 One of which is I am your official leader and representative from Bethlehem University. So I just want to welcome you to Bethlehem University, which is the only university you know of that is run by the people, for the people. Not only do we think it's cool to learn things and share them with each other, but part of why we do this is for people to make connections with one another. One thing we'd like to say is that education is a vehicle through which we do community building. But the goal is community building, not necessarily education. So for that reason, what we want to do is encourage everyone to serve, engage, chat and make connections amongst one another. We also of course want it to be a productive but respectful discourse that happens here. We encourage you to take courses during the class and send them to us at Bethlehem University VT at Gmail. So we can use them when we have a graduation party, we often have a running show of that. So we'd love for you to do that. If someone does not want their photo taken though, please speak up and also the person taking the photo, please respect that. So who all of you registered in advance to come? So we'll just want to get named. Who are you? I'm Anna Kaplan. Did you just register really? I sent an email. Yeah, we got your email. Okay. All right. You sent an email. Okay. So as long as we've got you, I didn't see you on the thing I printed out in a while. All right. Because we don't get that. Apparently, like all schools, we're keeping attendance. All right. And if you, if far away you want this, if you want to get on our email list or notifications, anything like that, promise we don't spam you. If anything, we sent two viewing emails out. So, but if you want to, you know, five things. Sign over there. Sign over there. Thank you. I also want to remind you that we do have sort of a mid semester event, which we've just recently been putting together. And that's going to be on the 23rd of March, if I recall, Saturday. And it's going to be, I think we're calling it the bug, which is a moth-like entity that we're going to be having for people doing some storytelling. Is that correct? Do I get all the details mostly? A moth-like evening of stories. Yeah. You want to know why it's called the bug. You have to come near the story. Yeah, that's right. You want to know why it's specifically called the bug. There's a story about that. And maybe somebody in this room will tell it. Then, finally, there's our graduation event, which is scheduled for Sunday, April 7th at 4 p.m. right here. As always, it'll be a potluck. We usually supply cake and you bring yourself and your family and if you can, a dish to share. And graduation is always a lot of fun. We have a variety of things. How many have you been to our graduation? Would you say it was five? Yeah. So, we hope you will join us. This is our 10th birthday. So, we're pretty excited. Did I miss any other piece of information? Looking at the Bethlehem University crew over there. Oh, no, we didn't. We just do some. The spring break party is here as well. Not our email list. We were literally working out the details of spring break Monday. So, with that, I want to introduce our speaker. Before I introduce our speaker, I'm one of my other hats is I'm representative for the town of Bethlehem, Socrates, Rochester, and Bangkok to the state legislature. And earlier this year, Kevin gave a presentation for our committee and found it very informative, very thought provoking, and yeah, just inspiring in a lot of ways. So, I'm really glad that he was able to come and join us. Which committee was that? Which committee? I'm on house commerce and economic development. So, it fits right into somewhat what Kevin's going to talk about. So, I could do a little buy on Kevin. Kevin grew up in Vermont and is looking forward to growing whole here too. Don't look too quickly. He's the son of Emma Hertz. He spent most of his early years living and learning in Burling. He's a graduate of Middlebury College where he studied the environment and education while also competing in track and field. Prior to joining the Vermont Futures Project, he worked at the University of Vermont where he led efforts in recruiting for diversity and academic advising, communications, community engagement, and economic development, and strategic planning. He's now the executive director of the Vermont Futures Project, a non-partisan organization that's working to answer the mission question, how can we use data, and that's an important piece of this talk, I believe, how can we use data to support the evolution of Vermont's economy towards a thriving future with opportunity for all? At 2023, he was named the Distinguished Citizen by Champlain College and an 802 diplomat by the Vermont Council on World Affairs, and I hope you'll join me as well. Thank you very much for that warm welcome, and thank you to all of you for being here and welcoming me to your community. I was speaking with Rebecca prior to the start and saying how I was so jealous to hear there was cheerleading and pie yesterday for town meeting day. That should happen everywhere. So first order of class, you all did the required reading, right? Education is part of my background. I had the privilege of teaching 9th grade earth science in the town of Middlebury after I graduated, and that was such a formative experience for me. I love the opening to Bethel University and talking about education as a way for community building, for people to share their experiences and exchange ideas. So that's why I'm very thankful to be part of this engagement tonight. Now, Kirk said I'm the son of immigrants. I'll share a little bit more about that piece of my story, and I definitely bring that perspective into my work as well. So my parents came to Vermont of all places back in 1986. How did they end up here? I have an aunt who married an American. They happened to have a home in Shelburne, and that was their one social connection. That's it. So my parents made a brave decision, a leap of faith to come to the United States in pursuit of the American dream and search for economic opportunity to make sure that their kids had a better life than what they had growing up. And I'm happy to say that they were able to find it. They were able to raise three boys and put them through college, and neither of them spoke English when they arrived. Neither of them had a college degree, but they were still able to find ways to make it work. So my work for the Futures Project, I try to make sure that opportunity continues to be part of the Vermont story today and moving forward as well. So with that, I'll dive into the presentation and start off with this simple question, who is Vermont for? And it seems simple on its surface, but when we start asking it, things can get complex really quickly, and that's okay. The reason why I like to ask this question though, I don't think we ask it often enough. And if we don't have an answer that we define as a community, as a state, other people will answer it for us. I'll just share one example. Raise your hand if you know of or watch Saturday Night Live. So several years ago they had a video about Vermont, that's what's featured in the top part here. There's a quote from that video that said, Vermont, it's a place with no immigrants, no minorities, an agrarian community where everyone lives in harmony because every single person is white. Yes, there's some humor to that, and for some people it also feels a bit uncomfortable to hear that and see that shared with a national audience, right? They have a very large worldwide audience. And that's just one example of how the story of who Vermont is for has been told for us. We were featured again just last year in Saturday Night Live again. So I ask that question, who is Vermont for? Now, here's that mission question that was stated, and I'm just going to highlight the last three words here, opportunity for all. Again, that's the piece that really drew me into this work, given my lived experience as a son of immigrants. But how are we answering this question? The way we're answering it in the moment is by working on developing a vision for Vermont's future, by creating an economic action plan. So the first step we took last year was to launch a set of goals, to grow Vermont's population to 802,000, and increase the non-seasonal housing stock to 350,000 by 2035. You may be wondering, how did you land exactly on 802,000? I'll talk about that in a sec. But this framework of people and places as crucial to the future of Vermont, this is meant to be a starting point for conversation, so I've had the privilege of traveling around the state and giving similar presentations really to get the conversation going and to collect input and feedback, so I really hope to have a discussion at the end of my presentation and learn from each of you as well. Now, a good starting point for answering the question, who is Vermont for, is by asking, who's already here? This is where data can be helpful. So this is the age distribution of Vermont's current population. Vermont has the lowest fertility rate in the country, so when we take a look at the blue there, can folks see that, or is it a little fuzzy? I can try to adjust. Let me see. Okay, I think that's the best we can do. So this top band here, that's the children. That's ages zero to 15, and you can see our homegrown talent supply is shrinking. Census data includes college students. That's the light green. We can attract them here, but Vermont has the lowest college graduate retention rate of any state in the country. This dark green here in the middle, this is where we really need to focus on recruiting and retaining more people, because as we get to the bottom of this graph, this orange band from ages 50 to 64, that represents about 140,000 Vermonters. And over the next 10 to 15 years, we shift these bars down, and we see that the workforce challenges we're experiencing now will only be amplified, because many of those in the 50 to 64 cohort will reach traditional retirement age. And as they age out of the workforce, they still have housing needs, and generally healthcare needs go up. So this is a picture of where we're at today, and it's important to ask, well, what if we do nothing? Because that's a possible choice. We can actually start to see the picture of what that looks like by looking at the data over the last 10 years. So in the top right, that represents January 2013, so let's say about a decade ago, and what that says is a decade ago, there were two job seekers for every one open job. There were more people looking for work than work available. And today, as the numbers have shifted, the ratio is inverted. So now there are about two open jobs for every one job seeker. There are more jobs available than people looking for work. And this shows that the aging population is leading to a shrinking workforce, and we can anticipate this will continue if we do nothing. I had a conversation with a reporter from the New York Times back in October, then the story was published in November, but he wanted to know how is Vermont thinking about the aging demographic and its implications for the labor force. The reason why he wanted to do a story on Vermont is because Vermont is one of the oldest states by median age, which means we're on the leading edge of a transition that the rest of the country will likely experience if we do nothing. And he wants to know how are we thinking about it? What strategies might we try? Because Vermont is going to be a leader. We're going to be a leader in what to do or what not to do, but one of those things will happen. So the dangers of doing nothing, what came up in our conversation is a shrinking workforce, loss of business, declining state revenues, increased cost of living. A lot of the challenges that we're feeling now will be amplified and exacerbated. But what really scares me is that opportunity begins to fade from the Vermont narrative. So why is a plan needed? I said that's how we're answering the question right now. Well, I typed in Vermont State Plan as a Google query and in about 15 minutes compiled this list. I'm sure there are more out there, but this is just to demonstrate that having a state plan is not a crazy concept. It's something that we've done in a lot of different topics, a lot of different areas, and it's okay to have these aspirational goals, right? These are all things that I think most people would agree are good to do or aspire to do, but what I found pretty quickly is actually we can't do all these things without an adequate supply of people and places. And I'll highlight that with data. So the Vermont Climate Action Plan, I was speaking with my friends at the Energy Action Network and in their 2022 report, they estimated that for Vermont to meet its Climate Action Plan goals through weatherization work, we would need about 7,000 more people doing weatherization by the year 2030. Then if we take a look at the current unemployment statistics, there are only about 7,500 people total in the state looking for work. So if we train them all to enter the climate economy, great, we've accomplished one plan, but we've run out of people to do everything else. We've run out of teachers, nurses, firefighters. We've run out of people to install broadband, build houses. So that's why we have to pay attention to that supply of people and places. And when we look at the numbers over the next 10 to 15 years on the supply side, there were only 5,300 12th grade students in the whole state last year. And the Vermont Department of Labor projects about 15,000 retirements per year through the end of this decade alone. So those numbers don't balance out. And the annual gap when we factor in all these things is about 13,500 people. Because when we talk about workforce, we're talking about people. And then projected out to 2035, the numbers got in the 800,000 range. And I will be fully transparent and admit I took some personal liberty in picking 802 as the goal because drawing from my education background and educational psychology, well, goals are only effective if people talk about them. They remember them and they take pride in reaching their goals. And 800,000 in a Vermont context seems a little big and scary, but 802 for some reason feels a bit more familiar and comfortable. So there's excitement about that number. Now, I've been talking about population growth from an economic lens, how a thriving Vermont balances the environment, the economy, and equity. So I'll bring in the equity perspective here. This is what the picture looks like comparing Vermont to the U.S. Vermont is about 92% light. The U.S. is at about 59%. And the U.S. Census Bureau projects that by about 2045, the country will be majority minority. So Vermont is quite a ways off of looking like the rest of the country. So if we simplify the numbers here, let's say nine out of 10 Vermonters are white, and there are really two ways to change that ratio. We can do that through addition or subtraction. Subtraction doesn't help our workforce issues and really doesn't increase the total number of non-white Vermonters. It would change the ratio, though. I also don't want to be responsible for getting, picking who gets kicked out. So my personal, though, would be addition. And it would do great things for the state from an economic perspective too. So if we bring the equity and economic perspectives together, we can see that the future of the workforce, we know it's going to be more diverse than previous generations. And in Vermont already, many non-white Vermonters are participating in the labor force at higher rates than the state average. Now, the Federal Reserve ran a simulation to estimate what would be the economic impacts of closing racial gaps in the labor market. And their estimate was that between 2005 and 2019, if racial gaps had been closed in the labor market for Vermont specifically, it amounts to about $150 million annually in GDP. And that's not something I want to lose out on going forward. So from an economic and an equity perspective, Vermont needs more people. But there's another side to the story that we also need to be aware of and help to tell, which is more people need Vermont. And that's where I want to bring in the environmental lens. So I mentioned earlier the background in education. I was also an environmental studies major at Middlebury. And one of the things that has really stood out to me in the state climate action plan is this language down here that says Vermont will need to prioritize helping the people who will be most affected by climate change. Now, climate change is a global phenomenon. So we have to approach this with a global perspective. So when we zoom out and just take a look at a national picture, we can see that climate vulnerability, the darker areas on this map are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than the lighter areas. The northeast is a relatively favorable location. That's not to say there won't be impacts from climate change. It's just to say that on a relative basis, there are many people that may need a place like Vermont. And I hope that we can take proactive steps in creating viable pathways for people to choose Vermont and to perhaps one day be able to call themselves a Vermont or two. So to make that possible, we have to talk about housing. If housing is a human right, it should be right to build housing. And in fact, doing so would help us move forward in terms of our climate goals as well. It's not the environment versus the economy versus equity, but we can bring these perspectives together. So this is from Energy Action Network. They mapped out Vermont's greenhouse gas emissions and broke it up into different buckets. And the green and the orange represents transportation and thermal emissions respectively. So those are the two largest contributors. And new construction can help reduce the thermal demands. We have a lot of really old buildings in Vermont. And if they're constructed in such a way where it reduces the transportation needs, things are really spread out right now, then we can see progress in both of those areas. I mentioned the old buildings. We have 25% of homes in Vermont were built before 1940. And this is sort of the picture in terms of the housing construction by decade. You can see we built quite a bit in the 1970s and 80s, but it's really dropped off in recent decades. So the housing shortage we're experiencing now in an acute way is something that's been building. And that's another thing we can do with data is to dispel some of the myths. I've seen a lot of attention on the housing situation in recent years. And I've even heard the refrain that COVID, the pandemic has caused this housing issue. But there was a 50% decline in active listings from 2016 to 2020 before the pandemic. And like with most things, I've seen a lot of COVID accelerated trends that were previously already at play. Now, I've covered a lot of data, but I want to end with a couple slides on sentiment. So how are people feeling about what they're seeing and experiencing around them? This is a question that I sponsored in the Vermont poll a couple of years ago to ask, are you supportive of growing Vermont's population size to strengthen its workforce? There are more people in Vermont that say yes than no. But what really surprised me was I started digging into the responses to try to understand if there was a difference by age. And I'll be totally honest, I had my own bias. I thought that younger Vermonters would be more open to population growth for new people to come here. And I was wrong. And it's okay to look at data sometimes and say, I'm wrong. Actually, it happens to me all the time. So this is how the data ended up playing out. The youngest respondents said no at the highest rates, and the older the respondents got, the more likely they were to say yes. I'm sorry, where was the question asked? In the Vermonter poll, it's administered by the University of Vermont Center for Rural Studies each year. And it samples a representative sample of Vermonters. I think the poll is being conducted in the next couple of months, the 2024 iteration. And I'm actually asking this question again to see if sentiment has changed. It's disseminated to people. Yeah, so they use census style methodologies. Michael Moser from the Center for Rural Studies is the one who leads that effort. And he'd be able to tell you much more about the mechanics of it. But I think it's a mix of different outreach methods from phone calls to text messages to digital. But it's pretty solid data and reliable methodologies. They try to mirror some of the census style methodologies. And I think the sample size a couple of years ago was close to 1,000. Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly how the phone numbers or emails get picked, but they try to clean up the data so then the answers are representative of the underlying demographics of the population. Yeah, so I'll say a little bit more about how this played out. And when I started reading the open-ended responses that went along with the yes-no answers, I started to see why the youngest respondents said no at the highest rate. So many of the youngest respondents were answering from a scarcity mindset. They were seeing population growth as competition in the housing market, whereas older Vermonters are more likely to own a home and be insulated from some of the market dynamics. Younger respondents were saying no because they saw population growth as competition in the labor market as they're trying to launch their careers and build career success. Older Vermonters were more likely to think of population and workforce in the context of health care and the services that they might need to access as they consider aging in their community. So when I started reading those open responses, the data started to make a lot more sense. Now, the last bit of sentiment data I'll share is from Vermont Public. So they asked, if you were to advise an 18-year-old considering where to build a successful life and career, would you recommend that he or she stay in Vermont or leave? And 42% of respondents said leave Vermont. And that to me is, that's scary. And that might have made sense a decade ago because there were more people looking for work than work available. But we saw the underlying data that dynamic has shifted. But the narrative hasn't. And we already have a pretty small pool of young talent that's continuing to shrink the low fertility rates. Yet we're telling them they have to go somewhere else to find a successful life or career. And that brings me back to that first question I asked. If Vermont isn't for the kids who have grown up here to be able to build a successful life, then who is Vermont for? What I found with kids is they didn't want to be 22 and be in some small town with no other young people around. So I could relate to that because I grew up in a small town and then I started my career in another small town and then I left for a while. But then I came back. And so that's what I talked to a lot of kids about was, sure, you know, because the other thing with Vermont is it's so small, it lacks diversity so much with the exception of the Burlington area. But I was working with kids out in the more rural areas. And so what I encouraged them to do was to go out and see the world because then you can see how wonderful Vermont is. And then the other thing that I ran into because I was helping first generation Vermont kids go to college is they were coming out of college and there were some professional jobs available but they wanted four years, seven years of experience. And they were like, I had a young man graduate from Norwich University, mechanical engineering. He got second or third in the application process but never got the job. So he ended up, he went up to Maine to a more urban area and was able to get a job in engineering and that's engineering. So it was like, yikes. And that was quite a while ago. But anyway. I came here to go to Marlboro in the East. Never wanted to leave but had to because I couldn't find housing. I couldn't find work. My mother told me I was wasting my life in Vermont. She told me to get out and Marlboro doesn't exist anymore but there are a lot of people who come to college here who run in this about their time here and they do return and those people, we've got a snag because they do have world experience outside. Fetford is full of people who are campers who have come back and taken over their family camps or just have such huge nostalgia for it that they return. But the other piece that I've been seeing is that because of the labor shortage, young people are getting advanced in Vermont faster. A weird example is the Dollar General in Fairleigh where there's a young man who I've been talking to on and off for months who had no clue about Maine but they pushed him into it because he was the only guy left. And so I said, you know, you have some leverage here. You need to get a better pay scale and you need to get some of your demand met because they need you more than you need them. And I know the post office is another example. People are getting advanced because, you know, there's nobody else to do the work. And so they're really young, they're really inexperienced but they're getting very real world experience right now here and maybe that could be impressed upon. It's like, well, the lack of demand for people not wanting to go to work or whatever the reason is, it means that people who do want to work could really rise faster. Thank you for sharing that. I'll wrap up with a couple more comments and then we'll just open it up to discussion. So I mentioned earlier that this framework, these goals that the Futures Project launched last year was a starting point for conversation and you can see already that people want to speak up. They want to share their thoughts and I'm really excited by that. Not everyone agrees on these numbers or the year and that's okay. But I really like a comment that was made. I gave a presentation at the Burlington YMCA and their CEO and president said, you don't have to agree with Kevin's numbers but you have to at least agree that they're directionally correct. And I think that's what this process is about is orienting all of us towards a direction that we can support and get behind and it's going to be the collective action from the local level that really feeds into a statewide vision. I mentioned earlier this wasn't meant to be prescriptive. I want to allow for the unique strengths and assets of every community to be represented in a statewide vision. What we do have to agree on though is this, the underlying numbers. This is the picture of where Vermont is today and this should be the starting point for how we plan for the future. So as the Futures Project pulls together that statewide economic action plan, these are some of the things on my mind. If you want a thriving economy, if you want to contribute to climate solutions, if you want to make progress on social equity, we need more people. I see people as an asset, not a burden. That shouldn't be a hot take but sometimes I feel like it is. People add productive capacity to our communities. They contribute to culture and we can actually take a look at the numbers and how many we might need. And then from that, calculate a housing number too. So if we can create a collective goal that's directionally correct and start taking steps in that direction, I think we'll see progress in our state. Some ways that you can help this conversation itself is helpful just sharing ideas and content, helping to amplify the work of the Futures Project. But for me, it's all about this last bit here. Just have data informed discussions with people in your network, whether it's friends, families, co-workers, elected officials, thank you. And again, I'll wrap up just by putting the mission question up one more time. My contact info is here for anyone that wants to stay in touch or continue the conversation beyond today. But I'll end there with the formal presentation part and let's continue having a great discussion. Thank you. I noticed, I mean, you talked about you can use these numbers to try to plan for our anticipated housing needs. And if I recall your presentation, I think it was from you, someone came after you, tried to take those numbers and break them down into communities and how many houses these communities have to build per year in order to meet that goal. And while you look at these big numbers, it's kind of scary that when you break them down per community, per year, the patches seem very doable. Can you speak to that at all? Yeah, certainly. I actually have some of those here. So the question is really about this distributed growth, that big number, 802,000. Yeah, if we picture that all in Bethel, that might seem like a scary proposition. But the idea is that, again, if everyone's bought in that there's collective efforts across the state towards that goal, one way to think about it is, what if we just split it up based on current population ratios? This is the gap, and then the annualized rate. So by county, right, most of those numbers are in the hundreds. And that's for population. For housing, this is what it would look like. I remember giving a presentation to the Shelburne Select Board, for example, and we got down to the municipal level. And for Shelburne, if we established a goal based on just the current ratios of housing and population, they would be adding about 150 people per year and about 75 houses. And the mood in the room totally changed because they were thinking 802,000, 350,000, and then when it went to 150, 75. Now the folks in the room start thinking, oh, that'd be really good for my community. That'd be good for Shelburne. And I don't have the Bethel numbers on me today. That's something I can follow up with. But I wanted to share one more piece of research. This hasn't been published yet. I just started diving into these numbers a couple weeks ago. But this was inspired by a conversation I had with the mayor of Rutland because Rutland has set a population goal for their city. And the mayor said to me, well, Rutland used to have tens of thousands more people than it does today. And it got me thinking, there are a lot of towns around Vermont that have depopulated where population has decreased. So I went town by town and found the historical population peak and compared it to the current population. And then I started adding up what I'm calling latent capacity. If a town used to have 3,000 people and it has 2,500 today, well, we know at some point in time it held 500 more people. And when we tally that up, if we were to return every town to its historical population peak, we'd have almost 75,000 more people today. This tells a pretty cool story, though, because you see that a lot of the growth has happened in and around Chittenden County. So that number is low because they're near peak populations. But then you look at some of the other counties and you see, oh, we actually have latent capacity. We know that because many of those towns used to have more people. So this can also inform the strategy of where to focus certain efforts, where to focus strategies in terms of building houses, or maybe it's supporting business growth. So at a regional level, right, it doesn't have to be the same prescriptive cookie cutter strategy in every single place. And that's why I say having that collective vision allows each place to pick the strategies that are best for that place. I've been working on that, too. But specifically on Thetford, because that's where I live, and because I was on the Planning Commission, our plan is aspirational, and the Planning Commission was supposed to bring the zoning regulations up to make it more real. And we're supposed to find 400 new homes to bring us up to about 3,000. And I started putting maps together. And three-quarters of Thetford is blocked off to do the wildlife corridor. We're right in the crossing, and there's no water in places that you can go, which is weird because we've got the river right there, but it's not like you're going to tackle that for drinking stuff, I guess. But there's a lot of pollution from where the sand and the salt and the old... I mean, there's a lot of problems in the little area that is available. You can't build anything there, or people are sitting on it, or the business conglomerates have bought up at the real estate investments, and that's preventing people from actually going to things there, too. So unless the state decides... To say that, you know, business investments can't be made in that manner by Wall Street, or that the people... You've never mentioned the people who have third homes here, and do not pay as much as those of us who are living here full-time, and yet they still take advantage of the plowing and the roads and all the things that we pay for on a regular basis. So, I mean, that's the boogeyman in the room, so there's really, really wealthy people with these crazy expensive houses who have huge trucks of land... Get that reference. And they are not contributing, they're just sitting on it. I have a presentation that I'm giving on March 10th, which deals with some of this, so it's like a follow-up on yours, so it's kind of cool. If you haven't been on housingdata.org, I would encourage you to check it out. It's a dashboard that's managed by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. They've been a really helpful strategic partner in some of my work, but they have a dashboard that gets into housing by type, by ownership, and a lot of their data is available down to the municipal level. I moved here to Bethel ten years ago, but in Woodstock, and I think it's even gotten worse now, when I moved out of there, more than 50% of the homes were second or third homes. So when a town is more than half, people were poor, not there. It kind of screws things up, like who's going to be on the select board, and the school board, and on the volunteer fire department, so they've had to go to a paid fire department now and paid ambulance service. There's just not enough volunteers left. That was the answer that I thought when you had that first screen. Who's it for? People vacationing here. That's what I get. And that's not me. I'm just curious if you've heard, I can imagine there's some pushback on this sort of concept from people who are like, you know, we don't want Vermont to change because, you know, or whatever, we sort of address that. I don't know how you address that. I'm sure you've heard that before. Oh, yeah, yeah. I knew that would happen as soon as we launched the goals. I didn't expect 100% buy-in. And I can actually share some of the perspectives that have spoken up publicly in opposition to the futures project goal, one of which was this author who said that Vermont's actually beyond a sustainable population level and has suggested that we should actually be trying to reduce the population to 500,000. And one of the bits of data that really stands out to me when thinking about sustainability is greenhouse gas emissions per capita. So again, borrowing from the Energy Action Networks Report here, Vermont is right there. So all the states to the right are states over the past 15 or so years that have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions per capita more than Vermont. And many of these states, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, those are states that have grown their population, added more housing, grown their economies, and they've actually made more progress in terms of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. So it changes the script a little bit when we think about what is a sustainable population level, because what we're doing might not actually be working as well as we think. And when I go out of the state and I go to other places, one of the things that's unique and I think makes Vermont a nice place to live is we have these small towns. And what I worry about is not all towns have zoning and sometimes don't want to do zoning and they don't want to, you know, they just feel like active 50s going to save them from sprawl development. And that's part of why I came here. Because I wanted to kind of hear what are you doing to sort of, like even I live up now in Randolph and we're a small town and I want to infill. There's all this space in our village where we could be adding housing and it would allow for better pedestrian, bicycle, transportation and development. And we can leave that unique open areas outside. And I like the wildlife corridor. I think we're crazy if we just think, oh, let's plop down all these new houses on 10 acres. We're going to wreck Vermont. And I'm sorry, but I look at Chittenden County area and I go up there sometimes and I think they ruined it, but then they ruin it and then they go, oh, shoot. And then they're backtracking, which I'm really happy with South Burlington. They're trying to make a town center. But once you screw it up, then it takes a lot of effort to get it back. And so I would love to have 802, but in a smart development way, not. And I lived out West in Oregon where they tried to do these growth boundary lines around some of the big urban areas. But some of it, they just come in anyway and they just, and I've got vaccines. And going up I-5 the way it was when I left, there were farm fields and now it's just like, and it's gross. And I just, I don't know if that happened to Vermont. No, I appreciate that sentiment. And I mentioned that, or actually Kirk said it in my bio. I grew up here and I look forward to growing old here too because there are things about Vermont I really love and want to see continue into the future. I'll go back to this and say, this gets us halfway to 802,000, right? And that's repopulating areas that have depopulated. So it wouldn't take creating much more new stuff to do this. But I am working with a group of environmental studies seniors at Middlebury College for their capstone class this semester to try to help me answer that question. How do we get it to 802 in a sustainable way? What forms of development can help us achieve that that doesn't ruin the ecosystem around us, which is a unique strength and asset of Vermont. So they're taking a look at case studies, other examples from other places to help inform the work that's happening here in Vermont. And at the same time, I also want to share, so this is a perspective that was authored back in October that also started to discuss some of the uniqueness of Vermont and the sentiment was that more people may overwhelm that, whether it's the cultures and traditions or the aesthetic look and feel. So I started to dig into the data a bit in terms of population density and Vermont currently is about 70 people per square mile. New Jersey, which a lot of Vermonters seem to like to pick on, is about 1200 people per square mile. And if we grew from our current population to 802,000, we'd go from 70 to 87 people per square mile. And to reach this level of population density, our population would have to be 11 million. Just to put into context sort of this scale of development we're talking about, I find the numbers to be helpful. Here's some new voices. Let's go here and then here. So what's working, like what's bringing people and the workers coming here? That's a great question. So how many people remember the relocation incentive that Vermont had? That was less than a decade ago, right? And I still remember the headlines. Vermont is paying people $10,000 to move there and that was because the challenge in that moment was trying to get people interested in coming to Vermont. And within less than a decade, the dynamic has totally shifted. There's demand for Vermont. People want to be here. We saw that certainly during the pandemic, there was an element of just safety and low population density that drew people here. But the pandemic also served as a reflective moment for society where many people started to consider what are their priorities? What are their values? And where do they want to live out those values? And Vermont happened to be at the top of many lists and we still see demand for Vermont. We see it reflected in the housing market. So to me, that's actually really encouraging that people want to be here. I think we're going to see continued demand for Vermont because of things like climate change. I showed that climate vulnerability map earlier. So this is another dynamic that's at play. I think there are folks that have moved to Vermont because of the politics of the state and they're leaving other areas where they might not as individuals feel as safe. Another thing that has worked, I know I'm adding a lot of things to the list, is our colleges and universities in a moment when nationally, there have been challenges in terms of enrollment. Our colleges and universities are actually doing quite well compared to national peers. So... Is university re-established over the last four years? How well is it doing? I'm speaking purely from enrollment numbers. Okay. The number is dead. The number of Vermont University and Vermont State University has changed dramatically over the last four years. I don't know if those enrollment numbers are that good. There's some mechanical pieces that certainly could be increased in terms of efficiency, but if we just take a look at the total number of college students in the state that has gone up over time. So the reason why I say I'm focusing on enrollment is I am thinking about this dynamic here. We attract young talent. Folks who didn't grow up here are coming to the state. We're having some trouble retaining. This is an opportunity to me. If we can create viable pathways for people to be able to stay here, I could find that data and provide it for you. Yes, all that's available through the NECES. I can't remember what the acronym stands for. But enrollment numbers by institution are all publicly available data. For giving some student loan for college students who stay for at least two years, they get a total of 5,000 off their student loan debt. Are you tracking to see if that's good? Because it's relatively new. Are you going to track to see if that works? So it's a new program to your point. We don't have the final data on it yet, but I am watching closely to see if it is an effective strategy. Is it something we should try to scale up? It's going to take the combination of a lot of different ideas and strategies to be able to grow the population to 802,000, to actually make progress on some of the challenges we're facing as a state. It's not going to be any single solution, so I'm glad that one's on the table, and we have to think of other ideas too. Could you go back to the slide of where you talked about the historical populations of different towns that was interesting to me? I just want to question why you care what their historical peak was and not their historical low? To me, it seems like you're both a form of confirmation bias, I think, if you're trying to find out what the capacity of that town was in the past, as if that's what it should be. I really question that assumption. I think you could just as easily come up with very different numbers for all those. For all those ones that track it over 50 years, 100 years, you're going to see populations go down and up, and every time that there's an up or a down, sociologically, economically, you're going to find reasons for it. There's lots of reasons, and we've heard great reasons here why things that might be an incentive for people to stay might be set to attract people, for people to leave. I look at that one of those first charts, and thinking if there's so many old, retired people here that it's not sustainable, then aren't they going to start leaving? I don't mean dying, I'm just meaning going to some gross. I might. Would that be part of the solution to some extent? My biggest point is that this is fantastically complicated. I agree. 100% agree. My point about that, and Kurt, don't take offense, but you've been to the legislature, they were interested. What are they going to do with this? That frightens me, because I see, oh, we have to fix this. We have to start doing these programs, and my experience with gross, I'm sorry, is pretty cynical. The more you try to do, the more misguided it gets. We're not very good at engineering gross. What works is supply and demand, and economic forces that are time-honored. I'm wary about what the politicians are going to do with it. I'm talking about us. We're the ones who elect the politicians. So I'm not letting you go. It's a huge challenge. My bias is we're not smart enough to do much with this data. I'll answer the first part of your question with regards to why. I was calculating from a historical peak, and I mentioned it was inspired by a conversation with the mayor of Rutland, and there's also been some pushback against growth goals saying that Vermont doesn't have the carrying capacity, that we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the schools to be able to grow the population. So the reason with starting with historical peaks to calculate that was to say, actually, we used to have more kids in our schools. We used to have more people in our towns, and some of the built infrastructure actually can support a capacity, has a larger carrying capacity than what the current population is in many places. So that was the motivation behind this calculation. But you're right, it is complicated, because that calculation doesn't say what size should we be, and I don't think that's for me to answer. That's for communities to answer for themselves. And I think it's good to have numbers as part of that conversation for how we answer it. What comes to mind when I look at, like, Windsor County, because that's where I am, is, and I live on the White River, that I have lost a significant amount of land in my backyard. And so what used to be the population, there may not be the land there anymore, as much land there. And then zoning also has to do with that. I mean, we don't have any, but a lot of towns do. And then did I just hear recently that Vermont wants to, like, preserve 50% of their land? 50 by 50. 50 by 50. So that just decreases the amount of space also. Well, doesn't that, I think that kind of, that would hopefully drive the growth to more developed areas, like she was talking about, like the current downtown, where they could stand some infill and whatnot, which I know the legislature did, there was a conversation right in the last couple of years that called for greater density. And there are, there are grant senate programs for people to renovate older houses and, and to funk houses and all those things through those community centers. And they're entirely redesigning the downtown designation and learning to make that so. One thing I was wondering about, so you had the data in the beginning about the gap each year, whatever that annual gap was, was it like 13,000 or something? About 13,500 years. So that, I guess, how confident are you in, or where is that sort of the number of, like, new jobs, right? Wasn't that a piece of that that's driving that gap over time? I guess one thing I'm thinking about is, you know, well, of course with telework, you know, that does change the dynamic a little bit, but, you know, where are you also looking like, where is that job growth occurring? So if the number is 802, you know, does it necessarily spread out just straight, you know, sort of distributed across the community counties, or are the jobs growing in particular counties, and then, you know, they would have to, maybe kind of, like, work harder to, and the other sort of related question is, I'm surprised to see that, well, kind of surprised to see that there's, what, it's like two jobs for every person basically now, and what kind of jobs are those, I wonder, how that will factor into attracting people here? Lift attendant, you know, server, McDonald's, home people. Not in this presentation, but that type of data is available. The Vermont Department of Labor has a pretty robust data set that's publicly available that gets into exactly what types of jobs are part of the current labor market and what they're projected to be over the next decade, and they partner with the McClure Foundation to publish a report each year highlighting the top 50 high-pay, high-demand jobs, so jobs that pay above the state median and are expected to grow, and they share that with educational partners across the state, both at the high school and higher ed level. So, trying to help bring that data into career-oriented conversations, and then I mentioned the housingdata.org dashboard earlier that the Vermont Housing Finance Agency maintains. One of the maps that they have is a jobs-to-homes index where you can start to see where are the jobs located versus where are the homes located, and there are some areas where there are many more jobs than homes. I see that in my hometown of South Burlington where if you created more housing there, people would be located closer to work. It would cut down on the vehicle miles traveled. There are other areas of the state where there are more homes than jobs, and maybe that's where we target some business growth strategies to create opportunities that are closer to where people currently live. Is that fair? Many parts of the state. More homes than jobs. More homes than jobs. We have zero jobs. Yes, that stands out in the data as well. But there is a positive soon to the more housing than jobs is that we have like 48% over 60, and they are starting to go, I can't stay in my house anymore. It's too big. Listen, and Bright Parts Forum are really interesting, the difficult way to track data, but we have been hit by a barrage of people offering rubbish removal services. Basically they come in and they case your house, and they take all the valuable stuff and they put the rest in the dumpster. And so this is happening to older couples because it's really hard for them to decide what's got to go in there. Maybe their children don't want to have anything. So we're trying to figure out how not to get scammed by people coming in from elsewhere who are just like taking all the antiques and then throwing everything all the way. But those kinds of houses, they have large, they can put ADUs inside or make them into duplexes because they're ridiculously large because of the different time. Big families, basically. Yeah, and many of the homes in Vermont were built quite a while ago. So let's say just the homes that were built in the 70s and 80s were created to meet the needs of the population at that moment in time when families were larger and younger. And this dynamic of an aging population, one of the predictable trends is median household size has gone down. And there are Vermonters that are now occupying a home that may be larger than their current needs. So that's part of what's captured when we think about latent capacity. Oops, sorry. Did I see some hands go up? Yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing. If we haven't created new supply to meet the needs of our current population, there are folks that may want to downsize, then we get stuck with a lot of empty bedrooms in our communities. And I'm encouraged actually by some of these numbers because if we can create enough new supply to allow for some mobility and people to get into something that meets their needs, then I think we can start to see some of this latent capacity get refilled. I agree. I could talk about this all night and it is amazingly complex. But a couple of things are standing up to me. A question about how to respond to people who don't want change. I think culturally, we have really short memories. I'm really fascinated to think back to history and what we can learn from it. Vermont has changed so much when it is today. I know it was 50 years ago or 100 years ago. I think that's really helpful for people to remember and think about how much our populations of housing have changed. But I also have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years and I see so many ideas that were in practice 100 years ago, 200 years ago that weren't and we've forgotten about them and we've done away with them. I wonder about bringing them back. I think about this too. How was Vermont housing all these people? Practically speaking. Where were the houses? Where were people living? It wasn't distributed necessarily the way it was today. I can think of a few things off the top of my head. They were living in houses and there was a lot more people in them. We think about moving in that direction which would involve building anything else. Homeshare now is a great program that tries to match often older adults with those big homes with people who need somewhere to live and they're often younger and can provide companionship for a little bit of assistance. But it's not widespread. A lot of people don't know about it. There's an organization called Strong Towns where I work on Smirk Grove and I always think back to one of the presentations that I've seen from that where they've shown pictures of Vermont's small towns and things like this in the buildings that we all treasure for their historic character and they had some powerful statistic about how few of them would actually be permitted today. We think about the architecture that defines Vermont like the front house, big house, back house, barn model. Almost everybody. These can't be built. So if we can take a harder look at what our regulations are preventing where we could be adding on and we make here that really does fit and wouldn't be a shock to the system I think we could add a lot of elements. I think about where they were spatially too. When we look at Bethel, where were the people? There were probably more downtown density-wise but we also have Gilead was bustling. There were so many people that there were so many people in these little places. A lot of empty houses. But far more back then there might have been a thousand people right there. That's kind of a question. I'm curious from other raunchers especially those who do live in rural neighborhoods could you imagine seeing a little hamlet grow again in a concentration of people who are having more there than it is now? We're concerned about density and sprawl downtown is a great place to start but I don't know if it'll be enough to get all those numbers. I think part of that is letting go a little bit. If we want to keep the villages which I think is valuable and walkability and bikeability but we might have to let go of some of those old homes to allow for density and that's something that being I think there's probably several who grew up here in Vermont as kids. Remember that those houses don't remember they're still here but we might have to let that go to allow for the density of growth to allow Vermont to grow and we keep it in the village or the town we keep it centered but it's hard and there's going to be people who don't want to do that and we can't force anybody to do anything like that but if we want to allow growth and allow Vermont to be the greater Vermont we're going to have to do that and that's going to be challenging on a like feelings art level but somewhat inevitable if we want to allow the greater green to stay and not sprawl the villages are going to have to change and get a little more dense again and they were dense back in the day but it's not hard change especially where some of those properties have ended up so change is hard it's a word that I wrestle with quite often and it's also why in our mission question we decide not to use the word change and instead thought about evolution because change can mean erasure evolution communicates we're trying to honor what has been and adapt to the conditions of the world around us but I do think about some of the historic realities of Vermont 100 years ago 75% of the state was deforested and the population was half the size and today 80% of the state is forested and the population and that in itself is remarkable success story that we should celebrate but it also says that we can actually do stuff that's healthy for the land around us and for the people living here too people are generally kind of gotten involved because it's so apparent and you just hear stories all the time about I've heard we live in a grand old regular hospital and I've heard stories about a hospital having a hard time hiring doctors because there's nowhere for them to live and have teachers so the housing one I think is but like what if we don't what's the downside of not doing this I guess yeah that's been the focus of a lot of conversations asking that question what is the danger of doing nothing here's just a short list but there are other documents I can point you to that explain the risks of depopulation especially with the imbalances of the age demographics that we have you know the legislative joint fiscal office issued a report on population and demographics and what it means for state revenues and the challenges that'll come with a changing dependency ratio so yeah there are risks I've seen that and I'll add a little bit to that just based on some of my lived experiences growing up in Burlington in a community of new Americans where my parents chose to come here they were migrants but I also grew up with friends from refugee families that ended up here not because of some choice that they made but because they literally had to get away from something devastating that was happening in their home country climate there's those dynamics at play too we know there are people that have moved to Vermont because of climate change they're climate migrants that had the ability to pick a spot on the map and had the means and the wealth to go there not everyone has that same level of privilege and I hope that we can be a viable option for climate migrants and refugees so I just want to make that distinction within the redistribution of population due to climate that there are some people that have choice and some people that don't and all three of them left the state they were all born and raised here but all three of them left the state and now that they are having families of their own all three of them have come back and they brought two people with them that were not raised in Vermont so we've got a net game there but the thing that really made it possible was the fact that remote work that especially my daughter that was the last one to come back she was gone for 10 years and wanted desperately to come back but her partner didn't have a job here and East Barnard which is a very tiny little village not far from here was one of the first ones to get fiber optic and that's what made the difference when Patrick found that he could work remotely here with good internet this company there you go he's on the board now but anyway I mean there is that possibility kids do need to leave my three kids all of them they needed to leave to see what it was like someplace else but they all knew that they wanted to be back here and they were lucky they were able to get houses and jobs here that's where we need to develop it more is to get these kids to come back and bring them a partner that was raised someplace else with them and then right off the bat they can double or not have people want to leave have the jobs here for those that can't get away and want to stay and have places to live that's important and not feel they have to go away to get the world experience that they can still be here it's great to have both opportunities but it's important to not forget the people that can't go away or don't want to go away and want to stay and they need the jobs and they need the housing and they need the opportunities to be able to stay here and grow up here and still be those people that want to be here too and I feel like a lot of those people are getting left behind and there's a divide that's happened of that opportunity so it's great to be able to go away and grow and see the world but it's also important to be able to just stay here and be able to grow right here it's valuable and I feel like I don't have all the data I got in here a little bit late but I feel like some of those opportunities are being lost so I think that's important I really appreciate that it's a yes and we need to think of both the kids who want to stay or can't leave and the ones who may feel like they need an experience elsewhere and at the same time recognize that even if we did retain 100% of our home grown talent it wouldn't offset the workforce gap because of the imbalances of the age demographics and this distribution I mentioned earlier we had 5,312 grade students across the entire state of Vermont last year that's not a lot and the Vermont Department of Labor projects 15,000 retirements per year so retention alone even if we kept 100% which I don't think we ever will wouldn't be alone enough that's why it has to be a yes and it's both an inside up and an outside in strategy I want to also mention because I work with people in poverty and the amount of evictions and no fault evictions that are happening right now and there's nowhere for them to go so that is a huge piece of this conversation and the more people that come in and buy bigger houses and blah blah it just makes it will increase our homeless population so that's that to be a big part of the conversation I need more housing can you put a slide about housing how it's being built more efficiently or using different trying to make it more efficient an efficiency Vermont is trying very hard to basically have us build spaceships on the ground that they're airtight and they've got all these gadgets it's not the only reason that people can get away with smoky wood stores is because they had very they had houses with geparoses they had very old rake farmhouses with blue wind and that's that allowed the air to change it is a million dollars easy to build a house not all of us have a million dollars I'm right in the middle of my third year of building my house and there's no way I can put all the bells and whistles that efficiency Vermont wants into these things and so when we're building houses and they talk about affordable housing that's not going to happen if we don't get box loads of HVAC systems many splits or whatever that are cheaper because it's too expensive to build a nice and this is not this building that we love here this is not an efficiency Vermont building for sure it's a complex situation and one of the things I try to do when things get really complicated is try to reorient my energy and attention and what do I have control over and I think that's a good question for us to ask around the state as well in terms of the cost of housing there are some things within our control and there are some things that aren't Vermont doesn't get to set federal interest rates we do have some control over land use regulation and permitting processes and that may be where we should focus some time and energy so if we can make some progress there will it solve the affordability to flat out? probably not but it's something that we can do and we have control over to start making some progress and I think it's important to not wait for a perfect solution because as we sort of sit within action some of the consequences will play out and the problem may be even harder to solve later the state does have control over allowing older builders to have their own agency and that's what I'm doing so I do have control over that right now but there is a big push to take that away so that specialized contractors are the only ones to get to build houses and that would be a huge mistake because all those little they have a rule now where it just says okay if you build your own house it falls on you that's on you but the minute they start having inspections and things like this then our housing is going to get worse what do you think was a great segue to my question which is how is the Vermont Futures project data being used like are people who are currently doing this work BHC Vermont Housing Conservation Board and others and active 50 conversations is this data being pulled into those conversations like how else are you being this and infiltrating into the work that's already happening so I mentioned I've been traveling around the state and trying to get this information out to as many parties as possible I've been privileged enough to be able to present a few times at the State House and moving forward I'm working with strategic partners on developing recommendations that will help us achieve some of these goals at the end of the day like I alone cannot solve this I often say I am not smart enough to write a plan on my own nor am I stupid enough to try and that's why these types of conversations are so helpful I haven't even thought about individuals as general contractors that's a novel idea that I've encountered for the first time today so thank you we will be launching the economic action plan in mid to late summer and we will have recommendations that we will then hand over to community leaders to try to create change in their own place we will be handing it over to folks in the legislature we will hand it to folks in local select boards and then the idea is again if we can orient ourselves towards a directionally correct goal whether we get to 802 or 750 the number ends up being I think that having consensus on a direction allows us to take some of these incremental steps that might allow us to see progress instead of waiting and sitting and seeing what happens I've been hearing the phrase we need more housing everywhere I go for the past year but when I turn around and ask how many do we need very few people have an answer so I think by having a number one Kirk you talked about wearing multiple hats earlier one of the hats I wear is I do some coaching for track and field and athletes will come up to me and say coach I want to run faster and I ask okay how much faster let's get a goal on paper and then create a training plan so you can take the incremental steps to get there I don't think that is a concept that we can apply if we can quantify what some of those goals are I think we can start to put together the tactics that move us in that direction those tactics may evolve over time as conditions evolve and I think there has to be flexibility for us to change those tactics but still understand what the direction is use another sports analogy sorry I have a lot of athletics in my and that is how I got into education but at any given moment on let's say a soccer field the correct action changes based on where players are where the ball is the weather conditions but everyone on the team has an idea an agreement on what they are trying to do put the ball in the net the way they do that in any given moment based on what's happening but if we can all agree we want to get that ball in the net then I think we will be able to take the right actions maybe that landed for some people maybe it didn't but it's the first time I tried that one yeah I want to respect Kevin's time since he got a drive tonight thank you so much for coming there are a few events coming up that might be of interest Cynthia do you want to actually describe your class on Sunday? sure it's called what is a pocket neighborhood because it's trying to fit in more housing into small spaces that are tucked away but nobody can decide what that means pocket neighborhood some people call it a cul-de-sac and some people call it a mobile home park and it's just like none of the above so I've collected all of the information mostly from this guy pocket neighborhood the Ross Chapin guy who started that in the 80s and I think it can be really fun it's a discussion but also with pictures to say this is what this looks like it is not this one of these things is not like him but it brings up a lot of what you're saying it's a fascinating talk it's everywhere a nation though it's not just here yeah so if we could solve it here we could be a beacon to other places I'll zoom March 10, 3, 4 and it can be a little longer if people could stay longer you may know more than I do we have an organization working in our area called the White River Valley Consortium which is a collaboration of White River Valley towns trying to see if we all pull together could we make a debt on housing and they're hosting some intergenerational storytelling nights coming up to hear the stories people have about housing in terms of finding what it's like that's what I know I think there was one in Randolph not long ago I know they were interested in holding one in Bethel maybe in some other towns so keep your eyes peeled for that the Randolph one in the album is happening and the third one I know is a really interesting opportunity coming up from a couple of statewide partners community trusts are one model that has made an impact in certain areas. Woodstock has a housing trust where they have bought houses as an organization and put covenants on them so they will always remain affordable or remain workforce housing for teachers or people working in the town and it's a pretty promising model to incrementally move ahead so the preservation trust of Vermont and Vermont Council on Rural Development are starting a new community trust program they're going to be picking I believe 20 communities over the next couple of years to work with them on this and it's pretty amazing help and assistance so they'll support community in putting together a board and an organization including all the legal business to set up a nonprofit capacity building to help these be really functional organizations and then continue to work with that group as they identify an actual project they want to do which could be infill, it could be taking one of the big empty buildings in a downtown and really moving that into housing or something else and there's a lot of funding attached to it too so multiple hundreds of developments they're having a webinar coming up very soon I don't know if it's deep but we can put it in a follow-up email to all of you about the university and all of this program so communities that think that might be an interesting solution should get a group together so any final words for you? thank you for coming thank you so much