Housing in Vermont: The Math Isn't Mathing

by Gemma Johnson

It’s hard to describe the quiet panic that settles in when you realize the place you call home might not be affordable for you—or anyone you know—in a few years. Not because you made a bad decision, but because the structure just… shifted. Quietly, and then all at once.

According to the 2025 Vermont Housing Needs Assessment, we’re short by somewhere between 24,000 and 36,000 homes. That’s just to stabilize things—to normalize vacancy rates, house people without shelter, and replace what’s been lost to flooding and time. That number doesn’t include people coming in. It’s just to catch our breath.

In the first half of 2024, the median sale price for a primary home in Vermont hit $340,000—a 5% jump in six months. And that’s statewide. In many towns, “starter home” now means “tear-down listed at $300K, cash buyers only.” HousingData.org tracks the slope, but if you’re living it, you already feel the incline under your feet.

We All Know Someone Who’s Leaving

Or they’re staying, but barely. A lot of us have seen friends take jobs they don’t want or stay in situations that aren’t good—just to hang on. Housing isn’t just about where you live. It determines who your kids go to school with, how long your commute is, how many nights a week you’re too tired to cook dinner. It's the invisible architecture of your life.

Online, people are blunt. “Expect to pay $350–500k for a livable house,” one Vermonter wrote in a Reddit thread this spring. “And $10k–$20k a year in property taxes.” That’s not alarmist.

The Second-Home Spiral

In places like Stowe, more than 25% of homes are second homes. They sit empty half the year. Meanwhile, the people working at the grocery store, plowing the roads, running childcare co-ops—most of them can’t afford the others. A piece from New England Landmark this spring described how small towns are losing staff, not because the jobs are gone, but because the workers can’t stay local. One restaurant closed for the season because it couldn’t find anyone to wash dishes who could also pay rent nearby.

There’s a kind of reverence in Vermont for “the village,” but villages hollow out fast when housing becomes a luxury investment.

Legislative Promises

This year’s big legislative push, House Bill 479, aimed to ease things. There were some decent pieces: funding for rental repair, zoning reforms, money for manufactured housing communities. But the larger proposal—the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program (CHIP)—hit a wall. Vermont Public reported a late-stage cap of $40 million that could choke the program’s reach. A solid-sounding idea deflated by compromise. Again.

Housing advocates warned that the cap means fewer homes, fewer towns helped, and another round of headlines with no follow-through.

This Isn’t Just a Market Problem

What we’re dealing with now isn’t about interest rates or temporary inflation spikes. It’s about how we define value. And whether we’re willing to admit that a community where only newcomers can buy and only outsiders can build is a community in name only.

Vermont can’t fix this with charm. It needs policy that reaches the people living paycheck to paycheck, renting rooms in drafty farmhouses, and working two jobs just to afford groceries. It needs homes people can afford and the infrastructure to make them livable. No more press release victories. Real homes. Real lives.

We’re not asking for anything extravagant.