and like build development and grow while also kind of balancing this like small town culture of Vermont um I would love to just get your overview of why you think there kind of is a current housing crisis specifically in Burlington um we can go back more into like this whole state but right now in Burlington kind of like the Chinning County area um what you believe like are some of the causes of why we're here so it's definitely multifaceted and there's lots of different pressures and factors on it I will say if I look at vacancy rates we have one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country which just means there's just not a lot of open available space if you look at available houses part of it has been and you spoke to that and part of your question about the pandemic a lot of people were interested in moving up here but these constrict this constricted housing market has been persistent for the last 10 or 15 years if not longer from the data I've seen from the Vermont Housing Conservation Board and BHFA Vermont Housing Finance Association my friend Leslie Black Plimo does excellent reporting on all of this and so I usually read a lot of her pieces as for how we got here I'd also say that Vermont's not alone there are many areas that are struggling with this and there are different solutions to these things and the state the government be it at the local level or the state level or even the federal level can't be the only fix there there has to be market-based forces because we can't build all the houses that everybody needs what we do have control over is where my intention where my lens is focused which is on regulatory controls that are in place and that have been put in place over time and those regulations really are at two levels there there's a third level the federal level but where the home bill focuses is really at the local level and that's where I think my south related city council capacity at the local level in Vermont and local municipalities get to set a lot of rules over how land is used and that's important because as new development or redevelopment occurs just because somebody wants to put a house there they're not necessarily going to own it for their entire for the for in perpetuity because people come and go but that building will still be there so the towns and municipalities that have oversight over that land have a right to set some conditions as to how it should be built in order to maximize optimize the line with community interests as well as long-term goals be it from a climate perspective from an economic perspective or from a just a smart growth bucolic aesthetic perspective so that local control is absolutely important and nobody knows the local community then the local elected officials and those are in Vermont your select board members or your city councilors so there's local control and at the local level on the south relative city council I've been part of many discussions because south Burlington is right south of Burlington and it is a suburban area that has been experiencing a lot of growth pressures on it from the largest municipality in the state of Vermont Burlington and the for better or for worse that comes with growth comes growing pains and those growing pains persist or reveal themselves when people with a beautiful view in their backyard are now hearing that somebody wants to put in a hundred units with parking and no longer beautiful view where deer might be trolloping along on snowy days but instead they see the backyards of people how people's houses and that that creates friction resistance and concern and so the question is how do you navigate that how do you constrict and define growth the caretta pace where do you design growth to be because if people know when they buy a home that that area is designated for growth that's a different discussion than when if when growth sort of grows up around people without some some oversight some intentions and community some community input and some planning so that's what happens at the local level but at the state level which is where the home bill really takes a two-pronged approach we also have this thing that's been in place for about 50 years called act 250 now it's important act 250 is not a bad thing act 250 is de facto land use regulation for the state of Vermont and it was it came into existence when somebody wanted to put a big thing down in Vermont where the local community wasn't ready for it but there wasn't necessarily any zoning or any rules to prevent it from happening so act 250 is the backstop if you want to put something in in Vermont you and you don't have local zoning it's out in a rural area but even if you do have local zone and if it meets a certain certain threshold it triggers a statewide review process which involves a lot of different requirements different check-ins different reports and that's great and you mentioned affordable housing and that maybe is another point that really is important to highlight why i think there's a housing crunch right now is because there's not enough housing and so one would argue if you take an economics that someone's supply doesn't meet demand it drives up prices and so there is just not enough housing supply why there isn't enough housing supply i would argue is because we have multiple factors but one major factor is that we have local constrictions at the local level of zoning restrictions and then act 250 has a lot of behavioral modifiers and how it affects the marketplace and driving or not driving not enabling not encouraging housing growth and this is where i definitely appreciate this attention so whoever's listening to this that this is something that a lot of people don't really realize and know because it only affects individuals individual promoters that own a certain amount of land that are thinking you know what i want to put some houses on there maybe they're thinking of selling maybe they want to build some houses for their family maybe they want to just extract some some resources and some revenue that maybe they want to make some money as they head into retirement but there is this rule in act 250 it's been in place for 50 years that i'll use me as an example i own four acres of south berlington so if you know bend down dorset street the middle market in delhi i'm right near there and that's where the suburban part of south berlington that's been gradually growing because in the late 90s city sewer and water and this factors a lot into smart planning we put city sewer and water into the ground covering the what's called the southeast quadrant that allows for higher density housing because we can talk about what sewer water is but without city sewer and water you have to have a larger land spots or land parcels so that you can't get as much density because we need a septic field a septic tank with a leach field for to dissipate you just can't get that high density housing which is what we need which is more housing and smaller closer concentrated levels to meet our climate goals as well as to meet the needs of college students wanting to find an apartment somewhere in berlington but in the southeast quadrant of south berlington um lots of money millions of dollars both federal state and municipal dollars as well as developer dollars were put into put sewage pipes that we have plenty of capacity on uh there is more room to put more housing out where i live down here so i am adjacent to city sewer and water i as a single landowner for that 250 can put nine units on my four acres within a five year time period within five if i owned other land parcels i don't but if i own other land parcels within a five mile diameter i would not trigger act 250 if i did nine units or less on my property but if i did a tenth unit within five years within five miles of this the paperwork i would have to do to build those units the nine units versus ten units would go from this much to this much the point is that paperwork translates to uh engineering costs lawyer costs additional fees and time and uncertainty so people and you can see this throughout the countryside if you die drive down doors history sometime i'll show you all of these nine unit developments of houses that were built because people knew that if they built 14 units or just 10 units then it would be 10 times as it's not 10 times that's an exaggeration it would be tens of thousand that's not an exaggeration tens of thousands of dollars of more money just to see if you could build that tenth unit but with act 250 the appeals process creates a great deal of uncertainty where things are often derailed stopped forded or otherwise drive the expense of more with more time because time is money so my amendment that the amendment that uh i had a lot of support but we wanted to respect the committee process and that was still alive in the house which is again part of the plan to raise awareness over this was to address this housing crisis to to make more housing available to drive down the average cost while also addressing the missing middle so that there's more fluidity in the marketplace because if people in one house could then move into another house smaller larger meeting their family needs that creates the flexibility this also gets to the homeless needs we need more housing more roofs for more people to be able to live in them and if we build more houses that will leave our older stock available where we can repurpose them in a variety of creative ways but my amendment which is still alive and laura sabilia a representative sabilia was doing a phenomenal job today keeping it alive in the house wood for a three-year period and that's important just in the communities in vermont that have local planning and zoning that's important that's about half of the the land mass in vermont south burlington has local planning and zoning which means we have rules there are towns that don't have rules bolton is in my district bolton does not have local planning and zoning so they this would not affect bolton but in south burlington instead of nine units if somebody down the street with a 30-acre parcel wanted to build up to my proposal was up to 25 units they wouldn't trigger act 250 they would just have to go through the local land rules and that would be for a three-year period which means when those nine unit developments would otherwise which are going to come in which i would argue is not smart growth it's actually sprawl it is less use less efficient use of land because of this arbitrary i've actually asked people that have been around for 50 years why is it 10 units they said well nine sounded too little 11 sounded too much so they went with 10 so it's just this arbitrary number because we have 10 digits on our fingers so my my amendment was just to raise that threshold for a three-year period in towns with local planning and zoning so that if the land this would not affect any of the natural resource protections on the land parcel my four acres or that 40 acres anything that's protected forests swamps marshlands those all stand but instead of being restricted at nine units if you could fit 14 or 17 and you wanted to you could then build more especially in parcels attached to city sewer and water which would be mine i've talked too much but that's my amendment that i got some press coverage over it's still alive but i wanted to raise awareness because it's that type of little obscure act 250 little threshold that is constricting the housing market and it has been for the last 50 years to the point where that's putting pressure on both prices availability and all housing stock across the income spectrum i'm so glad that you did describe that because i mean just in my little bit of research i've been doing like that's what i've come to like why aren't we building denser and closer to these economic hubs instead we're pushing like single-family homes and like yes there might be land protected but like it's all spread out and it's fragmented i'm like that like it doesn't make sense that's amazing that you're working on this um what's the name of it again that was an amendment to s 100 another aspect of s 100 that is still alive which really intersects your interest area and this topic that it's really important to highlight is duplexing by right so single-family housing has some and i don't know if you know senator keisha ron hinsdale but she is a phenomenal leader on this topic and so this has been her bill and she has the color of law as a textbook as a book that she always references if you haven't read it it's definitely talks about how housing policies has has its roots in income segregation and sometimes racial segregation so i can't speak as eloquently to those topics as others but i will say that single-family housing is a way to keep poor people from living near rich people and i think that holds us back as a as a community as a state and as this country uh we are better when we know and can walk and can relate to others across the income spectrum so that we see each other as neighbors and not as others and so my point is in s 100 currently as is if it makes it through the house if you can build a single unit on a parcel in vermont you also have by right the ability to build a duplex that automatically doubles the amount of housing that's available another important aspect is in areas like south burlington where there is city sewer and water meaning it can handle density it says if you have an acre of land then you have the right not the obligation very important distinction because this gets conflated in the arguments it does not force you to do five units but if you own an acre of land and you want to put five units there the city sewer and water if it's supporting and it enables and allows you to do so those are at the local level and that's where south burlington well in the city council the three to vote i was against this they restricted and parakeets too that are for some reason screaming right now oh my gosh so at the local level there's been south burlington has passed recent land recent land development regulations last year or two i was a three to vote where i was uh three councillors voted to restrict housing in the southeast quadrant to have was called conservation puds this is one of the two reasons why i was against it it is not good land use that right now requires that for a four acre parcel that you have that you could only build like one house so i'm getting my numbers off here but the that requires that you conserve like 70 percent of virgin's clay if you know virgin's clay you can't eat it's not prime agricultural soil it's good for housing and that's what we have in the southeast quadrant so they have these mandatory conservation puds where you're conserving land attached to city sewer and water because it's their golf course and that's that's not the good planning that's not smart planning and that's why i voted against it and so uh what the s100 does is basically takes away those local local constrictions so the possibility for those local restrictions so that at the individual the most local level of all at the owners level if they have access land connected to city sewer and water and they want to put five units on an acre and the natural resources allowed for it this would enable that for conservation but conservation where it makes sense yeah conservation on virgin's clay in eight parcels next to neighborhoods where they're in south berlington just south of the berlington there's only a certain amount of conservation and we have already conserved a lot of south of the southeast quadrant i don't have the specific number but variety of acquisitions as also forest blocks that we have protected we have over in my humble opinion we have over protected the southeast quadrant of south berlington which also happens to be the wealthiest district in the great state of vermont absolutely yeah i mean like i was driving down there a few weeks ago and i was like look at all these big new homes that are being built i guess looking at um just vermont as a whole and kind of how it has been growing really fast in the past two years and i mean even in the past 20 years i think there's been a lot more growth um do you think that's placed more pressure on affordability in vermont and kind of maybe we're not stepping up to being able to address the influx of people in the right ways the term i've heard a lot is climate migration so we're getting uh immigrants uh immigrants so escaping from the the pavement traps or the heat traps of our inner cities and other areas and uh to me i want vermont to be an opening inclusive and welcoming environment so i want to find ways to to house people that want to live here i don't want to slam our doors shut i don't want to keep us a gated i don't want us to be a gated community uh and to to do that to allow for that and also just to allow i have three kids i want them all to have the option they don't have to stay in vermont but i don't want them to leave because they can't find a housing here um my best man in my wedding went to school with my uvm he uh went moved to texas he got twice the house for half the money and that's because they have if you know texas they have no zoning i am not advocating for vermont to zone uh because the alternative the extreme alternative is is is hap hazard vermont has defended some texas out there uh but you can find the really poor development design that can occur without some community oversight but that regulation doesn't come out of developers pockets it goes into the price of our housing and so the more regulation we have and the more that regulation artificially constricts the the ability to construct the a need a community need which is housing that drives prices up so it's not just about and this is where the conversation usually gets completed to i'm all for affordable housing perpetually affordable housing but that usually translates and do high density multi-story building i'm all for that but i don't want the options in vermont to be either you have to be super rich to afford a before to make mansion out in the countryside or super poor and have to live in a place without a yard in a downtown area where you don't have all the amenities and the aesthetic views it's the missing middle that we've been pushing out in that missing middle are duplexes and four quads and townhouses in different areas and are permitting just isn't allowing and enabling those things in that missing middle as well as more perpetually affordable housing without it is just creating all the pressures the upward price pressures on a variety of our housing stock what would you say are some of the best tools to help you know vermont in burlington to be able to kind of grow more sustainably address more smart growth growth goals um and to kind of support people in all different walks of life financial situations um kind of like if there's just a few top things you'd recommend talking about the big ones but another big area that i've been a strong supporter of and i'm glad there's finally some movement at this local sub burlington level there was statewide movement that uh ceased last year which is rental registries and looking at short-term rentals i'm going to lose some support with my next statement but i will also say that on senate finance i'm very intrigued by h480 which is a bill that will look at how to we have an extremely complicated property tax code when it comes to education funding in vermont i can never explain it and it'll take it takes like an entire semester to really understand it but what i want to distill it down to is we have really three classes of properties homestead properties so that's if you're a vermont and you this is my home and in my taxes i declare it as my homestead so i get certain qualifications and there's income sensitization and up to 64 to 80 percent of vermonters get income sensitization when they declare a homestead and then there's this whole other class called non homesteads but in that non homestead class that includes rental units which are homesteads like multi-story rentals uh the apartment complexes those are in that non homestead so are commercial properties and so are half vacant or very vacant uh vacation homes what i what i'm excited about is i feel that we should charge a variable property tax rate based on the whether or not it's a commercial property whether or not it is a multi-story occupied 90 percent of the year of or a vacation rental that is only occupied 20 percent of the year 10 percent of the year i think we should have a higher taxation rate for idle housing stock in order to motivate and incentive tax policy better utilization if you are an out-of-stater that comes up to vermont in the winter for a month i would like you to incentivize or be incented to rent that out to somebody for the other 11 months and then maybe have them go to a hotel for that month that you are and have the math workout so that we have more houses more roofs for people to work uh to people to live in so i think we through to a rental policy to both tax policy as well as rental registries which is an aspect of this is registering tracking and measuring um who's living where paying what um and for that can also tie into our climate goals by looking at the energy efficiencies of our rental stock i see a lot of a lot of benefit and getting a handle over our short-term and long-term and other rental stock a peter druger is a management scientist i always quote in my uh my management classes in the grossman school of business that you can't improve what you don't measure and right now vermont is not measuring what we're what we're renting what's being rented huh so i'd like to start measuring that that's super interesting i did not know that um and so burlington does great job so burlington does have a rental registry but south burlington does not s6 does not so a statewide rental registry was proposed uh that's where did go any further south burlington is on track because we're now the second largest city in the state and uh they are the city council is very likely to implement a rental registry in the next two years sorry you weren't doing something no no yeah um you're saying about like taxing kind of these different rental properties at different rates so right now is are these rental like commercial rentals vacation homes all tax the same rate right now same non homestead tax rate there are some variations for commercial properties they can have property evaluations based on projected income of the property and there are these things like rental rebates but that's not that's undersubscribed and for out-of-state vermonters or out-of-staters that don't do their taxes here in vermont they're not getting those rental registries so h480 because i'm very excited about it because it's what i think we need to do we need to better under what's called the grand list uh the list of properties in the state of vermont that's often managed at the local level h480 proposes to manage it more at a stake on consistent level with additional variables to track what characteristics there are of that property so we can have better levers to use tax policy to drive our housing and climate objectives yeah i mean too if you're looking at places like you know stow keelington like the places that do end up bringing a lot of kind of economic help into vermont people like buying second homes there and then renting them out and visiting like it's one of the biggest drivers i think of our economy too and like it's really important to kind of use that um the last big thing i want to talk about was the um actually two more big things but the first one was the vermont housing and conservation board um personally i just have a big interest in this of the contention between how can we grow while also maintaining kind of the small small town charm um and kind of the open natural land of vermont um but still address the affordable housing problems and i just feel like some of the programs they have you know like funding for mobile homes manufactured homes different sort of like AUDs all that kind of stuff while also like investing in land trusts i just think like the work they're doing just has a lot of potential um i'm wondering your thoughts on it kind of how you've worked if you've worked with them in the past at all um and maybe also what your personal stance is on kind of how we can balance those goals as well so i don't have a lot of first-hand experience with the vermont housing conservation board but i'll say this the housing advocates i know of speak extremely highly of the organization and they have a impeccable reputation in what they try to accomplish in balancing these dual goals of conserving where we should conserve and then fostering and encouraging smart housing growth where it also needs to occur so i will say from a finance perspective what has come up recently and what i've heard of even before i joined the senate is uh since the late nineties we've had our property transfer tax so when somebody sells the property there's a fee and half of it by statute is supposed to go to the vermont housing conservation board but i hear that all but for the first two years the general assembly has um not withstood that statute if you know that term not withstood it basically says we're going to ignore that rule for this budgetary cycle which means we um some would argue short changed um the vermont housing conservation board that was before my time but i will say in my two years here i hear with all the federal monies we've made good on some short falls that we've had in years past and so there is a renewed interest to fully fund the vermont housing conservation board and that's a call that as i've it's been explained to me from advocates i fully support half of the money that we collect when somebody sells a house from the property transfer tax should go to the housing conservation board so that we're growing smart and we're conserving smart yeah definitely um i guess too just to follow up of that so kind of when you're combining the people that maybe are opposed to development um i guess like the not in my backyard um and also while needing to grow and address the affordable housing um what would you say is like just one or two sentences of like how we can come together as like a state community um to kind of compromise um still grow but also um conserve sorry that was a roundabout question one thing i think that we could do better in vermont and this is no slate on current operators we just have a very shire-based approach to governance meaning each town and municipality has about all the say you know to other states especially out west and even down south there's a lot stronger county-based governance what i would say county based governance if we start to shift to or at least start thinking more regionally i think we can better achieve these goals i i see burlington using these imaginary lines drawn before the automobile age those people just living on that side of this imaginary line are those people i didn't mean to say that derogatory but i'm saying burlingtonians that live on that that side of the line are looking to replace the memorial auditorium and they're gonna have to burden bear that burden for that huge project with just within they're already taxed out but i grew up in south burlington in vermont and every concert i went to growing up was that memorial auditorium so why am i not contributing to the revitalization of that asset and but to make that happen in vermont we need some sort of more regional taxation or governance perspective at a county per the county wide angle and the same thing could be thought of for housing if we started to look at the county south burlington has done its fair share and i don't know if that came across earlier on but south burlington has grown a lot over the last 20 30 years if you look at our population growth we have allowed for the housing that this this region has need i would say there's this growth exhaustion where this this community just feels like they have grown so much they they they want to slow it stall it or at least just get it to be at pace with what the other communities are i feel like south burlington might be more receptive to growth if all the neighboring communities are also helping us fund a recreation center or ice rink or the other things that come with that growth and that's not currently happening so one thing i think systemically that could help vermont is if we start looking beyond these uh municipal boundaries and instead look more regionally around population centers and workplace centers and where people are just naturally living especially post-automobile age i i think i'm not that i want the automobile or to be automobile centric but a lot of that has enabled the growth patterns that we've seen over the last 60 to 80 years that we're kind of struggling with right now absolutely yeah and i think like just it's natural i think to kind of struggle with growth if you are being faced with it really quickly um and just like i don't know if change is happening really fast around you like that's tough um and just seeing i mean me personally too i mean i'm from middlebury and like i've even seen it start to grow and like i think it's so good and we need that but at the same time it's like oh i don't want anything to change i think that's like a natural human thing um and yeah definitely south berlington has you mean you look at like shelbert road and like all there um the highway going through definitely has a lot um yeah that's really interesting um awesome the last main topic i wanted to cover was just i think we had talked about it right in the very beginning of the home um the home bill yes the home bill um going i don't think we had talked in depth about what it is um so i wonder if we can quickly explain that a little bit sure um there is a lot in this bill and it's what's called an omnibus bill and so to be uh exhaustive uh it would take probably an hour and the floor speech for this i think was actually an hour and 20 minutes so um i think we we touched upon some of the key things already which is the act to fit there are some act 250 reforms in there which do allow that 2555 in very specific areas or downtown centers or growth areas or neighborhood designation areas which only represents about 0.5 percent of the entire land mass and the other major issue topics that we did talk about that is in the home bill is that duplexing by right as well as when there's city and sewer um allowing it for a allowing for not requiring five units other than that there is a couple of new positions to help advocate on housing i don't have it in front of me and i'm probably going to miss some things but uh it does a lot of different things those are just the two big ones that are getting the most attention that that's why i spoke to them yeah okay awesome well those were most of my questions um i've learned so much too and i'm just really excited about all of this and just being involved in kind of the local community and like learning more about what's going on um is there any other kind of programs or big ideas that you don't think we touched on that would be important um for this topic i don't know if i did justice to the topic of uh rental registry or statewide rental registry and the the benefits of that i know there has been some efforts again provided this session but i hear those are hitting some opposition um so i think that would be worth looking into a short term rentals air b and bs those two are taking houses off of the the rental market and so aligning our tax policies and our registration practices so that we know what's happening and that they're conforming to all the safety standards can do some to put those maybe back into a longer term rental uh where people see more costs associated to shorter term rentals which longer term rentals will better meet the college student need in the chitin county area um so i would think that's worth more attention than i gave it or justice um my last two final questions is what is your favorite part um about either being a senator or kind of teaching at uvm just what's your favorite part in these roles um and then maybe what's the most challenging things that you faced so this is gonna sound like silly but no these are these types of things are the favorite part i get invited to like go talk to the boy scouts and when i get invited to other events meetings just hearing from people i love hearing from people what they care about and then taking it into my service um i will say this the the grind of the legislature they say it's that nobody wants to see how the sausage is made actually working in the legislature sitting around the committee table for literally hours and hours on end to talk through very mundane very specific language can be a grind but it's what i signed up for and it's what it takes to get policy and drive policy to align with community interests and our priorities as a as a state and content area so getting out there talking to people is one of my best of my favorite parts of it the legislative part is is what you sign up for to have an impact on the community that i care about is very meaningful it just can be a grind long hours but it's nice like the state house is really nice well thank you so much for talking for a little bit sorry i went over but just so much to cover awesome on this important topic the only way to address the housing crisis is to address the housing crisis and that's done through things like what you're doing so thanks for your time on this yeah absolutely well thank you so much have a great rest of the day bye