 Good evening. I'm Emily. I'm Jessica. My name is Yuri. I'm Potensia. And I'm Arnold. This evening we will be talking about the housing cost in Burlington. Did you know that in Burlington has a population of roughly 43,000 people and yeah. 20,000 of them being students. And today we're just going to attempt to discuss the topic of housing markets and how expensive the homes are here at the current time. And how it's pushing a lot of people out of state because they simply can't afford to buy houses, buy home in Chiddon County because they just don't make enough. Earlier today we were able to talk to one of the real estate agents that currently works with one of the local firms here. And what he has described to us was that currently the market is extremely competitive. All the houses that are being put on the market are being sold within days or even hours in some cases. And that if you are looking for a home you potentially have to make a life-long decision. So spending a quarter million or half a million dollars and live with it for the next 30 years. And you have to make that decision within hours or minutes even. Which is insane to think about. What else did we learn from that guy? Well, one thing that I found out is that housing prices have been the same basically since 1997. They haven't gone down very much, but they've only gone up. They haven't, nothing's fluctuated here. Absolutely, that's a great point actually. That's one of the things that he brought up to us is that we have seen a house market increase here. Especially within the last five years. Their homes on the market there are listed at about 270 to 275,000. They were purchased at 275 years ago and they're being sold at 340, 350. And they're gone within days with no renovations being done to them or anything like that. Which is insane to think about. Also on top of that, Vermont is the highest, one of the highest states in the country. It's 13th for highest housing prices in the country. But I mean there's not that many people here, which is why it confuses me. Also there's 600,000 people that live in Vermont in general and in New York City it makes sense that it's expensive because there's so many people living here or living there. But here in Vermont that number confuses me. Absolutely. In our opinion there are certain things that we can do to try to lower the cost of housing here. Because it's simply just pushing a lot of people out, especially young people that can't afford to live here. We spoke about that it's unfortunate that a lot of people want to stay here because of many wonderful things that the state has to offer. But they're not getting paid enough or the job market is just not here in order for them to afford to start a family here. And they're kind of forced to be pushed out. And there are things in place that the state is known for many zoning restrictions and building permits that you have to kind of follow through. Act 250 being one of them. Even then I support the act zone because it's preserving the natural beauty that Vermont has to offer. But at the same time it's preventing us from building more and therefore having more housing for people that need it. There's Bernie Sanders in 2017 I read an article about this. They cut a bunch of agencies, government agencies that provide money for people who can't afford to pay for housing. And that's only increased the homeless population. And also on top of that because when they cut the agencies spending money to rebuild houses, apartments and put money back into the government, in order to live reasonably in Vermont you have to make $22 an hour. Which is insane if you think about it. $22.40. Well some of the ways that they've tried to help reduce the amount of people who are homeless was with the Section 8 funding. So I was researching and throughout the United States roughly 4.8 million low income households are relying on Section 8 housing. And basically Section 8 housing is paying the difference because they are also paying for the rent, but they're paying for the difference that they can't come up with. And so a lot of the people who do rely on it because even when we were on the streets interviewing people, the homeless guy that we interviewed, he was waiting for Section 8 to go through. He said he was on the wait for over two years and he wasn't sure whether he was going to qualify or not, which was kind of surprising if you think about it. For somebody who's homeless and it's been homeless for a long time to even worry about qualifying for Section 8 is worrisome I'd say for sure. Well another thing about that is that employment since 2016 hasn't changed. It hasn't gone up and it hasn't gone down. There's no jobs providing people who need, I think in order to have Section 8 housing you need to have some sort of income a little bit. But how are you supposed to do that and how are you supposed to qualify for a program when there isn't an influx of jobs? Absolutely. Nothing's happening. Totally. Totally. Well yeah and that's the issue you know is that it seems like the job market is almost non-existent. You know we have a hard time placing people. So the working class is just forced to leave out because you're also forced out of that bracket to afford a home. If you're not making over $25 an hour you're kind of forced to buy a home for $200,000 and $200,000 in Vermont unfortunately just gets you an extremely old home. That needs a lot of work. Think of what $200,000 gets you in North Carolina. It's a brand new construction. Here you're spending that big amount of money and you're still taking a risk. It's a risk unfortunately. It's almost of a pleasure. It's like buying a car. Once you buy a car it loses value. Absolutely. You should be able to have the same value. Absolutely. I mean the one great thing about our state is that our value, your property value will hold for the most part because the economy is extremely strong. Even during the when the housing market crashed and the market here only went down by like 6 to 7 percent. That's what I'm saying. So it didn't really affect us that much. It was almost nonexistent. But it is a problem absolutely to touch up on affordable housing. I would like to see these major real estate companies or these major development companies to maybe write up a business plan of some sort. We need to build more eventually to provide more housing for people to stay in the state. There's a fact on here. Do you know where the fact sheet is? I'm not sure. It's about the Burlington has the smallest, tallest building in the nation. Yeah. And that's like it's an old people's home I believe. Yeah. Which is, you know, well, and that goes back into the act 250 that it's preventing us from building upboards. You know, we're in like I said, there's certain positives about the act. You know, it's preserving our state and its beauty. But at the same time, you know, density is not the type of word that we like to use here and our officials like to use. It's not, you know, we don't like density. We want to stay away from it and that just preventing us from, you know, keeping young professionals here in the state of Vermont. You know. Well, I mean, I've thought many times about leaving Vermont because last year I paid $1,700 for one bedroom apartment on Church Street, which is a lot of money. Absolutely. Especially for me because like, you know. Yeah. So renting costs, you know, we looked at the median, an average cost to rent like a studio was $900. I think one bedroom was $1,100. Two bedroom was $1,300. But I'm also what I'm saying is back on your point is that I'm paying for a pretty crappy place. It wasn't anything nice. The same amount of money down south will get you a lot more. Yeah. Pretty much. Absolutely. Absolutely. I just have roomies, but, you know. Well, it's insane. Like we were talking to Ruslan. I mean, that's how competitive the market is in Chittenden County alone where, you know, if you want to live close to Burlington, you better be ready to spend over $300,000 and it's going to be not a perfect home by any means, which is insane to think about. Yeah. But yeah, totally. I'm also like looking at back to this in Chittenden County, like the demand versus like the need. So like there's a high demand and there's just not enough houses for everyone to buy. Like once upon a time, people wanted like the big houses, lots of yard and all that. But like those houses are racked up really expensive now. So like most people want to buy houses in the 200, 300 range, but they have to either compromise what they're going to get or they'll have to pay for a really long time. Yeah. So like people are literally choosing if they want to spend that money within hours, like you were saying, because they only have that much time because they're competing with so many other buyers now. It's insane. And then we also spoke about potentially raising the minimum wage in order to kind of deflate the prices. But then that would raise a concern with the local businesses around the area because that would potentially put them out of business because as our state loves to be local and organic, that's what succeeds here. And if that were to happen, then those local businesses are not going to be able to pay their employees $15 to $19 an hour. So we'll see a lot of local businesses going out of business. That's the problem is that in order to lower, in order to build more, what I'm saying is that that would solve a lot of things. If we brought more jobs and more stuff into the, to build more houses, you would have more jobs and that's more of an economy. It would just work, but I forget what ACTU said. It's not allowing people to do that. Yeah. So to wrap up this discussion, we'd like to leave you with some open-ended questions to kind of think about. And so do you think that what you pay for your house is worth what you receive? And how can you make housing more affordable in Burlington, or how can we even improve Burlington? Thank you.