 Welcome. I'm Kathy Cody Hudson, Director of the Osher Lifelong Rune Institute at the University of Vermont. And we're so pleased to have you join us for today's Olly Distinguished Speaker Series presentation. How Vermont is addressing its affordable housing needs with Maura Collins. A special thank you to AARP for sponsoring seats again in our series. Welcome to our AARP members and welcome to our new and returning Olly members from across Vermont, the country and Canada. We really are appreciative of your continued participation and support of Olly. Before we begin, a couple of virtual housekeeping reminders. We do encourage you to enter your questions in the chat box. We'll do our best to get to each one at the end. And please refer to the instructions in the chat box if you want to activate live captioning on your screen. We're recording this presentation and we will send it out to participants in the next day or two. So today we welcome our distinguished speaker. Maura Collins is the Executive Director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, a statewide affordable housing funder. She has worked at BHFA since 2002. She received her master's in public administration from the University of Vermont, and she has served on UVM's faculty, teaching graduate level housing policy courses. In her spare time, Maura is on the board of Pathways Vermont. So please join me in welcoming Maura Collins. Thank you, Kathy. Should I just jump right in? Yes, you may. This is excellent. I'm so happy to be here today. I will tell you right off the bat. I'm not a Vermonter. I've only been here 20 years. But I say that at the outset, because we may go fast through some things, but I'm very happy to slow down, answer questions. In fact, I'd love to get people thinking about questions that they have about housing in Vermont right off the bat, because I think y'all came with questions. I think you signed up today because you were wondering about why are prices going up so fast and furious? What do interest rates, if they are going to be going up this year, what's that going to do to our housing market? Do we have a bubble going on maybe? Because, you know, 10, 15 years ago in the last recession, it was a housing crisis specifically. Is that going to happen again? I'm sure you have questions. And if we were in person, I'd be the kind of person who would say, let's start with questions. I'd ask you to tell me your questions, and then I try to weave those into my presentation throughout. So, being virtual, I can't quite promise as seamless of a transition. But if you want to put in the chat what your questions are, what you're hoping to get out of the next hour, what you want me to focus on. I am a Swiss Army knife, only when it comes to housing. I can't answer any questions that don't have to do with housing. But I'd love to take a stab whether it be around the state's response to homelessness through the pandemic, whether it be about starter homes in the state, what's going on with rental vacancies right now, or anything in between. I welcome your chat questions. And I also will say, I'm so excited to be here today because I was due to give this same talk March 15 of 2020. Maybe it was March 18. I can't promise the number but I know it was like right there, right when this was my first thing that got canceled in person event that got canceled as a result of COVID. So, I'm happy to be here today because, well I never would have imagined that that postponement back in March of 2020 would last this long. I am happy to have the opportunity to talk today about my favorite topic, and also to, I don't know, dig into this. So I'm going to, I don't see any questions yet. So I'm going to start through a very short slide. I can ask, I can post a question there are a couple coming directly to me. So, do you want me to read them. Sure. Okay, so why are taxes so high here I live in Brattleboro and am a senior. Yep, I'm not going to answer them already I'm going to make a note and I'm going to leave them in later on okay well then I'll send them directly to you. Great I see one to me that talks about what is affordable housing. That's a good question that's one I get asked every time. And so the question is about, do we have to subsidize it forever or is it affordable right off the bat. And yes I see a question about housing happening in Morrisville, and I know exactly what projects you're talking about there's some exciting things happening in oil county I can talk about. While the questions keep coming in, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what we know is happening right now, which this is not a coven step this is, I would have told you the same statistic for the past 10 plus years, which is about a third of us in the state pay too much for housing. So the question that came to me about what is affordable housing. It's that first bullet on the slide. Every house in the state is absolutely affordable you can write that down. The affordable housing expert says every house in Vermont is affordable. We don't have money. So there are people out there, I'm going to guess Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever can afford just about every house in the state. The problem is, is that the rest of us can't. And so that's why housing is unaffordable is because it's a relationship between each of our incomes and housing prices. In an academic sense in a perfect world households would pay no more than 30% of their income for their housing costs that includes taxes that includes utilities. And it includes your mortgage which is your principal and interest and your homeowners insurance. It includes your renter. It includes your full rent, which does pay for taxes so the misnomer that renters don't pay taxes is not true because a landlord calculates what the building costs and then charges the rent needed so that renter is paying the rent which covers taxes, and it would cover their utilities. So 30% is the magic number. So if Vermonters don't earn much money, and there's not much affordable housing for them. If a Vermonter earns a lot of money, there's more housing available to them and they may not feel the affordable housing crunch quite as much. It's also important to know that this is an academic standard that makes my life easier by having a nice round number like 30%. It doesn't mean it's right for each of us individually. I have three young children. I have childcare costs. That means maybe I shouldn't be pushing the envelope and spending 30% on housing, because I have a big old expense that a lot of other Vermonters don't have. I may have high healthcare costs. I may have high transportation costs. I may have very high utility costs because of an unweatherized home or inefficient home. So if things come into play and we all have a different ratio exactly that we play or that we pay. But as you can see from the chart, you can see that 19% of all of the households are paying between 30 and 49% of their income for housing, and another 15% are paying more than half their income for housing. I wish I had stacked these bars on top of each other so that you could see that you have to add those numbers together and see that 19% plus 15%. So 34% of Vermonters are paying more than 30% of their income for housing. The reason those red bars are on there to show how many are paying more than half their income is because those are the households that are at far greater risk of losing their home if they have, we say, one muffler away from potentially being without a home. If you're paying more than half your income, then whether it be a muffler that breaks or an unexpected medical bill or the like, you may actually lose your home as a result because there's so little left. So the next slide talks about home sales and what's been happening there. The prices were rising even before the pandemic. So this is not new, but we do know that since the pandemic, the median home sale price has gone up 19%. So there's a lot of factors that influence this. I'll say that for those of us in Chittenden County, the median is far higher instead 270,000, which is the statewide median in Chittenden County, it was $385,000 last year. And just as a reminder, the median is the halfway point. So if we ranked all the homes from lowest price up to highest price, the median is the middle point so it doesn't get swayed like an average does with an outlier of a big million dollar home. Also, lots of Vermont counties have experienced home price increases as a result of the pandemic. And so we have seen surprisingly high home price increases in the Northeast Kingdom and in Lemoyle County and not just Chittenden County. In fact, Chittenden County's increase has been a bit more modest compared to other counties. And some of that is likely because of the high number of vacation homes there are in other counties, and that some of those vacation homes are now being sold as primary residences, or more primary residences, meaning someone's primary home is now being sold as a vacation home. These numbers tell us though, I'm sorry I have some notes on my other monitor over here so you've seen me looking it's because I'm reading, because when you when I start quoting numbers you're going to see me looking sideways. And that you would need to earn an income of just over $73,000 to afford that median priced home, whereas the actual median income in our state last year was $62,000. You'd have to see the median income from honor be able to afford the median income home, and that's not the case right now. You'd have to earn 73 grand to buy that home, but actual median incomes are closer to 62 grand. And here's even worse. That's, I'm giving you the median of all Vermonters. But if you look at the median income of Vermont renters, meaning those are the people who want to be first time home buyers want to put down roots want to settle in the state want to call this home, and make our communities more vibrant by having them be a part of, but be a part of our state. Our median income is $36,000. So now you see why by the numbers, it's harder and harder for folks to make that entry into home ownership. So how does Vermont compare. Well, nationally home prices have gone up by 18 and a half percent from this past December of 2021 for me year prior to that. There was no state that saw a decline in home prices. The states with the highest increases were Arizona, followed by Florida, followed by Utah. So all over the country we're seeing big increases. There are lots of fluctuations month to month with this, I can tell you that Vermont was a dark purple shade just two months ago we were one of the top 10 states with a 20% home price appreciation. Each month more home sales come in, and these numbers fluctuate, but you can see that home prices are going up everywhere. And you can see that they're projected to continue to go up, but not at the same rate as we come out of the pandemic. So what this map is showing us is that if you just look at November to December because this data is all from December, there's a little lag to it. But if you looked at the difference between November to December home prices nationally went up 1.3%. But if you looked at December to the year prior they went up 18 and a half percent, which I mentioned. The organization CoreLogic forecasts what we can expect. And they're saying that between December and January, we wouldn't see any appreciation. It's actually not a lot of homes that sell in December and January it's the holidays and it's a hard time to play kids out of school and so there's often not a lot of transactions happening in the data winter. But if you look at December 2021 and compare it to where this organization thinks will be in December of 2022, they are expecting another 3.5% increase. So one reason for this drop off of that home prices probably won't go up quite as fast and furious as before is rising interest rates, and most economists agree that prices won't escalate as fast because interest rates will mean that there's less money. And consumer desire for home ownership is going to stay strong though, and we have consistently not built enough homes in this country. And so that is going to continue to put pressure on prices, because we know that even though interest rates will make homes less affordable, we just need more homes. The nation has underbuilt by millions and millions of homes. And so it's not just a Vermont problem that we haven't been building enough. It's happening nationally. So here are questions about are we in a housing bubble, and this core logic organization that I respect based on their data. They do suggest a small probability of nationwide price decline, but it's much more likely that we will see price declines in certain metro markets, meaning that those are the at risk markets that have a history of potentially overbuilding historically. So largely though they're not calling I don't see any economists in my world calling for large scale price declines, most are calling for what you see here, which is a slowing of the appreciation to something a bit more normal and natural that we've been used to. Now, our housing market is not just about home ownership, renters are an important piece of our housing market. About 25% of Americans were renters at some point in their life, so we can't ever forget about the importance of rentals because they're an important wrong on the ladder that moves someone up to achieve home ownership. And the fair market rent in the Burlington area is over 1200 almost $1300 right now, a fair market rent is a HUD standard that has to do with their affordable housing programs, and it takes that median that middle point that I talked about. So what's the rent at just below that at the 40th percentile so not the 50th percentile which is the median but just below that. That is what the $1265 a month rent is. So that's really a modest one bedroom apartment. So affordable at the average renters wage though is only $800. And so there is rental assistance available. In fact, the, there were coven related protections that had eviction moratoriums for a long time. The federal government has put more rental assistance out and made it available than really at any time, anyone can imagine, or remember, but historically, it's always been that only 25% of the people who qualify for rental assistance, actually get it. This is not an entitlement program where just because your lower income, you get a section eight voucher housing choice voucher. Instead, it's very different. And a lot of folks don't get that golden ticket. So it is really hard for people to become first time home buyers when rent prices are increasing as much as they have been. And we know that since the pandemic prices continue to go up. So these stats that I'm giving you today are probably even higher now. But before I move on, I want to explain what this bar chart is because you all are probably nowhere near as nerdy as I am and you don't use phrases like housing wage. Housing wage is something we in housing refer to, which is the wage needed to afford that one bedroom apartment at that HUD standard that modest one bedroom apartment and only pay 30% of their income for their rent. It's an academic rule of thumb that we use. So we know that if your rent was $1265, then you would need to earn $24 and 33 cents an hour in order to afford that apartment. Yet, as I put here, the hourly rate wage actually earned by average renters is closer to 15 bucks. So you can see why we have a problem. And a lot of people talk about well then get a roommate, which is totally fair. I, most of us have had roommates at some point. And so that is a viable option for people to make their housing more affordable. In addition, it's important to know that more than half of Vermont's renters only have one full time wage earner or less. So we don't see a lot of the majority of renters actually only have one wage earner. And we can appreciate that there are a lot of housing situation, family situations household situations, we're having roommates becomes more difficult for instance, once you're married and have children and the like. And so we need to make sure that we have affordable housing for people at all life stages. So the question inevitably comes, why are housing prices so high. And I already spoke to how we haven't been keeping up with the building that we need to do. The glory days of Vermont's growth and someone call it glory days but I'll say that Vermont grew the most in both population and households during in the post World War two era so from the 50s through the 70s to 80s. So that's when we had the interstate, and a lot of people are moving into Vermont. In addition, we had the impact of the baby boom, and that we just saw unprecedented growth in our state. And so in the 80s. That was when we started to see our growth bend down this is the second half of the bell curve this is when we start to come down in terms of our growth. In the 80s, we were still growing our year round housing stock and I say year round because I'm focused on primary residences. I've mentioned before that we have a lot of vacation homes in our state. In fact, Vermont in Maine are the two states with the most vacation homes as a proportion of all their housing stock. 19% of our housing stock right now are vacation homes so they're off the market to Vermonters to live in year round. So I really most of my data always focuses on primary residences year round housing. In the 80s, we were adding almost 2% of our housing stock every year so that meant roughly 3400 homes a year, we're being brought on to the market being built and to house Vermonters. You can see that every decade since that has dropped off. And recently, the most recent decade that just ended, we know that about 1400 homes were being created each year. And so it hasn't kept up with the demands of Vermonters. It confuses people though in fairness because our population really hasn't been growing that much we've heard that for years I mean pre pandemic, we knew that Vermont wasn't growing a whole lot. So why do we need all these new homes, if our population is stagnant, or really only growing in Chittenden County or something like that why do we need so many homes. Well because population is different than households. So population is how many people we have, and that has been relatively flat for a while. But the number of households we have is growing. And what you have to remember is, is how often one household becomes to one household becomes to when a child reaches a certain age moves out on their own. In some cases, one household can become for if you have three children. One household becomes to when there's a divorce. And so there's a lot of times when we can grow the number of households we have, but not necessarily be growing our population dramatically. So if we have more households, it means we need more housing. And we know that the average household size is going down just about every year over its trending down definitely. We live in smaller households, and we're not as likely to bring in multi generational members of the family. And we also get married later and do make a lot of choices that means that we have very small households we live alone for much longer much more comfortably. At this point. So, as the lack, when there's a lack of supply that increase says that just drives up rent and drives up sale prices. Additionally, over this time period, the 80s had high interest rates, but from the 90s to the early 2000s and the 2010 decade, we've seen historically very low interest rates. So, also I want to point out that housing used to be done a bit differently. It used to be that municipalities would welcome developers to build housing in their community. They used to be seen heroes is too strong a word all on it, but they used to be seen as partners in growing a community. And the developers were were lured in because municipalities would put in roads with sidewalks and curves and lighting, and maybe even a rec path, and ask a developer that would incent a developer to come in and pop a bunch of homes in a subdivision, and poof, we have a neighborhood. The reality of municipalities is that they are cash strapped. They don't have the money to put in roads and curves and sidewalks if someone's not paying the bill. So instead, those costs have been shifted back to the developer and the overly simplistic attitude, because this isn't doing any community quite the justice they deserve, but the simplistic attitude has been, you know, running off these homes. If you want to build in my town. I want you to have some skin game. I want you to put in a sidewalk I want you to put in some lights and we're going to have certain design features that our community requires, so that we keep up the character of our community. And so we want you to put in a rec path and we want you to pay some impact fees for the impact of the kids in the school district that will inevitably happen. We want you to put that burden that financial burden on developers. They in turn, tack that on to the sales price of a home. And then we wonder why housing so expensive. There is no, I'm not trying to bash municipalities, because their cash constraints are very real, and they don't have money to put in the infrastructure that they used to. As time developers don't have a magic pot of money that can pay for these things for them. And this is why the burden gets put on the home prices. So why don't we build more homes. Well, there's fewer government subsidies in the past, the HUD budget is far smaller than it has been in a long time. We spoke about how only 25% of eligible renters can get rental assistance. Right now we're absolutely seeing high price to materials, a shortage of labor, we see inflation impacts. The infrastructure limitations I was talking about are those roads and sewer and water supplies and so there's limits there. We have policies like this chart shows that we really like larger lots for homes. I think it's, it's surprising to me to see this chart that I have on the slide here to see northeast. I mean that's New England. I think of quite little villages, I'm in the village s extension right now and I can tell you, I could throw a baseball to into my neighbor's house because I'm on a tiny tiny little lot right at the five corners. So I think of that kind of compact development in the northeast. And I think about West, I've been out to visit Utah, Montana, Colorado. I've seen homes on these sprawling ranches with lots and lots of acreage, and I was shocked to see that the median lot size of newly constructed homes is bigger in the northeast than we see out West. And there's local opposition. You can imagine when there's a new development going in. I don't know about your front porch forum, but I can tell you my local newspaper my front porch forum gets filled when there's a new development saying where are these people coming from why you know why do we need more one bedroom apartments where what's all this development happening I don't like the way our community has changing how it looks. I rarely see people writing layers the editor saying, I welcome the new households that are moving into town I welcome the fact that we're going to have more crossing guards because there'll be more kids walking to school. I welcome that there's going to be more businesses as a result of all these new households more restaurants more shops more things walk within walking distance. You don't often see that kind of response. And so what happens is projects either don't get billed, or they cost more, which gets passed on to buyers. So, there is a lot being done. I'm not all doom and gloom. I'm actually quite an optimist. And there are actively a lot of proposals being discussed in Montpelier. Right now, they are looking the legislature is looking again at updating act 250 which is our statewide permitting process. And there's several proposals to incentivize communities municipalities to update their local zoning, which is very important. There's a lot of communities out there that hasn't haven't updated their planning documents or zoning documents in many, many years, despite the fact that our market has completely changed just in the last two years, much less the last five or 10 when some of these documents were less looked at. There also has been unprecedented investments of federal stimulus money, a short hand we call it ARPA, because the most recent stimulus package was called the American Rescue Plan Act. So we call it ARPA funding. And so there's state money and federal stimulus money going into the creation of affordable rental housing. And then there's new programs being proposed that VHF is a part of that we're proud of where we're proposing that some of the stimulus money go to affordable home ownership development. That's important because in our country, we have a long history like back to the 1920s of how we make housing affordable. And how we make housing affordable is on the rental side, we give tax credits and loans and have HUD programs that buy down that make that building more affordable to build and operate. And then the people who live there, get that below market rent, because we've subsidized the actual building. If the building was going to cost $5 million to build, maybe we can use government money to get it down to a million dollars and then they only have to get a million dollar mortgage. And so that is much more affordable because the other four million was paid for by federal and state sources, public sources. And on the home ownership side, we don't do that. We don't have large scale programs that build affordable starter homes. There is habitat for humanity. There are small self help type programs and others that do build some homes, but not to the same extent of what we're doing on the rental side. For example, in Vermont, we spend 60 to $65 million a year on creating affordable rental housing in a normal year, not with all the stimulus money that's happening now this is a different scene altogether right now but historically. We would spend about $60 million a year on creating affordable rental housing. We spend about two to $4 million a year on creating affordable home ownership. Instead, the US has chosen to make home ownership affordable through somewhat complicated financing mechanisms, like having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac support a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. That makes housing more affordable if you have a fixed rate mortgage. If your income goes up each year for workers, then, and your house price relatively stays the same, then that housing gets more affordable over time. A lot of people who itemize their taxes also have the benefit of writing off their mortgage interest or their property taxes. And so it lowers their tax liability that makes housing more affordable. It doesn't build the homes, it doesn't create the homes it's not an incentive for developers. And so that's a program that we're talking about creating now. I want to go, I'm going to sample just a couple of the questions I have some more slides but I noticed that someone asked a question I'm looking for now about. How is VHFA approaching the opportunity or the challenge of funds from ARPA to address the affordable housing challenge from a board member of a homeless and transitional housing nonprofit. Much of the money that is going directly the stimulus money that's going to affordable housing is not going through VHFA, but is going through our sister organization called the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. We've been around for 30 years and have a brilliant dual message of affordable housing and land conservation. And it's an award winning model that Vermont pioneered that brought those two, what I would say are unlikely bedfellows together, because normally you have a plot of land, and you have people say, develop it like crazy we want all sorts of housing, and then you have other folks saying conserve it we have climate change concerns and we need to make sure there's green spaces and that these are livable communities, and there would be a tension and a fight between these ideas of what to do with this parcel of land. And by creating an organization, the Housing and Conservation Board that by statute has to bring both those missions together and grapple with that in one conversation. We have really promoted smart growth, where we decide you know what, this is a village center, this is a downtown close to jobs close to transit has infrastructure and sewers and amenities. And so we're going to put housing here so that we don't have to put it out in our conserved land that should be working lands and the like. I also noticed that there was a question about, can I talk a little about affordable supported housing for those who need assistance due to a mental health condition. I would be happy to in my intro Kathy mentioned that I'm on the board of a statewide nonprofit. It's a mental health organization that specifically works with people without homes and have mental health challenges called pathways for mom. The needs there are very great. I'm sure you've read the same media articles I have about how the the mental health needs of our state and nationally are going up considerably the stress the anxiety, not just for our youth but also for adults we're all feeling the impact of the last two years of this pandemic. And so it is so much harder when I'm talking about housing wages and what people can earn. That's not assuming that they also need potentially additional supports to be successful in their apartment. So, there has long been priorities to make sure that the public money going to create affordable rental housing through VHFA has make sure that we build in supports for those units. So VHFA for over a decade now has required that for our, we have a lot of programs and I don't want to go into all the details because we don't have enough time, but for our most competitive valuable money that we hand out. So we have to make sure that 25% of the apartments be set aside for people without homes. And then we require that the developer has a signed agreement with at least one if not multiple service agencies, so that the people living in those apartments have enough supports that they need. And that has been wonderful. In addition, the stimulus money the ARPA money that the state has not just ARPA but actually, there was other stimulus programs in 2000 that passed from the feds. And when that money came out, the legislature is very clear that that money had to go to prioritize homeless units. And so there was an expansion of shelter capacity, as well as 800 new apartments for households that are homeless have been brought online just since the pandemic. And that has done wonders to address our homeless needs. Now the problem is, is that the number of people experiencing homelessness is rising as fast as we're bringing units online, but that kind of prioritizing of people who are homeless and may have special service needs is continuing. I'll go back to my slides, but I'm going to answer one more question before I do just to spice it up a little bit. I see a question about how is senior housing managed or made available in Vermont. It's a great question. A lot of just let's see we have to start at the beginning sometimes I start multiple sentences and don't finish any of them so I'm going to have some discipline. There are 13,800 apartments that have received some kind of government assistance the publicly supported apartments in our state that doesn't count all the vouchers out there where an individual may have a section eight voucher and is renting a private apartment and their rent is being subsidized. I'm just talking about the ones where the building itself was subsidized with some kind of government funds, and therefore the people living there are paying lower of those 13,800 apartments just under half of them are age restricted. And so they have restrictions saying you have to be either 55 or more often it's 62 years old to live there. And a lot of those have great support systems in them as well. There is another award winning model that Vermont has pioneered and now has brought to other states it's been studied by the federal government and proven as an evidence based best practice, and it's the SASH model support and services at home. It was created by previous leaders at the Cathedral Square Corporation, which is based in Chittenden County, but the SASH model is available at, I think it's hundreds, should I say hundreds of housing sites. I shouldn't say hundreds. I don't really know. I don't know how many housing sites are covered by SASH right now. And I should look that up. But what it is, is that for every 100 residents, there is a full time SASH coordinator providing services to those residents, as well as a quarter time nurse, who is available to those residents. And what we find is that providing services to seniors in their housing is very cost effective and can lower their costs of health care overall. And so it's a great program if you haven't heard of the SASH program, it's, like I said, available statewide through a lot of nonprofit housing providers. So senior housing is really, to go back to the question, senior housing is really managed differently at every building. One developer, like Cathedral Square is a well known senior housing owner and developer of affordable housing. They will have multiple buildings, and they're all managed separately. Cathedral Square has one application, and you can check off what buildings you're interested in. They're managed a little separately. Some may allow for pets to be there, some will not. Some will have on site, laundry and facilities, other senior housing may not. And so there's not really a way I can answer that question broadly about how senior housing is managed because frustrating for many who are trying to access housing, it's very individualized. So there isn't so such a thing as one waiting list for all the senior housing in the state, for example, I'm going to finish up my slides and then go back to questions because I see me about 20 minutes left. So I'm also going to take a drink of water. Thank you. So, what can you do. I know that sometimes I give these talks and people get a little down hardened because I talk about the overwhelming need and the limited resources. It is a little different right now that there are more resources now than we have seen definitely in the 25 years I've been doing this, many would say ever. And so that money is flowing through the proper channels to get out so we can build more housing renovate more housing. But what Everett Vermonters can do is to support housing friendly policies, especially affordable housing. So, for instance, when I made that comment before that not a lot of people write letters to the editor or send out from porch forum posts about how supportive they are about development happening in the community. I don't know why they couldn't. I will tell you that I wrote an op ed, and the headline was, I want more. And it talked about how I wanted more things in my community because I wanted my community to grow and be vibrant long term into the future. Now I think I want to be very clear that any growth and any planning needs to be done thoughtfully and wisely going back to that idea of conservation and development and how do we make sure that we're making smart decisions with both those features in mind. But that largely happens when it comes to the kind of publicly supported affordable housing that we have in our state. I am just so confident that the housing we are creating is meeting multiple public policy goals. And so not only are we creating housing, but we also are preserving our historic buildings. And we're only building in designated areas like downtowns and village centers. We're not sprawling, you know, to pop individual homes on mountain sides that we want to protect. The housing we're creating with public subsidies is energy efficient, some of its net zero and it's going to be affordable long term. And it's really prioritizing those who need it most and have the lowest incomes, and we ensure that those affordability provisions are in place in perpetuity, meaning, if we give money to a building now, then it will have to be affordable forever. And it's not going to be a time 30 years from now that the developer can cash out and walk away with public subsidy, like was the fact that happens in many other states. Today has been pushing and encouraging more local housing committees to form. And so, if you went to this housing data.org website, you would find a housing ready toolbox, and it would tell you about all the housing commissions or committees that we know about in the state. It would show you what their charter or charge look like, how were they created, if they have a website we point you to it. And then we give tools for how to, to support these commissions for instance, housing data.org is a website where you can pull up every town in the state and get more housing information than you would ever want to read or digest but it goes into what are the housing prices in my town what are the rental prices what's the housing wage, what's the vacancy rate how many homes are heated with different fuel types so I can see what maybe the weatherization needs are in my community is population and household size growing or shrinking what's the age of the residents do we need more age restricted housing, or more non age restricted housing. And all that information is on housing data.org for every town. And it's information that gets updated every year. And so we try to give that information to these housing committees to look at what the local housing needs are. And so I'm just saying that every town has very different needs. I've made some quick comments about that I live in a six junction and I want more, and that's because I do believe that a six junction, especially right in by the five corners is the kind of community that the Regional Planning Commission and the local planning bodies have all designated as an area for growth. I do not mean that 10 miles out when I get to certain parts of Essex town, or to Jericho or under hill that I think that the same housing solutions are appropriate. I think that housing is very location location location very location based. And so a housing commission can have those conversations at the municipal level, and really come to the right answers. Yeah, VHFA has a new YouTube series where you get to, frankly, see me in this home office, educating people on how the affordable housing system works in our state. There's videos on what the housing needs are of our state every five years we have to do a big study and I spent four and a half minutes telling you what the findings were so you don't have to read the 100 pages. There's a video on why does it cost so much to build affordable rental housing because it's very expensive. What are the different housing agencies besides VHFA and the Housing Conservation Board there's some others and how do we all work together. Welcome to see that, as well as a recent survey that we posted or did that talks to builders about cost increases and the delays resulting from the pandemic. I will have to ask my friend Kathy, if my slide deck gets shared somewhere or posted those are links if that's not shared with you all I can somehow get those actual links to you, but you'd find them all through VHFA.org. Now, I'm done with my slideshow so I don't know if we want to take down the slides but I'm very eager to answer this question from my friend Helen head who I see has posed something to me. So do I stop sharing now Kathy. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and stop sharing more. Thank you so much and yes we can certainly get those links out to folks we do a follow up email so we can send resource information out to our participants so yeah we can move into questions and I think Krista has popped on as well. So, go for it. Great. I'll answer this one from Helen and then maybe we'll go back to the normal thing of Krista you can let me know because I'm sure I've not gone in order and messed up the whole system here on you but I'll go ahead the long time. Oh, there's my dog, a long time chair of the housing committee and the House of Representatives is asking it's not unusual for residents to oppose housing development particularly in their own neighborhoods as concern about the climate crisis grows that may increasingly become a rallying point for those opposing housing growth at the local level how do we address this. I think that that goes back to the questions around that balance of housing and conservation, and that it's best discussed at a local level. I think there are a lot of resources that I could share but don't have handy right now that speak to the climate benefits of smart growth and that if we develop in our downtown areas. It's better for our, the climate overall, because people are driving less, they're working closer to where they live, and that there are just so many. There are so many benefits I can appreciate that in South Burlington this conversation has really come to a head recently. I think that we see this play out throughout Vermont in a lot of, in a lot of ways so I think it just goes back to smart growth actually is more climate friendly than if we sprawl housing out and people have to drive farther and farther from jobs. Thank you. I have a question here are Airbnb is killing affordable housing, especially rentals. Yeah, great question. So, I know you want me to say yes, and I'm not going to, because I really do. I know it's popular now to say follow the science I follow the data. And, as I said about 19% of the states housing stock. It has always been vacation homes, and we know that short term rentals are two and a half percent of our housing stock. And we don't know if that two and a half percent overlaps with the 19% of vacation homes if that makes sense or the short term rentals just vacation homes that are now have a new platform to be rented out through the 20% of our housing stock doesn't sound like a lot, but VHF a we really only look at the short term rentals that are units that are available for a full month. And year round, because honestly, my next door neighbor snowbirds to Florida for a few months this time a year. And so they do short term rental of their home for the two and a half months that they're not here. That home would never be available to renters of Vermont or home buyers, because that household absolutely lives here all those other months. And so I just think it's important to really make sure that just because we see a growth and short term rentals that we really dig in to be like but would that be on the market but for this opportunity. The other thing I'll say is that my comments a lot of times being from a statewide organization are statewide and gloss over local realities. We do see where short term rentals are are in our ski communities. So it's Burlington, but it's more so it's Ludlow killing Tim, Warren weights field and in those towns. There probably is more of a relation, because we just know there's so many short term rentals in those towns specifically. Thank you out of the large amount of developments going on in our area what is the percentage in your opinion that are going into affordable housing. That being enough. It's hard there's a group called building homes together based in Chittenden County that has been studying this year after year. They set a five year goal this was five years ago. So that's the goal of how much housing development needed to be built over the next five years and how much that should be affordable. And at the end of the five years, we met the barely met the housing development goal, but fell well short of the affordable housing goal. And so it is a very small percentage of homes that are actually affordable and so we need to be doing more in that regard. And another one with regards to affordable housing is there any state requirement to to require solar panels on affordable housing, or any kind of renewable energy for that. There is not a blanket requirement for solar. A lot of times developers have that in their budget and they plan to do that. And then because the cost of development is so high, they in the end can't do it. We do have green building and design standards that reward projects that do various types of energy efficiency measures. So renewable energy would count towards that and we really have, I think it's just over a thousand apartments in the state that have advanced wood heat, for example, now pellet boilers, but there's not a requirement that that happens and it's just this trade off that we have it's very difficult between the cost of housing and these renewable goals we know that the upfront cost is going to increase costs up front but then save money long term, but it's hard to tack another thing on to the price of housing when housing is already so expensive to build. Why are taxes so high here. Any questions coming from Brattleboro and there's probably many answers, one could say it costs, however much it costs to run the town of Brattleboro. Now you as a voter could have an opinion about if it should cost less to run the town of Brattleboro, but I'm just going to say it is what it is. And so I would argue that the more people we can divide that among and share that cost with the less each of our bills goes down, which is one reason why I'm for growing in a thoughtful smart way, many of our communities, because I'm not paying that cost among more people so my share goes down. Obviously I'm not going to opine on to, you know, is Brattleboro paying the right amount for all of their municipal services and benefits and all that because as I told you at the beginning, I only know housing. So I only know how housing solutions can address this, but it is helpful that our property taxes do have income sensitivity in Vermont. And that doesn't mean that that doesn't mean as I said every individual income is unique and our expenses are unique so I don't want to say that that we can all afford the same things, but income sensitivity is something that the state legislature has put in place to try to buffer that so that if your home price is high and so your property taxes are high, then it tries to buffer that for folks who are modest means are on a steady income like seniors are. So that's helping refugees. That's another good question. We have been helping refugees since the 80s when the refugee resettlement program began in our state. Now, obviously we have a real influx. There are some proposals in the legislature to dedicate new services new additional resources to refugees. One thing that I think surprises a lot of people to hear is that new Americans do receive nine months of assistance when they first move to our country move settle in Vermont. They get nine months of assistance, much of that assistance, all then has to be paid back. So a lot of people sometimes mistakenly think that's free money that new Americans are getting that long staying Vermonters don't have access to, but it really and in many regards is just alone. And so we are trying to specifically work with the organizations the public housing authorities that administer the rental assistance they're trying to work with the refugee resettlement program to make sure that everyone has a rental housing voucher. But the housing stock doesn't accommodate a lot of the new Americans that we see many new Americans and I frankly don't know if this is true for Afghanis like it has been for other nationalities that have come before. I have larger household sizes, and so they need bigger homes and so they're often looking for three, four, maybe even five bedroom homes to live in. And not only are there not a lot of those still on the rental market they've converted to homeownership, but we're not building a lot of those because as I said before Vermonters have really smaller household sizes. The HFA is actually doing the upset we're encouraging more small units to be built and so we have a real way that we're missing serving new Americans as a result. Thank you. This one question here I've noticed a lot of new housing going up in Morris Morrisville. What are the reasons for so much in one town as opposed to it being spread out within the Moio County. Yeah, such a good question. Yeah, there are a couple of developing two different developments village center and then a new one that actually is a split development between Morrisville and stow which we haven't done new publicly subsidized affordable housing. And so in many years. Morrisville is a center of services, like I said transportation, a lot of things and so there is a factor of if you build it they will come, and that the town of Morrisville has built up its municipal services so much that it is ideal for growth and it's ideal for growth. Additionally, communities that have water and sewer and that kind of infrastructure are less expensive to build in, then towns that don't have that kind of infrastructure and it has to be put in. And so there are many communities in the Moio County that's all septic and they don't have that infrastructure that could support a 20 apartment building like you can in Morrisville whether sewer available. One for about South Burlington and another one about interest rates and that will be able to close on those. Why is there so much new building in South Burlington. Because South Burlington wanted that way because South Burlington consciously knew that it was not only its own economic center of jobs, but also it is so adjacent to when you scheme Burlington area I mean that that's really our downtown core of development and so that is one of those areas designated for growth by the Regional Planning Commission and by the municipality itself supported by voters and so there has been again really thoughtful process that has happened for many years through the planning Commission Planning Committee and it's late I'm getting losing my words now, but South Burlington has really thoughtfully planned for growth and has ensured that affordable housing is a part of that growth. They get credit for in their new town center they have been the city downtown. They have inclusionary zoning which means that a proportion of all the new housing development happening there is required to be affordable housing, and that's something we only see in a handful of towns and it's wonderful to make sure that if a town is going to grow that we know that one of it is protected for generations to come in affordability. But I encourage you all to get involved there is South Burlington's example that they have an affordable housing committee, and so they've done extensive work for more than a decade looking at the data looking at the numbers and having these tough conversations locally. If you're wondering about, is there really that much need for South Burlington I encourage you to look on the municipal website to find the affordable housing committee and go to some of their meetings and hear some of their discussions and look at some of the data they've looked at because there's been specific housing needs assessments done for South Burlington that target why that kind of growth is called for. Thank you. How and we'll close with this question. How will rising interest rates and or inflation impact home prices and values in the future. Yeah, so there is a fantastic Washington Post article that came out it was a commentary by Mark Zandy and Mark Zandy, which you can Google Washington Post ZAN BI, and it speaks to if we're going to tackle inflation. We need to address building more homes, and his is Mark Zandy is the chief economist for Moody's, and he's a very smart man who knows that actually inflation one third of our inflation calculator is set by home prices. And so because that's like I said 30% of what we spend our money on, and then another I shouldn't quote the percentage 1020% is actually like utilities and food and things like that but that if we can make our housing as well as utilities more affordable, then we actually can bring down inflation because we're bringing down what we pay for one third of the calculation that goes into inflation. And so I'm not saying that building more homes is going to end our labor shortage, although I think it'll help because we'll have more workers who are able to live here and get jobs, but material shortages, you know, it is a reality that apparently they're shipping containers off the, you know, shores of LA and the rest that are really impacting the supply goods shortages that we have. So inflation overall is in part because we are 1.7 I think the article said 1.7 million homes have not been built since the last recession that should have been to keep up with demand of Americans nationwide. And that's like an entire year's worth of home building that we missed since the last recession, and that if we had built those homes then that would help with inflation because the supply would be there to meet the demands. It's kind of a complicated topic to throw out at the last question. I think as I four are going to really probably lower that price appreciation that we'll see in the future, but I don't expect the interest rates economists I'm listening to are not thinking of interest rates are going to pop a bubble and that we'll see price decline so Thank you for for answering that large question at the end here and that's a wrap for our Q&A and over to you Kathy thank you more. Thank you so much again more for for presenting and sharing your insights and all of the knowledge that you have about our current housing situation here in in Vermont we really appreciate you coming today and speaking with our Ali community. And thanks to all of you for joining us. You will receive a link to our online evaluation form. We value your feedback so please send that along. And we hope to see all of you next week for our fourth and final lecture in this series timeline elements with James Stewart. Stay well everyone. Thank you. Bye bye.