 of different communities within our state. Last time we broadcast from here, we spoke about the impact of affordable housing on early childhood development. You can see on our website, the shorter video versions that are not live, that are just recorded in the house. You'll see in the next coming month, we'll be talking about how housing impacts folks living with HIV and AIDS. In November, we talked about veterans. And today, we have with us, Emily Hancock, who is a member of the class of 2023 at UVM. And Emily and I are gonna be talking about affordable housing and young people, especially college students and recent grads, and kind of the relationship, right, between young people and the housing crisis. So Emily, why don't you tell us a little bit about you? Are you from Vermont originally? I am actually originally from Kansas. So I am a long way away from home. I applied to a bunch of schools trying to just get out of the Midwest. And then UVM ended up giving me the most in financial aid package. And I was like, excellent, Vermont is the best state. Definitely go in there. Not trying to be in massive amounts of debt when I graduate. I think my perspective is probably a little bit different than a lot of other college students at UVM. I am like paying for my own school and paying for my rent and paying for all the things myself. And so that's kind of just like a little bit of a disconnect between me and some of my peers I find a lot of the time in which their parents help them with school and help them with rent. They don't understand the drasticness of the way high rents affect housing people and the way that that affects the Burlington community overall because it's not like a burden that they bear themselves. They're not facing those costs. Yeah, absolutely. It's a, and as you know, the housing market here is insanely tight. And especially in Chittenden County and Burlington, it's at one point, I think two or one point. I'm not sure what the decimal point is. It doesn't matter. That's insanely low. That there's not even apartments available. Never mind apartments that are affordable because there's none available. So everybody knows that they can charge whatever they want for an apartment and someone will pay it, right? Exactly. And one of the things that like thinking like for my perspective myself, like thinking of like, oh, if UVM offered like more scholarship money to help like offset those costs but then all that's gonna do is just increase prices because you're just increasing like more money into the system that already has a lot of money pouring into it. So like that's not a like viable answer because that's all that's gonna do is just like increase the prices. So now, did you, so you live at off-campus housing Yes. In an apartment. Yep. What was your experience trying to find one? So I actually experienced a little bit of homelessness in May of 2020 when I came back to Vermont. My job had like extended me back and asked me to come back after getting furloughed and I was like, I make a lot better money in Vermont than I do in Kansas where the minimum wage there is $7.25 an hour. I remember in high school, like lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons and making like $9 and I was like, I'm so cool, look at all the money that I'm making. And then I got here and I was like, oh, this is an even minimum wage here. But for me, it's like, I was very, very lucky with the place that I found. I have two roommates and I only pay $500 a month to have this like little like closet space to live in but it's like what I can afford and it's like what like keeps me housed. It's just- Does that include utilities or no? No. No. So $1,500 altogether a month for the whole place. No, it's a little bit more for the other people because they have larger rooms than I do. Oh, okay. So it's even more expensive. Yeah, no, definitely not cheap. I, it's also like very far away from campus and that is one of the like key things that I think might solve a lot of issues in de-densifying Burlington overall. UVM shuttles does not offer shuttles off campus unless it's like late at night. But if I'm trying to get to my morning class it would be really nice to have a shuttle to get me to and from there. Their main focus for providing those shuttles late at night is for people like partying. They don't want people to drive while under the influence of anything and to provide them a safe way to get home late at night which I think is like amazing and could continue to be done. But I'm not trying to party, I'm just trying to go to class. The exact opposite of partying. Exactly. But maybe finding a way to offer more shuttles away from campus. So if you're offering shuttles like to a new ski or offering shuttles like to Colchester just pretty much any area surrounding Burlington that you're allowing like a campus bus with a consistent schedule to get to you'd be able to like be more comfortable living and housing further away from campus. And then that decreases the like I guess workload on Burlington overall and helps to de-densify that. It's interesting you know well I mentioned that we have some versions of in the house that are not live that are you know just recorded and the one that'll be coming out probably next week or the week after I'm talking to the director at VT Cares which is the HIV AIDS organization here and one of the things that we talk about a little spoiler one of the things that we talk about is how people come to Vermont who are living with HIV and AIDS because of the phenomenal care that is available in Vermont for dealing with HIV and AIDS then they get here and they can't find a way to live. And so some folks you know come here seeking that fantastic care and you know they end up living in their car or they end up right. And so it's interesting you know that we have these things that draw people here and you know school healthcare. The job market like alone I so I currently have four jobs which I it's it's a lot but with one of them I know that there are people that had like considered like working here in Vermont and they could not find housing and so they went back to Philadelphia and that's just like it's so much affordable more affordable to live there that like they literally couldn't find housing here and I also know students who have withdrawn from UVM because finding housing was too much of a challenge from them. I think like this year especially looking at how dense on-campus housing is the enrollment statistics are free to everyone online on UVM's website if you look them up and it's about 500 more students this year alone than it was last year due to deferrals and looking at that and thinking okay they're on campus now they'll be on campus again next semester but then the year after that they're all hitting Burlington I will be graduated by then but I just like I'm thinking about trying to find housing in that market with 500 more people if the housing market's already this tight and more people and more people are trying to move to Vermont it's gonna we should do things now to build housing before it gets like too late and I think UVM really needs to find more housing on campus and actually make that housing affordable one of the things that like drives up these prices is it's actually cheaper for students to like live off campus you're paying roughly when I calculated it out it's like around $1,100 to share a room with someone and to share a bathroom with like 10 people have no kitchen and that doesn't even include the meal plan on top of all of that so you're looking at like okay I'm paying over $1,100 to live on campus share a room with someone not even have my like own bathroom that I know is being cleaned regularly and then you have all of that and you're like okay I can live in an apartment by myself and pay $800 that's not unreasonable you're saving $300 and you're getting so much more out of it so if UVM were to like drastically cut the cost of it's on campus housing then it's gonna seem like a more attractive option and then on top of that they also need to make sure they're not over-enrolling students like this fall they need to like only accept a very small amount of students compared to last year otherwise there's literally not gonna be anywhere to house them looking on their website and calculating and tabulating through the availability of on-campus housing there were about 5,600 students who were living on campus as compiled first years and sophomores and then there's about 5,800 like occupancy housing that they have for them on campus if like UVM's done what it's continually done which is just to increase enrollment, increase enrollment and increase enrollment they're gonna run out of housing for their students and no juniors and seniors can live on campus It's unbelievable, so I live in Winooski and a buddy of mine lives, I'm on one side of the circle and he's on the other side and sometimes we'll get together for dinner or something and he'll sometimes joke that we jokingly call Winooski the Brooklyn of Burlington and yet and it's pretty accurate also because the prices are just like Brooklyn and we're kind of like and he'll frequently say this is Winooski, Vermont, it's not New York City but really that's what we've sort of arrived at I was talking to, well just in the course of my work I frequently talk to lawmakers and a topic that's come up as I've been talking about talking about this upcoming discussion with you was the idea that even beyond college so now we want people to start a life here we want people to stay for the long term and how on earth does a recent college grad realistically start a life here when those, so now schools out of the way and now we're trying to put that degree to work and people work in multiple jobs to, you know, and it's still barely making it it's a real, it's a very real problem I think in other cities like after you graduate college the opportunity to live by yourself in a situation like in a one bedroom unit by yourself that is not a realistic reality if you're making minimum wage in a minimum wage job you will have to have roommates in your like 30s and I think that's a big discouragement of people like wanting to live here as they're like if I'm in my 30s and I have roommates how am I supposed to like start having a life outside of this like college mindset and the other thing is I think like I understand that like economically there's a sense that it makes sense for parents to try to like take care of their kids and do everything they can for them but I think it's like if your parents are paying your rent for you it's essentially the same as like you're living at home and I think like having that mindset with people because that's like definitely like look down upon if you're living with your parents which like should not be at all like it's completely not affordable and if you have an option where you're like I'm literally saving thousands of dollars like in one year it's a tough situation. For sure, for sure. Now you mentioned you have four jobs but you actually have five you just don't get paid for the fifth one you're an advocate, right? So I first sort of what brought you here today as you know to catch everybody up who's watching is that I had been talking about so VAHC and I know you know and I don't know if everyone who's watching knows VAHC is a coalition of over 90 organizations who work together in advocacy, education and outreach to try and increase accessibility to safe decent affordable housing here in Vermont and part of the coalition we're getting ready right now going into legislative session which will start in January and so we put together legislative priorities causes that we wanna advocate for. Next year we're gonna have a more sort of once I'm more settled in my role we're gonna have sort of more of a process of really giving real voice to our members to really come together maybe right at the end of the session we're going into now to start talking about the next session and really be a part of putting policy in and really not just saying well I wanna support this bill that's already in but how do all of us as a coalition help contribute to shaping the needed policies and a voice that's missing at the table is young people and I think that voice needs to be there and lawmakers agree that it's a missing voice and it's a voice that they wanna hear from and so I was talking about this with our steering committee and someone said oh I was at this community meeting and this college student spoke and she was so eloquent and all this so I tracked down the recording and then I talked to the organizer to get the contact information and all this stuff and I watched you speak and you were very passionate very articulate as everyone is hearing tonight too and so then in talking I found out that you've actually been kind of formally working on this right so tell us a little bit about what your project has kind of been so right now I've been trying so I qualify for work study and I've been trying to get that as my funding for working on just like understanding how the pandemic has exacerbated the effects of houselessness and that's like I don't know that's a very like near and dear issue in my heart after experiencing that myself it's a very stressful situation and especially like trying to be a student on top of that you just you can't set yourself up for success in that situation. For sure. And you've done some like round table stuff among the student body right so like you've done some formal things with other college students. Just trying to like listen to their perspectives and just trying to like give them a space to be heard because I feel like a lot of times like their voices are just like not that they aren't heard but it's just they don't have the time to like actively go out and say like this really is a tough situation for me this is a really tough situation that I'm in. I know one of the things in a post I made on Frontport Forum I was listening getting responses from medical students getting responses from graduate students so this isn't just an undergraduate issue like medical students leaving UVM medical school because they can't afford to live here graduate students switching to different programs because they can't afford to live here or it's just too much of a headache the fact that you have to look like over seven months out to be able to even find housing for the like upcoming year kind of boggles my mind like it is not like that in other cities but it's also everyone is having this issue with the pandemic. I was just reading an article earlier today UMass Amherst and how they are experiencing like one of the exact same things they over-enrolled the amount of students they're able to house and then that's leading to like construction on the like community around them and then that's like displacing them from housing what's really frustrating is if you don't come from some sort of like financial backing Burlington isn't somewhere you can live anymore it's slowly like morphing into a place that like you have to have serious money if you're going to try to live here affordably. Yeah, for sure. I know, you know, I'm not from here either. I'm from Rhode Island and I just moved here in July and I got really lucky finding my spot. It was really, I was stalking Craigslist literally and I'd be sitting in meetings for my previous job refreshing the page and the second a new thing would pop up if it wasn't a scam. It was some apartment that was, you know I remember one that it talked about like great city views and it showed a picture of this living room in this living room window with a skyline and I said there's not a single skyline in Vermont where's that picture taken? But once you get past the scams to find something that's available and then reasonable is almost impossible and I had a friend who his, I had spent some time up here a year ago and made a couple of friends I stayed in touch with and one of them found out that I was playing move back and he was very excited and on the floor above him an apartment was coming available and so he said, you know, hey, if you're interested you know, I'll connect so you connect him with the landlord, really nice guy and now I'm again, I'm five hours away, right? And so I get the video tour and all that he hadn't listed it yet and I thought to myself I'm all concerned about fitting my furniture in there like it's kind of small, you know and my buddy was like, well, you know I mean, there's not a lot of room, but like, you know it's, and I know that the place is well-kept and because I'd been to my friend's place and, you know and but the price that he was asking was a couple of hundred dollars a month more than what I'm paying where I am where I have much more space and I just thought to myself, oh my goodness I don't think that people I think that sometimes when we talk about affordable housing people just think of homelessness and they don't necessarily connect all the dots and recognize that the issue of affordable housing is an actual named issue and that it really and truly does apply to all of us, you know? And I think that's like the case with like fronting but also like home ownership this is a perspective that I didn't even like think about until I was sitting in the forum with Kesha Ram that she was hosting where I spoke about my, spoke previously but like how homeowners, like you can't do that in Burlington, it's insane there was a woman who talked about how she had sold her house and made like I think 150% profit on the sale of her house and then looking for a different home in Burlington she couldn't afford to live there because prices had changed that drastically and that like looking for housing I've been looking for housing with my partner and I was like, oh I looked at this and I like sent it to him by checking it three hours later it was already off the market so it's a very, very volatile situation both for renting and for housing and affordable housing like trying to transition people into home ownership and not just have it be renting and I think the demographic breakdown of Burlington it's like either 60 or 70% renting and then 30, 40% like home ownership so it's a very rent driven market which is very different than I would say a lot of other cities What have you said, have you had any experience of in your conversation with other college students or even just in your lived experience as a college student and what do you know about sort of the quality of the places that kids are living in are they living in dumps? Yes, I would say they definitely are the ideal situation is that they're trying to live as close to campus as possible which makes sense because that's where you're spending like eight, nine, 10 hours of your day on campus and you want to be close enough You want to be close enough to your house that where you're able to come home, maybe eat lunch maybe grab the things that you need to set yourself up for success and so specifically like the areas in the like old North End pockets that are extremely close to campus are very, very densely packed with students knowing that students are trying to live in that environment there isn't really a big incentive for landlords to maintain those properties because students will live there regardless because they have to and I think that you know we talked in the last year in the last legislative session we talked a lot about rental housing safety and quality of the housing stock and the bill pertaining to that was passed but was ultimately vetoed so I think that the conversation is gonna continue because the issue continues and it just points to another layer of the struggle that there's not space the space we do have is expensive and the housing stock is so old and I'm always thinking about how so if I lived in an apartment where it was costing me a fortune to heat it because every time I ran the heat I was heating the outside or to put an air conditioner in the window so I don't sweat to death in the summertime drives the electric bill up so high like the anxiety around those expenses how that impacts academic life or just if the place is a dump or the leaks or the mold or whatever all these things take away from a successful academic experience Yeah, one of the things that I have been looking into is this concept of university-approved housing in which in order to rent to students you have to make sure you're living in what the university considers an acceptable living condition I think Nebraska and Illinois are two states that have this in place it would be ideal because then it limits like where college students can rent within the community but at the same time like you have something like that already with the Redstone lofts on campus and all that's done is just raise the prices people are paying I think it's when I recently checked it was 1,085 to have one bedroom in a four-bedroom unit on the Redstone lofts and to me that's like an insane amount but again that's still cheaper than living in the dorm housing so everything is relative to like that baseline price point it's a very, very high rent And those policies around in those other states around the college having to have some responsibility and making sure the students are living in decent housing Is that via some kind of state legislation or are you familiar with that? I'm not familiar with that I've just kind of been like looking into what other college towns have done and how they have protected both the local people who are trying to live here and make it a city that's not 100% like dependent upon the university and I understand that there's like a lot of animosity between like the people of Burlington and college students and I understand that like we indeed are part of the problem by raising all of the rents with like people from out of state whose parents pay for the rents driving up the prices but at the same time like we also do need somewhere to live and so I think one of the main issues that would solve that is really just UVM stopping over-enrolling the amount of students that it has the capacity to house and that Burlington has the capacity to house The only way we're gonna get out of this is as a community and really working together and putting aside any nimbyism that's out there in some demographics or you know as we're here talking tonight and we'll usually know we have hopefully there's some folks gathered at Manhattan Pizza and Pub having pizza and young people and when our broadcast is done we're gonna talk a little bit or they're gonna talk there a bit about well what are we gonna do what are we gonna do about it right and so I hope that both our conversation today and you know kind of that event will serve as the first steps towards really kind of formalizing a community of young people people in their twenties trying to get involved and who want to be involved so there's a lot of opportunities there and a lot of opportunities to bring those ideas to the table at VAHC and then ultimately to the big table in Montpelier where decisions get made I know that like housing growth and the amount of housing being built over the course of the years has like really stagnated and that's could just be to a do of availability of space but I know that there's also a lot of like laws in Burlington just looking at like renovating a specific property like trying to build any sort of new construction there is like such a like snake like bureaucratic network that people have to navigate in order to try to find these housing like projects to begin with I one of the things is like the Vermont Act 250 in which like enough people like saying that they don't want to like have like any sort of construction project go on can prevent it from happening and I think that affordable housing that like prevents it from ever even being like conceptualized because there's such a stigma on affordable housing not even like if it was like college students but just like people who are like needing a place to house their families that have like no affiliation with the university and I'm wondering if there's a way to like reword parts of that to prevent affordable housing from always being on the chopping block because you will always have enough people specifically in Vermont and everywhere that there's like a lot of people who are like this is a great idea but just don't put it near me which is the not in my backyard Yep. Yeah for sure and I think there is ways there are ways to do that and that's exactly why we need these voices together at the table and I think that it wouldn't be a great opportunity I think for college students to to come to the table not even just at the state house even at the local level you know and a big part of a VHC as an advocacy organization you know we're kind of involved and we're talking to people at every level and so we need these college voices at every level and you know lawmakers and policymakers always say that the most useful thing that they hear is the testimony of people with lived experience and you know it's always it's very easy for some other group to come in and say well this is what this group needs but it's very different for people to stand up and say this is what I need this is what my community needs and this is what my community's experience has been and this is the help that we need I completely 100% agree with that which is why I feel like a lot of the tabling events that I've had is I'm just trying to listen to people's stories and listen to their experiences I always think like stories over surveys is a better way to connect with people to understand actually what's going on if you have someone fill out a survey that's just like picking and pointing issues if you listen to them and listen to the like emotional experience that they've been through or like the trauma that they've been through you can actually help them in a more meaningful way because you understand the full picture and not just a set of data points and yeah for sure and I think on a lot of issues that's very easy for people to become numbers and it's so important that we start turning numbers back into people because that's how change happens for sure that's how change happens well Emily I hope that this conversation is the beginning of a movement a movement among Burlington's 20-something population that we can together be a part of the change so anyone out there is watching if you're a college age person well if you're anyone really but particularly if you're that college age bracket and you'd like to get involved you can email me david at vtaffordablehousing.org or you can explore our website for more information about our different programs and things that we have going on Emily do you wanna throw your email address out there in case anyone wants to reach out it's just Emily Hancock at uvm.edu if you need a space to rant about the housing situation both on and off campus I am here I'm here to listen I know a lot of people who have been living on campus have talked about very personal issues like eating disorders that they've faced in like the dining hall situation or the lack of food availability like not having control over their space not feeling that they can get warm enough during the winter because they cannot afford to raise their heating bills situations like these if you feel like you need to just let it out because it's a very stressful situation and not everyone has the like resources to be heard I'm here. Sounds good well Emily thank you very much for joining us and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.