 Hi, everybody. My name is David Martins. I'm the director at the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, and welcome to In the House, live. In the House is a project, I guess, if you will, of VAHC. It's our ongoing conversation about the topic of affordable housing in Vermont, but an ongoing conversation from the perspective of different communities within our state. Last time we broadcast from here, we spoke about the impact of affordable housing on early childhood development. You can see on our website the shorter video versions that are not live, that are just recorded in the House. You'll see in the next coming month we'll be talking about how housing impacts folks living with HIV and AIDS. In November we talked about veterans, and today we have with us Emily Hancock, who is a member of the Class of 2023 at UVM, and Emily and I are going to be talking about affordable housing and young people, especially college students and recent grads, and kind of the relationship between young people and the housing crisis. Emily, why don't you tell us a little bit about you? Are you from Vermont originally? I am actually originally from Kansas. Kansas? So I am a long way away from home. I applied to a bunch of schools trying to just get out of the Midwest, and then UVM ended up giving me the most in financial aid package, and I was like, excellent, Vermont is the best state, definitely go on there. I'm not trying to be in massive amounts of debt when I graduate. I think my perspective is probably a little bit different than a lot of other college students at UVM. I am like paying for my own school and paying for my rent and paying for all the things myself. And so that's kind of just like a little bit of a disconnect between me and some of my peers. I find a lot of the time in which their parents like help them with school and help them with rent. They don't understand the drasticness of the way high rents affect housing people and the way that that affects the Burlington community overall, because it's not like a burden that they bear themselves. They're not facing those costs. Yeah, absolutely. As you know, the housing market here is insanely tight, and especially in Chittenden County and in Burlington. It's at one point, I think two or one point, I'm not sure what the decimal point is. It doesn't matter. That's insanely low that there's not even apartments available. Never mind apartments that are affordable because there's none available so everybody knows that they can charge whatever they want for an apartment, and someone will pay it, right? Exactly. And one of the things that like thinking like from my perspective myself, like thinking of like, oh, if UVM offered like more scholarship money to help like offset those costs, but then all that's going to do is just increase prices because you're just increasing like more money into the system that already has a lot of money pouring into it. So like that's not a like viable answer because that's all that's going to do is just like increase the prices. So now did you so you live at off-campus housing? Yes. In an apartment? Yep. What was your experience trying to find one? So I actually experienced a little bit of homelessness in May of 2020 when I came back to Vermont. My job had extended me back and asked me to come back after getting furloughed and I was like I make a lot better money in Vermont than I do in Kansas where the minimum wage there is $7.25 an hour. I remember in high school like lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons and making like $9 and I was like, I'm so cool, look at all the money that I'm making. And then I got here and I was like, oh, this isn't even minimum wage here. But for me it's like I was very, very lucky with the place that I found. I have two roommates and I only pay $500 a month to have this like little like closet space to live in. But it's like what I can afford and it's like what like keeps me housed. Does that include utilities or no? No. So $1,500 altogether a month for the whole place. No, it's a little bit more for the other people because they have larger rooms than I do. So it's even more expensive. No, definitely not cheap. It's also like very far away from campus and that is one of the like key things that I think might solve a lot of issues in de-densifying Burlington overall. UVM shuttles does not offer shuttles off campus unless it's like late at night. But if I'm trying to get to my morning class, it would be really nice to have a shuttle to get me to and from there. Their main focus for providing those shuttles late at night is for people like partying. They don't want people to drive while under the influence of anything and to provide them a safe way to get home late at night, which I think is like amazing and could continue to be done. But I'm not trying to party. I'm just trying to go to class. The exact opposite of partying. But maybe finding a way to offer more shuttles away from campus. So if you're offering shuttles to a new ski or offering shuttles to Colchester, just pretty much any area surrounding Burlington that you're allowing a campus bus with a consistent schedule to get to, you'd be able to be more comfortable living and housing further away from campus. And then that decreases the workload on Burlington overall and helps to de-densify that. It's interesting. I mentioned that we have some versions of In the House that are not live that are just recorded. And the one that will be coming out probably next week or the week after, I'm talking to the director at VT Cares, which is the HIV AIDS organization here. And one of the things that we talk about, a little spoiler, one of the things that we talk about is how people come to Vermont who are living with HIV and AIDS because of the phenomenal care that is available in Vermont for dealing with HIV and AIDS. Then they get here and they can't find a way to live. And so some folks come here seeking that fantastic care and they end up living in their car or they end up right. And so it's interesting that we have these things that draw people here. And you know, school, healthcare. The job market alone, so I currently have four jobs, which it's a lot. But with one of them, I know that there are people that had considered working here in Vermont and they could not find housing and so they went back to Philadelphia. And that's just like it's so much more affordable to live there that they literally couldn't find housing here. And I also know students like who have withdrawn from UVM because finding housing was too much of a challenge from them. I think like this year, especially looking at how dense on-campus housing is, the enrollment statistics are free to everyone online on UVM's website if you look them up. And it's about 500 more students this year alone than it was last year due to deferrals. And looking at that and thinking, okay, they're on campus now. They'll be on campus again next semester. But then the year after that, they're all hitting Burlington. I will be graduated by then. But I just like am thinking about trying to find housing in that market with 500 more people if the housing market's already this tight and more people and more people are trying to move to Vermont. We should do things now to build housing before it gets like too late. And I think UVM really needs to find more housing on campus and actually make that housing affordable. One of the things that like drives up these prices is it's actually cheaper for students to like live off campus. You're paying roughly, when I calculated it out, it's like around $1,100 to share a room with someone and to share a bathroom with like 10 people, have no kitchen, and that doesn't even include the meal plan on top of all of that. So you're looking at like, okay, I'm paying over $1,100 to live on campus, share a room with someone, not even have my like own bathroom that I know is being cleaned regularly. And then you have all of that and you're like, okay, I can live in an apartment by myself and pay $800. That's not unreasonable. You're saving $300 and you're getting so much more out of it. So if UVM were to like drastically cut the cost of its on-campus housing, then it's going to seem like a more attractive option. And then on top of that, they also need to make sure that they're not over-enrolling students. Like this fall, they need to like only accept a very small amount of students compared to last year. Otherwise, there's literally not going to be anywhere to house them, looking on their website and calculating and tabulating through the availability of on-campus housing. There were about 5,600 students who were living on campus as compiled first years and sophomores. And then there's about 5,800 like occupancy housing that they have for them on campus. If like UVM's done what it's continually done, which is just to increase enrollment, increase enrollment, and increase enrollment, they're going to run out of housing for their students. And no juniors and seniors can live on campus. It's unbelievable. So I live in Winooski and a buddy of mine lives, I'm on one side of the circle and he's on the other side and sometimes we'll get together for dinner or something. And he'll sometimes joke that, you know, we jokingly call Winooski the Brooklyn of Burlington. And yet, and it's pretty accurate also because the prices are just like Brooklyn. And we're kind of like, you know, and he'll frequently say this is Winooski, Vermont. It's not New York City, you know. But really, that's what we've sort of arrived at. I was talking to, well, just in the course of my work, I frequently talk to lawmakers and a topic that's come up as I've been talking about, talking about this upcoming discussion with you was the idea that even beyond college, so now we want people to start a life here. We want people to stay for the long term. And how on earth does a recent college grad realistically start a life here when those, so now schools out of the way and now we're trying to put that degree to work. And people are working multiple jobs to, you know, and it's still barely making it. It's a real, it's a very real problem. I think in other cities, like after you graduate college, the opportunity to live by yourself in a situation like in a one bedroom unit by yourself, that is not a realistic reality if you're making minimum wage, in a minimum wage job, you will have to have roommates in your like 30s. And I think that's a big discouragement of people like wanting to live here as they're like, if I'm in my 30s and I have roommates, how am I supposed to like start having a life outside of this like college mindset? And the other thing is I think like, I understand that like economically, there's a sense that it makes sense for parents to try to like take care of their kids and do everything they can for them. I think it's like, if your parents are paying your rent for you, it's essentially the same as like you're living at home. And I think like having that mindset with people, because that's like definitely like look down upon if you're living with your parents, which like should not be at all. Like it's completely not affordable. And if you have an option where you're like, I'm literally saving thousands of dollars like in one year, it's a tough situation. For sure. For sure. Now you mentioned you have four jobs, but you actually have five. You just don't get paid for the fifth one. You're an advocate, right? So I first sort of what brought you here today as you know to catch everybody up who's watching is that I had been talking about, so VAHC and I know you know, and I don't know if everyone who's watching knows, VAHC is a coalition of over 90 organizations who work together in advocacy, education and outreach to try and increase accessibility to safety and affordable housing here in Vermont. And part of the coalition, we're getting ready right now going into the legislative session, which will start in January. And so we put together legislative priorities for causes that we want to advocate for. Next year we're going to have a more sort of, once I'm more settled in my role, we're going to have sort of more of a process of really giving real voice to our members to really come together maybe right at the end of the of the session we're going into now to start talking about the next session and really be a part of putting policy in and really, you know, not just saying, well, I want to support this bill that's already in, but how do all of us as a coalition help contribute to shaping the needed policies? And a voice that's missing at the table is young people and I think that voice needs to be there and lawmakers agree that it's a missing voice and it's a voice that they want to hear from. And so I was talking about this with our steering committee and someone said, oh, I was at this community meeting and this college student spoke and she was so eloquent and all this, so I tracked down the recording and then I talked to the organizer to get the contact information and all this stuff and I watched you speak and you were very passionate, very articulate as everyone is hearing tonight too. And so then in talking, I found out that you've actually been kind of formally working on this, right? So tell us a little bit about what your project has kind of been. So right now I've been trying, so I qualify for work study and I've been trying to get that as my funding for working on just like understanding how the pandemic has exacerbated the effects of houselessness. And that's a very near and dear issue in my heart after experiencing that myself. It's a very stressful situation and especially trying to be a student on top of that, you can't set yourself up for success in that situation. For sure. Yeah. And you've done some round table stuff among the student body, right? So you've done some formal things with other college students. Just trying to listen to their perspectives and just trying to give them a space to be heard because I feel like a lot of times their voices are just like, not that they aren't heard but it's just they don't have the time to actively go out and say, this really is a tough situation for me. This is a really tough situation that I'm in. I know one of the things in a post I made on Frontport Forum, I was listening getting responses from medical students, getting responses from graduate students. So this isn't just an undergraduate issue. Medical students leaving UVM Medical School because they can't afford to live here, graduate students switching to different programs because they can't afford to live here, or it's just too much of a headache. The fact that you have to look like over seven months out to be able to even find housing for the upcoming year kind of boggles my mind. It is not like that in other cities, but it's also everyone is having this issue with the pandemic. I was just reading an article earlier today about UMass Amherst and how they are experiencing these kind of taxing things. They over-enrolled the amount of students they're able to house, and then that's leading to like constriction on the community around them, and then that's like displacing them from housing. What's really frustrating is if you don't come from some sort of like financial backing, Burlington isn't somewhere you can live anymore. It's slowly like morphing into a place that like you have to have serious money if you're going to try to live here affordably. Yeah, for sure. Either I'm from Rhode Island, and I just moved here in July, and I got really lucky finding my spot. It was really, I was stalking Craigslist, literally, and I'd be sitting in meetings for my previous job refreshing the page, and the second I knew thing would pop up if it wasn't a scam. It was some apartment that was, I remember one that talked about like great city views, and it showed a picture of this living room, this living room window with a skyline, and I said, there's not a single skyline in Vermont. Where's that picture taken? But once you get past the scams, to find something that's available, and then reasonable is almost impossible. And I had a friend who, I had spent some time up here a year ago and made a couple of friends I stayed in touch with, and one of them found out that I was playing Move Back. He was very excited, and on the floor above him, an apartment was coming available. And so he said, you know, hey, if you're interested, you know, I'll connect. So he connected with the landlord, really nice guy. And now I'm, again, I'm five hours away, right? And so I get the video tour and all that. He hadn't listed it yet. And I thought to myself, I'm all concerned about fitting my furniture in there. Like it's kind of small, you know? And my buddy was like, well, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of room, so it's, and I know that the place is well kept, because I'd been to my friend's place, you know? And, but the price that he was asking was a couple of hundred dollars a month more than what I'm paying where I am, where I have much more space. And I just thought to myself, oh my goodness. I don't think that people, I think that sometimes when we talk about affordable housing, people just think of homelessness. And they don't necessarily connect all the dots and recognize that the issue of affordable housing is an actual named issue. And that it really and truly does apply to all of us, you know? And I think that's like the case with like fronting, but also like home ownership. This is a perspective that I didn't even like think about until I was sitting in the forum with Kesha Ram that she was hosting where I spoke about my, spoke previously, but like how homeowners, like you can't do that in Burlington. It's insane. There was a woman who talked about how she had sold her house and made like I think 150% profit on the sale of her house. And then looking for a different home in Burlington, she couldn't afford to live there, because prices had changed that drastically. And that like looking for housing, it's like I've been looking for housing with my partner. And I was like, oh, I looked at this and I like sent it to him by checking it three hours later. It was already off the market. So it's a very, very volatile situation, both for renting and for housing. And affordable housing, like trying to transition people into home ownership and not just have it be renting. And I think the demographic breakdown of Burlington, it's like either 60 or 70% renting and then 30, 40% like home ownership. So it's a very rent driven market, which is very different than I would say a lot of other cities. What have you seen? Have you had any experience in your conversation with other college students or even just in your lived experience as a college student? What do you know about sort of the quality of the places that kids are living in? Are they living in dumps? Yes. I would say they definitely are. The ideal situation is that they're trying to live as close to campus as possible, which makes sense because that's where you're spending like 8, 9, 10 hours of your day on campus. Hopefully. You want to be close enough to your house that where you're able to come home, maybe eat lunch, maybe grab the things that you need to set yourself up for success. And so specifically like the areas in the like old North End pockets that are extremely close to campus are very, very densely packed with students. Knowing that students are trying to live in that environment, there isn't really a big incentive for landlords to maintain those properties because students will live there regardless because they have to. And I think that, you know, in the last year, in the last legislative session, we talked a lot about rental housing safety and quality of the housing stock. And, you know, the bill pertaining to that was passed but was ultimately vetoed. So I think that the conversation is going to continue because the issue continues. And, you know, it just points to another layer of the struggle that there's not space. The space we do have is expensive and the housing stock is so old. And, you know, I'm always thinking about how so if I lived in an apartment where it was costing me a fortune to heat it because every time I ran the heat I was heating the outside or, you know, to put an air conditioner in the window so I don't sweat to death in the summertime, you know, drives the electric bill up so high like the anxiety around those expenses, how that impacts academic life or just if the place is a dump or the leaks or the mold or whatever, all these things take away from a successful academic experience. Yeah, one of the things that I have been looking into is this concept of university-approved housing in which, like, in order to, like, rent to students, you have to make sure you're living in what the university considers like an acceptable, like, living condition. I think Nebraska and Illinois are two states that have this in place. It would be ideal because then it limits, like, where college students can rent within the community but at the same time, like, you have something like that already with the redstone lofts on campus and all that's done is just raise the prices. People are paying... I think it's, when I recently checked, it was 1,085 to have one bedroom in a four-bedroom unit on the redstone lofts and, to me, that's like an insane amount, but again, that's still cheaper than living in the dorm housing. So everything is relative to, like, that baseline price point. It's a very, very high rent. And those policies around, in those other states around the college having to have some responsibility in making sure the students are living in decent housing is that via some kind of state legislation or how is... are you familiar with... I'm not familiar with that. I've just kind of been, like, looking into what other college towns have done and how they have protected both the local people who are trying to live here and make it a city that's not 100%, like, dependent upon the university. And I understand that there's, like, a lot of animosity between, like, the people of Burlington and college students. And that, like, we indeed are part of the problem by raising all of the rents with, like, people from out-of-state whose parents pay for the rents driving up the prices, but at the same time, like, we also do need somewhere to live. Right. And so I think one of the main issues that would solve that is really just UVM stopping over-enrolling the amount of students that it has the capacity to house and that Burlington has the capacity to house. Well, yeah, the only way we're going to get out of this is as a community. Yeah. And really working together and putting aside any NIMBYism that's out there. Exactly. Get some demographics, or, you know. As we're here talking tonight, and we'll usually know, we have, hopefully, there's some folks gathered at Manhattan Pizza & Pub, having pizza and young people. And when our broadcast is done, we're going to talk a little bit, or they're going to talk there, a bit about, well, what are we going to do? What are we going to do about it, right? And so I hope that both our conversations today and, you know, kind of that event serve as the first steps towards really kind of formalizing a community of young people, people in their 20s, trying to get involved and who want to be involved. So there's a lot of opportunities there and a lot of opportunities to bring those ideas to the table at VAHC and then ultimately to the big table in Montpelier, where decisions get made. I know that, like, housing growth and the amount of housing being built over the course of the years has, like, really stagnated and that could just be a do of availability of space. But I know that there's also a lot of, like, laws in Burlington just looking at, like, renovating a specific property, like, trying to build any sort of new construction. There is, like, such a, like, snake-like bureaucratic network that people have to navigate in order to try to find these housing, like, projects to begin with. One of the things is, like, the Vermont Act 250, in which, like, enough people, like, saying that they don't want to, like, have any sort of construction project go on can prevent it from happening. And I think that affordable housing that, like, prevents it from ever even being, like, conceptualized because there's such a stigma on affordable housing, not even, like, if it was, like, college students, but just, like, people who are, like, needing a place to house their families and have no affiliation with the university. And I'm wondering if there's a way to, like, reword parts of that to prevent affordable housing from always being on the chopping block because you will always have enough people specifically in Vermont and everywhere that there's, like, a lot of people who are, like, this is a great idea, but just don't put it near me, which is the not in my backyard. Yep. Yeah, for sure. And I think there is ways, there are ways to do that, with these voices together at the table. And I think that would be a great opportunity, I think, for college students to come to the table, not even just at the state house, even at the local level, you know, and a big part of a VHC, you know, as an advocacy organization, you know, we're kind of involved and we're talking to people at every level. And so we need these college voices at the local level. And, you know, lawmakers and policymakers always say that the most useful thing that they hear is the testimony of people with lived experience. And, you know, it's always, it's very easy for some other group to come in and say, well, this is what this group needs, but it's very different for people to stand up and say, this is what I need, this is what my community needs, and this is what my community's experience has been. And this is the help that we need. And I think that's why I really 100% agree with that, which is why I feel like a lot of the tabling events that I've had is I'm just trying to listen to people's stories and listen to their experiences. I always think, like, stories over surveys is a better way to connect with people, to understand actually what's going on. If you have someone fill out a survey that's just like picking and pointing issues, if you listen to them and listen to the, like, emotional experience that they've been through or, like, the trauma that they've been through, it's a more meaningful way because you understand the full picture and not just a set of data points. Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, on a lot of issues, it's very easy for people to become numbers, and it's so important that we start turning numbers back into people because that's how change happens. Humanize the situation. For sure, that's how change happens. Well, Emily, I hope that this conversation is the beginning of a movement. A movement among Burlington's where we can together be a part of the change. So anyone out there who's watching, if you're a college age person, well, if you're anyone, really, but particularly if you're that college age bracket and you'd like to get involved, you can email me david at vtaffordablehousing.org or you can explore our website for more information about our different programs and things that we have going on. Emily, do you want to throw your email address out there in case anyone wants to reach out? It's just Emily Hancock at uvm.edu. If you need a space to rant about the housing situation, both on and off campus, I am here. I'm here to listen. I know a lot of people who have been living on campus have talked about very personal issues, like eating disorders that they've faced in the dining hall situation or the lack of food availability and not having control over their space, not feeling that they can get warm enough during the winter because they cannot afford to raise their heating bills. Situations like these, if you feel like you need to just let it out because it's a very stressful situation and not everyone has the resources to be heard, I'm here. Sounds good. Well, Emily, thank you very much for joining us and I'm sure we'll talk again soon. Yes.