Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you. Welcome back everyone to the House Committee on General Housing, and we've been looking at data that we received. Laura, for your benefit, and Nate and John, let me set the stage here. We have really two related but different goals here. One is, we're trying to understand better the data and the meaning of the data on who is renting, owning, where and how, the tax department just presented to us the landlord certificate data, and as I remember, we were thinking that the sort of creation and refinement of data in lieu of a statewide rental registry would be a kind of multi party effort. And so one of the reasons we invited you guys was to look at what you think data trends are, any information you have on that, and in that regard, have John Adams with us, who's the Director of Geographic Information at ADS. The second, and it's related, but only tenuously, is one of the things that keeps coming up is how did we set the housing targets? Not at this point, in this moment here with you guys, not how did we distribute them amongst the RPCs and then amongst the towns. We'll get to that. But where did the gross statewide numbers come from, and what thinking went into that? And we don't mind your getting into detail with us because where else if not this committee? So, take it away. If you guys want to testify together, I don't know, Nate, do you guys want to testify if Syria and we're together? How do you want to do it, Marc?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Well, Nate and I have been talking over the last few days getting ready for this, so we were thinking that I would kick it off a bit, then I'd pass it over to Nate. Okay. But we are very friendly, and Nate, I have no problem if you and or I can't see if John's in the room wanna interrupt me. You're welcome to, but we're all very good friends. So Okay. We can be free flowing here.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But, also, the fact of the matter is that Nate is tall enough that if he sat in that chair, he would probably block me. I would never wanna do that. Yeah. Okay. Take it away, Mara. Start.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So I'm Mara Collins. I'm the executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, and I'm most prepared to speak to the second point you were asking about, chair Mihaly, about where and how did we set the targets. I wanna give a little origin story and then pass it over to deputy commissioner Formulary. As for who is renting and where and how we know that information, I can I can spitball that a bit, but that is complicated, and you're not wrong to be grappling with that question because it is complicated? And we don't have a rental registry, and therefore, we don't have great information that at the level of detail the legislature seems to always want. But if I could start at the beginning, two years ago, VHFA turned 50 years old. And in doing so, I was looking at our very first annual report from 1974, and I found that we had three employees. We had an executive director, we had a finance director, and we had a research analyst. That shocked me. And I can say that because I was hired as VHFA's research analyst in 2002, and that's how I got my start at VHFA. But I was shocked to find out that when we only had three employees, one of them was a researcher. I think that that goes to show just how important the idea of housing data and understanding the market is so critical to an agency like VHFA because we rely on loans. We are not a grant making organization that can allocate money and not worry about it being paid back, but all the investments we make have to be paid back in order for the whole system to work that I've explained to you about how VHFA works. And so we have long been seen informally as the data nerds among the state agencies. Each of us have specialties. It does not mean that the other agencies don't have a strong grasp of data. It just means that when it comes to knowing all about the census and things like that, VHFA has a long history of doing that. I was hired in 2002, and like every mother, nine months later, gave birth to my first baby, which I call housingdata.org. And it was a collaborative effort between the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont, and VHFA, and think that was it, and others participated in the creation of this website. And that's why we have such a great moniker of housingdata.org, and there's no weird acronyms or Vermont's in there because we are so early to see the value of having good, reliable housing market information. So if I were to show you housingdata.org, I would pull up a website that first off would have the directory of all the affordable rental housing in the state. And so when I come to you and I tell you how many public housing apartments there are or how many tax credit apartments or what the rents are in that subsidized housing, I'm relying on the 15,000 apartments that are listed in the DORA, the directory of affordable rental housing. Additionally, there's a lot of resources and tool kits for communities that are setting up housing committees, and we walk through how to do a local housing needs assessment and give people all sorts of helpful information to make sure that their community is housing ready. But the the community profiles is what I wanna focus on today, which is you could pull up every town you represent, the villages within that town, county levels, or statewide, and you could get literally thousands of pieces of housing market information. There's information on, the population and households, the ages and demographic, who's living there. We report on everything we know about their income, and special needs that they may have as related to their housing. We know about the homeownership homes and how many homes are being sold each year and if they're manufactured or not. And we know about rental housing and where jobs are compared to housing. We know about short term rentals, way too much information than for me to walk through fully here. And so for what would it be? Twenty three, four years now, we've had this website, and that has plugged along and has become really the source for a lot of the media, policymakers, and and affordable housing agencies that look to information. It is not VHFA's data. I'm giving VHFA way too much credit here. We are just the convener and the the repository and and reporters of the data. It is probably I'm making this number up, but 65, 70 census data that we're regurgitating in useful charts and pretty figures for every town. It's a lot of department of taxes data. It's some advocacy data that we get from special national special needs groups, and it has a little bit of MLS data from the realtors. It has some homeless data we get from the continuum of care. It's a it's a pulling together of information. And but it has to be available at the local level to be included in our data. It has to be regularly updated. If you do a one time study in some community, we may link to it somewhere, but we're not gonna put it on this dashboard. And this is all very high quality information. And yet, in a minute or two, I'm gonna contradict myself because I'm gonna tell you about how the data actually has quite a lag and can be somewhat problematic. But first, let me sell you on the fact that it's great data. Separate from the housing data website, HUD, the federal government, HUD, requires that the state of Vermont and every other state in the country do a housing needs assessment every five years in order to get access to certain public funds. And so the state is the Department of Housing Community Development is the state agency that receives that funding from HUD, and so it's DHCD's job to do a housing needs assessment every five years. Sometimes that confuses people because they think VHFA did the housing needs assessment, and they'd be right. The state contracted with VHFA to do this. So every five years,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: they have d h c d contracted with VHFA. Okay.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Correct. So for the last four housing needs assessments, VHFA has been selected as the contractor three times. So we've done it a bunch of times in the last fifteen years, but that's not always we are not responsible for the housing needs assessment. That's a DHCD responsibility that we've worked with them because we have all this deep information about market data. They've selected us as that contractor. So in 2020, VHFA did something with the housing needs assessment in partnership with DHCD in a new way. And we it was the first time we did an estimate of the needs of housing for the coming five years. Now this was published in February 2020. So we wrote it in 2019. So I bet you most of that data capped out about 2018 as what data we are pulling. So it was very much pre pandemic data. And we purchased some data around what those household projection numbers were going to be. And then we applied what we know about the housing markets in the state, and came out with some of those estimates. But five years later, when it was time to do the state's housing needs assessment, HNA, again, we instead of hiring, buying the household growth data, which was the basis of what's going to happen in the future, we did our own household growth estimates. And I'm very proud of our team that we've been tracking how our estimates compared to reality as every year the census comes out with new household, information. And we can see that our estimates have proven to be more accurate than the data we purchased from the vendor years ago. And so kudos to VHFA that we are getting it right. I also wanna be very clear that there's nothing special about working at VHFA that gives you the ability to see into the future. We are not clairvoyant. We cannot predict what's gonna happen. We did not see the pandemic coming even when it was on top of us. So there are many ways that the housing market is going to change and develop in ways that we cannot predict nor any housing needs assessment is ever going to cover. But in 2023, many of you remember the HOME Act, and this is where the conversation changed a bit. We went from talking about the basic housing needs of the state to now the legislature started calling for targets. And targets are different than needs. And the targets were intended to meet the short term needs for the additional homes that we needed in the states, and it it accounted for how we have so many vacation homes. We have a large proportion of our homes are actually seasonal and vacation homes. We wanted in these targets. We need to create some economic vibrancy, meaning some more healthy closer to healthy, vacancy rate. And we wanted to actually counter some of the demographic realities and shifts that we saw happening that may otherwise leave Vermont's aging population with, some real contractions as we see the age cohorts peak of elders being such a large part of our population, but then shrink when you look farther out. And the home active 2023, when we start talking about housing targets, there well, I'm sorry. Can I back up? In the HOME Act, there was this vision, I believe. And I remember the conversations at the time. There was a hope that there was gonna be a cascading effect that these targets would be set for the state, but then also be set for each region. And then the regional planning commissions, the RPCs, would break those down by municipality. And the vision was that municipalities would then plan for how they were going to meet those targets. But correspondingly, when you're working with RPCs, I can tell you a little bit about what that's like, And these folks are long term thinkers. They are planners at heart. And so as we were working on these targets, and we were looking five years in the future to set these estimates of where were we gonna be by the 2029, The RPCs want to hire VHFA to calculate the targets all the way out to 2050. So another twenty they wanted to look out twenty five years. They wanted to get that longer range picture of the direction of the state and the regions. And so there's a lot of it's understandable why people get confused between needs that are in the housing needs assessment, targets that have some aspirational, methodology to them about where we'd like to be with a healthier vacancy rate and, more opportunities for housing. And also, that there are estimates of where we were gonna be in 2030 versus where we're gonna be in 2050. And so the targets that are were put on DHCb's dashboard, and I would never wanna steal Nate's thunder, and so I'm not gonna speak a lot about the dashboard because I know that they're here to talk about that. But what I hope you get from this history lesson is that there's lots of people who are working together on housing data, and we all have distinct roles. VHFA has the housing data website. The state is responsible for the HNA, the needs assessment, and the targets that has been put in the legislation as their responsibility. The RPCs are implementing this regionally, and none of these numbers matter at all unless the municipalities are, enacting this and turning planning to be housing ready, but also reporting on the data that they see locally, like permit data and what they see happening. And so recognizing that there's many cooks in this kitchen, there is a housing data advisory group that meets regularly to work through these issues, discuss methodology. We hold each other accountable. We ask questions. We discuss trends and the related impacts of if you I don't know if you can tell that that's a mobile hanging behind me in my office. And if I were to pull on one of those pictures of a house on one end of the mobile, the other part would all go cattywampus. And so we talk about what will happen when this item happens, with data, what will the outcome be elsewhere?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: And then Marc, can I say too that then the purpose too is then for us in this committee to then use that accurate data to inform how we policy make instead of anecdotes? That was the purpose.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What is who's on the housing data advisory group?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'm gonna turn to my friends in the room to answer that one because I don't sit on it, but my colleague who's sitting off camera here does.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So let's

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: see if likes them all.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What institutions are represented? I have it. It's DHCD. This is I have

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: a slide. Oh. We'll go right to it. DHCD Vermont Center for Geographic Information Vermont Department of Taxes VAPTA which is the RPC's statewide group the Vermont Enhanced nine eleven Board, we'll get to why they're on there and VHFA currently sit on that. And how often does it meet? Every other month for ninety days to two hours. And is it public?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It is not a public body. It's just

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Does it bring us together? Okay.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Yeah.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you. Okay.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: So

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: any questions more before we hear from Nate and John? Or if

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I could give, I want to reinforce what representative Krasnow said about, yes, please use good accurate data. This was the benefit of the housing data website was we spent a lot less time arguing over. Well, the realtor said that this is the median home price. Well, the tax department says this. Well, we're a solder house for that in that community. And, you know, it it really has helped to, let's say, professionalize and and get agreement on this data. The advisory council that needs talking about that he'll speak to more has also amplified and and furthered this work. But also remember that if we rely on good data, good data is gonna have a lag. VHFA's data on housing data website usually appears to look about two years old, and that's it's not. It's the most accurate recent information that we have from the census. But the census when when the census comes out with a survey, it's always gonna be a year or two behind. Also, in smaller areas like Vermont, second smallest state in the union, it's harder to ensure that you have reliable data. So even just state level data is pretty complicated to report on. And if you move below that, you get into margins of error and all sorts of things that can show some pretty big swings. Those are too often dismissed in our in our search for certainty around what's happening. We just ignore that. And but and that's what we've seen. I just wanna talk about one thing a lot of times, and recently I've seen this discussed several times. There is a real misunderstanding about the difference between populations and households. And so there was recently in media article about how, Vermont's population had shrunk by 200 some odd people. And interesting to know that the Census Bureau actually has two main surveys that estimate population in the years between a decennial census. One of them showed an increase of over a thousand people. One of them showed a decrease of 200 some odd people. And, neither is based on a full count. Both estimates should be used with caution. But the last point I wanna leave you with is this one data point because I've talked about data, but I haven't left you with any data. So the last one I wanna do is leave you with a piece of data. Let me give you one example of why household size is so important. I've talked to you about shrinking household size, and now households are what matters. Our household size shrunk over the last ten years from 2015 to 2025. So let's imagine a world which did not happen, but let's just imagine that Vermont's population held steady from 2015 to 2025 and that there was no growth in the population. Okay? Now it did grow, but let's pretend like it didn't. This state would have needed to add 22,000 homes to the state's, inventory just to account for the fact that there were fewer people living in each house even if the population never grew. So there are people who say, wait. The state's not growing robustly. We're kinda stagnant. We're either barely growing or we're shrinking a little or something like that. That means 2,000 of the homes we need every year is just to account for a shrinking household size. And I know how nerdy that is and that that's doesn't seem to make it into the headlines that people talk about, but that is a driving force of why we keep saying we need to add more homes. It's because of the choices we are making in how we live and how we use our homes. So I can appreciate people who are having this internal disconnect between hearing that we're shrinking or that we're we're stagnant, but need more homes. And it is often because of our very low household size.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Elizabeth? Thanks, Marc. I I just wanna respond first, just respond to that and say that was what we largely talked about when we when we were looking at the basic needs budget, or that was two years ago, because it's not just in Vermont, but it's everywhere, the kind of change in what happens inside of a household. That seems to have really changed a lot even all across this great nation. But I wondered my question is of DHCD, geo info taxes, VAPTA nine eleven board and BHFA, Are you able to layer on other data? And do you set out ground rules on what data you're going to agree to use amongst yourselves? And do you have access to the other like, the biannual health care data, do you add that in there? Or do you how do you amongst yourselves talk about data?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Well, why don't I pass it over? Because I know Nate was planning on talking about this a bit. So is this a good time, Nate, for you to set in? But the quick answer is, yes. We do. We are often sharing data, agreeing on data, and it's very collaborative. It's been a great this council has been wonderful. And for VHFA, our housing data that we put on our website is vetted. And that's why I was saying it's mostly census department taxes. And we don't get into some of those other sources that Nate was speaking about that we don't put in nine one one data on housing data and the like. So let me let Nate take over if that works. I'll stay here for questions though and would be happy to interrupt him during his testimony if I want, if I'm allowed.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Nate, come on out there.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Nate Formalari, Deputy Commissioner at DHCD for the record. To kind of directly answer your question off the bat, the group that's come together is doing is trying to get to a data standard that is agreeable across all the different groups. So we're all speaking the same language. And I'll let John correct me here, but I would also say we're trying to get the basics down first before we start trying to layer all sorts of things on top. So I think as time goes on, there could be some opportunity for layering, but we're just trying to figure out where a house is being built and when it was built or how many units are in a house and how we can track that in more real time than a year or two lag.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Then I want to know how many times you've met. How many meetings have you all had together? Is this brand new?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I'd say a year, probably.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: In the first few meetings, we're defining what do we want this how do we want to come together? And problems are we trying to solve?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's been two years.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Two years, and you mean how often? Again, I forgot. Every

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: month. Every other

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Every other month. Okay. Take it away, Nate.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Okay. So I also don't have a ton on renter versus owner prepared for this. But what I can talk about is some of the vision that you folks had and that Laura laid out in her remarks and some of the stuff that's starting to become reality as we've worked on this. So I'm just going to share some slides. You can see that? Yeah. And I'm going to breeze through some of this because Maura did do a nice job covering a lot of this. Sorry, one second. Traditionally, when we've been looking at housing development in the state, we've used housingdata.org. And it's US Census Bureau data on permits, building permits that are issued. So this is 1960 to 1988, where the state peaked at over 4,800 permits. Then goodness, advanced slide. Come on, man.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: And then

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: this is 1988 to 2025 where it gets a little more volatile. But in recent years, we have seen that number climbing again. So we're up to 20.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: As I was born.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: It's hard for me to see. It looks like the lowest is, I can't

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: see It's right after the financial crisis of two thousand That's 2012? 08/09/2010.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah. And then it's going slowly

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yep, and then I think, we'll talk about this more,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: but the influx of federal dollars has certainly helped in recent years. So what's the last year, 2004? 2024 is the last year that we have. And that's how many? 2600, okay.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Did you

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: have one use? So,

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: as you folks laid out that we needed to develop targets, This data has issues in terms of it's updated annually. It's actually, John could speak a little bit more about this, but it's actually based on municipal reporting and then they have their own methodology to come up with this number. So that's not like literal. Also, building permits don't always mean that that gets built. I'm struggling today. So this was your enabling language that said, PHCD, along with the RPCs, develop these targets that Maura talked about. And then, in ACT 181, you ask that we develop a way to track our progress towards the targets. These are the targets that were established. I think you've probably seen this before. Each 25 to thirty and twenty five to 2,050 each have a lower and an upper number. There is a 14 page report on how we developed this with methodology, and I can get that to the committee. I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but it was a robust methodology for this. And again, more aspirational, not need, but how are we going to grow? And these upper numbers would provide better economic outcomes, more kids in school, more opportunities, companies that wanna move here and grow. But the lower numbers are more status quo to slightly growing our economic trajectory.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: And I think that's important what you're saying, because one time when I was going around the state talking about this, they were like, that's what you said we need to do. And I said, no, this is aspirational. It's not what you know? And there people some people were concerned in certain municipalities that they weren't going to be able to meet those immediately.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Was this let's not go way into the weeds, but a little bit into the top of

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: the weeds, was did you start with a statewide need and then disaggregate or the reverse? So reverse. So these are actually RPC regions. Well, no, statewide number first, and then each region got assigned a certain number. I think most of the regions were pretty equally. Obviously, Chittenden County had to take a little bit more of the burden just because of the number of houses they had. So the big

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: sort of issue was '27, '41, seventy nine and one hundred seventy two. That was your first round of work.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It was developed all as one. Again, we contracted with VHFA to help us. Have Moore's Not Lying. They have really great analysts there. And this is how it was delivered in this format.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Yes. How was it decided that I just still really fail to understand how it was decided that by 2050, there need to be between 79,172 brand new homes and not new homes. How was it decided that they needed to be brand new buildings when we already know we do know that one of the obstacles is available, buildable land? So how you square our oversized inventory of underused housing and building between 79,172 brand new units when our biggest obstacle is actually a lack of buildable?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So these numbers thank you

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: for that

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: question. These numbers envision new units, not necessarily brand new. So if an offline building is coming online and generating five units, that would be envisioned

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: in this. Okay. Thank you. Yes. But wait. What do you mean? If a building let's say a building. Let's say I live

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: You might

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: What? An old school perhaps.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Or You

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: say that? It does not include my house. I live in a house, let's say, alone now, that's not true, and it's got six bedrooms. I kick the bucket and the house comes on the market as a six bedroom house. That's not in here.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: No, but if it was turned into three separate a triplex Yeah.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Would account for ADUs. For what? ADUs. Accessory dwelling units. And you'll see how we're measuring a new unit. If it has its own 911 address, that's going to show up on the dashboard that is in the next few slides.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay. Well, let's go on.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Go ahead. So just to clarify, like a single family home that is subdivided is addition into two is adding one home. One unit. One, now it's two. So you pick the one, you add the second was That's

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: the new unit.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: That's a new So it's not necessarily a brand new construction from nothing. It can be Right. Okay.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And I would say these targets aren't necessarily envisioning the type of unit. It's just a unit that's coming online. Right.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: It doesn't say a three bedroom or a four person household.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So let me go real quick now. Also in the legislation of Act 181, it asked the regional planning commissions to break it down to the municipal number. So they were handed the regional number. Now go to every town and figure out what every town's target is

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: going to be.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: RPCs are doing that through the future land use area maps and regional plan development with the land use review board. So this map is just showing that six RPCs have submitted draft maps. These are the counties that have colors. Those are the different land use categories. As part of that, they're also putting municipal level targets in. So we don't have all the municipal level targets, but some are starting to arrive. This is slated to be done at the end of this year.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Oh, I guess I wanna go back, Nate. Yeah. Perhaps you're no to that one. Yeah. A number of narratives kind of swimming around this building are, we really don't need new houses. What we need is to deal with our second home problem. We don't need new houses, because what we really need to do is deal with our abandoned homes. What we will when we can when my generation just finally gets out of the way and into the ground, we'll get all these housing units that will become available, and that will take care of the problem. But I am assuming, and I'd like you to provide more details, that the seventy nine thousand to 01/2000 takes all of that into account.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It does. So there is a 15% margin in the target specifically for second homes, because that's the current part of the housing stock. So these targets assume that it will remain at that percent. As I said before, I think when we're talking about abandoned buildings or if we're rehabbing old mill buildings or schools, all those units are units. So they would count towards these targets. So these are not saying you have to build 172,000 single family homes on a cul de sac. It's just giving an aspirational goal across any type of development that we're doing.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: All right, go ahead.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: All right.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: RPCs, municipal targets. So Chittenden County is one of the I'm just showing this for I know it's hard to see, and it is in your packets. But I just wanted to show this is how they're doing it. So each community and they're doing it generally the same. Each community gets aligned. How many houses do you have now? And then your targets with ranges. Again, the ranges are helpful, I think.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Do

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: you consider I mean, thing that was just mentioned, I'm thinking about the issues circulating, floating around this building. Some people are saying, well, it can't happen because we don't have land. Others have said, well, these numbers are useless because obviously every community has enough land, so what's to talk about? Do you are there land constraints, zoning constraints, land use constraints that are built into these numbers by the local jurisdictions,

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: or how does that work?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That is not necessarily envisioned in the housing target numbers. What I would say is, it is establishing some sort of baseline, some sort of number that we can now

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Does that ring?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And again, I'm going to get to the way we're looking at this so that we can see where is that, where are the houses being built as we work towards these targets and what policy changes could be helpful to address the things you're talking about.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: So

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: it's not necessarily envisioning what the RPC and LERB maps are going to look like or anything like that. It's establishing a target that we are now required to report on that can help inform your decisions in the years ahead.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: That was the whole purpose.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That's how I would explain.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: That's exactly. And this is mine and, well, I guess the three of ours, and they present, Charlie Baker presented this at our breakfast, but if folks are interested to reach out to their regional to get theirs, this is really good data to have as a legislator, I think.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: It's partly done, but not entirely done, right? It's stable halfway.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Oh, maybe yours isn't done. Yours is not done yet. Oh, mine's done. And it's here.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So, tasked us with, all right, you made these targets. Now show us how we're progressing towards them. No such tool existed. DHTV was at a bit of a loss. So I called my friend, John Adams, at the Vermont Center for Geographic Information and said, here's what's going on. What can we look at? And what can we do? So I'd love for John to talk a little bit about the back end of this dashboard and the data that we're thinking.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Who came up with asking him? You? It's smart. He's the man. But how did you think to pick him up?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Well, needed to know mapping.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Yeah.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: They do maps. BCGI has a lot

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: of data points. So, it was a conversation that kicked off.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: While we're waiting for I remember I'm just gonna tell an anecdote I'm not too old but I remember when my family had to leave our road so that we could have 09:11 find us back then. Remember those days?

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: New one renamed a bunch people. Yeah, you're too young. Marc, you known before 09:11?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Oh, I noticed, and I wasn't here.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Hi folks, I'm John Adams, Director of the Center for Geographic Information, and I can talk to you a little bit about what we decided to use as data sources driving this dashboard. It wasn't as simple as we thought. 911 address points are not created for the purpose of tracking address unit at new construction, and there are certainly some limitations there. But after evaluating all possible sources, given that we wanted things that were fairly granular, we decided to use them as the foundation or the backbone for this. We have a process that automates an extract from their database on a weekly basis that then update our housing development dashboard. There are some challenging properties measure. And I think some of the questions or discussion earlier was getting at that for places that may have already had an existing E911 address, but there was a change in use, for example. So we have a process that looks at changes to the extent that E-nine 11 captures those, which they don't always. Accessory departments are another challenging one. They don't always get a new E-nine 11 address. So using the Portable Housing Rental Directory that DHFA maintains, those happen to be a good number. Their development projects oftentimes are redevelopments and can be the tricky ones to capture from an E911 perspective. And then on top of that, we use the VHIP hazard improvement program, accessory department data to augment the E-nine 11 database, as well as Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission for number of years had been maintaining their own. So we leveraged the work that they had already done and combined it with E911. They've been doing some QAQC on what we've been reporting out. There's also in the tool, there's a way for municipalities, for anybody to provide feedback if they notice something is either missing or incorrect. So a few municipalities have given us some great updated

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: numbers,

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: and then as well as a few interested members of the public have submitted some edits with pre verified, updates to that data pipeline. It's still far from perfect, but E911 has just this past week, released some updated changes to their schema so that the pieces of information that they track, including more emphasis on accurately capture the number of units as well as the year built. Year built is of that, and I think one of the challenges or forthcoming with the data we currently have, completions can maybe show up a little bit earlier than their actual completion date. You can get it assigned an Eheim Lavon address before you actually move in for units completed. So we're hoping to use CAMA data. CAMA stands for Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal, so municipal assessing databases. Our hope is over the summer to collect every municipality's assessing data, most of which has year built data that we hope will be more accurate or confirm what we have and feel more confident about what we're reporting on. We also have a project with the University of Vermont spatial analysis lab, specialists remote sensing. So they're using satellite imagery that's captured and they create a monthly composite of this. What we'll be doing are working on change detection to see if there's new construction that we might not be capturing, and Ideally, probably on a quarterly range. And that all gets reported back to E911 to help improve the quality of their data and anything that they may be missing. Now, maybe I'll stop here and see questions.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I think everybody's absorbing We're all thinking. No. This effort is designed to tell us, well, how many units are being built? What's being built on the ground? How does this compare in your experience thus far, how does it compare to building permit data?

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I have a slide for that.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Woah. Well, do you wanna show it to

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: us? He's on it.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Oh my goodness.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Is it in your pocket?

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: You stole my closer.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: That's okay.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Found it's generally within about 400 which

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: felt decent.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: That's good. What an innovative idea.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Yeah, the census building formation is interesting, challenging at a granular level. They rely on municipal reporting of building permits. In Vermont, 20% of municipalities don't require any permit at all. The response rate of this survey is very, very low, but there's very smart people at the Census Bureau who can do some They come up with estimates based on a lot of different factors. So at a statewide level, feel like they can oftentimes get pretty close, but it wasn't enough for us to work on or feel comfortable using.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Now, why I'm interested, I had heard the number of units being built in the last year or two since act January, but I'm looking at 2025. 2024 was a bigger year, but not 2025. What do you think? What's going on?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. It's a great question. I think one one thing that that we're thinking about is between fiscal year twenty one and fiscal year twenty six, dollars 700,000,000 of state and federal funds were put into the system. So perhaps, you know, is now we're getting over the hump of that as we look at 2025. Also, John and his team continue to refine this data for accuracy. So I think you saw in that disclaimer with the building permits, like we're not considering this like final absolute, we're just trying to work towards the goal of being able to track our progress in more real time than ever before.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: You'll notice these bars here, the 2024, the yellow one represents multifamily development. So there were a number of larger multifamily development projects in 2024 that account for sizable percentage of that change.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And just to the point, I mean, '26 is already showing up. So that's, I mean, that feels pretty good that we're able to kind of see that even if we're still double checking and making sure everything's accurate.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Yes. How do you get almost 10% other besides single or multi?

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: This you know, remember

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: what That's I was a big percent of other.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Site types. And there are a number that go, some are classified as family, other as multifamily, and then they actually have a category that's other. This can oftentimes include accessory apartments, pick up a sizable percentage of that, seasonal residences, it can include yurts. And you can select or filter for those and actually zoom in on the map if you want to see specifically what qualifies as other. Sometimes it's differences in how municipalities are entering the data. So an accessory apartment may be classified as a multifamily home in one town by any nine eleven coordinator, and it may be classified as Does either other or accessory

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: that bother you?

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Does what bother me?

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: That an ADU would be classified differently by each town?

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Oh, have no I mean, in a perfect world, we'd love perfect data, but the world we live in has no such thing. And the reality is, it's the purpose of why this data is collecting is for E911 purposes. So that's their focus, and we don't want to take people away from that, getting responders where they need to be, and oftentimes it doesn't matter. They're looking for an address. They don't care if it's classified as other.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Oh, okay, okay, okay. Thank you. It just clicked that it could be a campaign. It could be Yeah, I got you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Other questions of these Sorry. If I could. What is

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So this is the statewide view. I just wanted to it's hard to pull the dashboard up and do it live. It'll crash, and then there would be a

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: bad testimony.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So I took some screenshots. You can see we have uploaded the targets for 2030 at this point. And given the range from the lower to the upper, this number here is based on and John back me up here, but the average of homes built between 2021 and 2025 puts us on a pace to build 11,500 homes when the lower target is 27.9. So that's what that's showing. This is the breakout of the type of unit. And then on the map, can zoom in, you can go all the way down to a dot. So one thing I wanted to do here was just because the other thing I hear a lot

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: when I'm out in the

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: world is like, how dare you put these targets out? They're so high. They're crazy. They're scary. What are you guys thinking? And I think it's been interesting to see them boil down a little bit. So now that the RPCs are putting in their regional plans, this is the Mount Escutney Regional Planning Commission's area with their specific target and annual need and what they're on pace to build. So again, they're just smaller numbers. And then if you go down to Representative Carlton, we're in an area of interest for you, aren't we? Yep. And then if you go down to

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Reading, right? In Springfield.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Oh, Springfield. So a bigger community in that area. The numbers keep coming down and become more reasonable. And the hope is that communities will see this and say, okay, maybe we can tackle this. And maybe it becomes less scary. So you can toggle up on the right there by region and town. And then I went one more lower to Reading because they're almost after their annual bill target. They don't have a huge target number, but they're building on a pace that might get them there. So I think it's interesting as we start to load up these municipal numbers to be able to kind of stream around and see what different communities are facing. And these numbers are set at the RPC when they are meeting with the towns

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: about their future land use.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That's where these numbers are coming.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I think I know the answer to this, but how many of these can we distinguish occupied residences and not your route occupied? Is there any way to weed that data out here? I'm just looking at someone's eyes. Knowing where they are, I wonder.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: You know all the roads around

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: there. I

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: don't know if you have insight on that other than that other category.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: Short answer is no. There's no way to do that here.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Other questions from these gentlemen?

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I just want to say to you, this is really great work, and I really appreciate all of this, all that you've done. I look forward of digging in. And the Center for Geographic Information website is by far up to me because I'm a data nerd. I loved looking at that area of our state website, really. It's pretty remarkable. It's pretty neat to dive in there for a few hours and look at what everything looks like. That's why I can see where my house is on this map. It's on the line between South Reading and Brownsville at the high spot. That's it.

[John Adams (Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information)]: We have a great team pulling a lot of this together. Maura was talking about her annual report, her first one in 1975 at BHFA, and I was looking at ours from 1992, and we had 100 and, say, nine users that had filled out mail order cards, we had sent them what's called the state database on 12 floppy disks. And now we have well over 300,000 Angular users accessing things through web maps, much like we do a movie on Netflix, just streaming our data. A lot has changed. That's pretty great, even since I've

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: been in the State House, because I didn't know about it before I was shown the state website as a legislator. But even since I've been here, it's really

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Well, I'm Mara and Nate, and it's John. A thousand thank yous, it has actually been really interesting.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Thanks for

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: having I've got just one more very quick question for Mara.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Are you there?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yep. Yep. I'm here. Sorry. I'm hiding behind if you wanna stop sharing your screen, you can see me, but I'm here.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Why do you think it is harder to get data in a sparse area?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Oh, because, the only, let me put it this way. The best data is when you have, you can actually ask everyone exactly all their details. And so a universal count is always gonna be your best data after being like, if I were to, do a count of all the members of this committee, I could count you, and I could report on that, and I wouldn't have to do a sample. But the bigger, the community is, you have to start relying on samples. And so we know that the decennial census is the only time we actually count all the people in, The US and in the state and in communities. And in between those ten years, we are have an insatiable need for data, and we're not willing to wait another ten years for data. So we ask the census to do these surveys in between and tell us about population and renting and owning and income levels and demographics of age and race and all that. So when you rely on a sample that only has 650,000 people in the universe at the first place, that sample is gonna be smaller, and there's gonna be larger margins of error. And so when you all start asking me data about your communities that only have 325 people or even 3,000 people and it's a sample of them, it's more likely I'm gonna miss the person with orange hair, and I'm gonna miss the person, you know, with three toes instead of five because they weren't in my sample. And so the data starts getting more problematic. And so there's also fewer data sources for a state like Vermont. If you ever look at reports that talk about the 50 biggest metro areas in The US, you know, Burlington area is not listed. So we have fewer data available, but there's going to be larger ranges when you get this is statistics one zero one. You know, you get bigger error levels when you get into counting only a few people.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: You know, and I also I I also sort of I do wonder whether There could be a way to centralize our data collection in this state so that we can look at the layers of who people are and what their habits are and what their health status is and what they need and all that stuff.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: This was a topic many years ago when this administration came into office. There was a lot of talk about the Census Bureau being used as a political chip that could either tell us about the demographics of people or not tell us about the demographics of people. And so at that point, I think there was a lot of appreciation for the value of the Census Bureau and the work that they do, and for the state to have more information about people, it would have to largely replicate the Census Bureau. And my opinion is that there's a lot of value to our federal government, and this is but one of them. And so while we can get information from the Department of Tax I'm sorry, Department of Health and other state agencies. It really is only the Census Bureau that truly captures data about all of us. Otherwise, it's subsets of people who encounter certain systems such as the health care system, but there's a lot of people who don't get counted there either.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: You know, Mora, could you just stay a little bit, I'll tell you why. I would like to move on now back to three twenty eight and the sections four, five, seven, seven and twelve, which we discussed, and just have any concluding thoughts and questions, and more of what this is is Senate Economic Development discuss the house to consider including in s three twenty eight a few extra sections which were not included. We don't have three twenty eight anymore. It's in ways and means, but that doesn't mean it can't be done there. And two of them have to do with you guys, as you probably know. They essentially codify the rental housing revolving loan. I think we found it to be nonconformular seal and pretty straightforward. Is there anything you wanna say about that?

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I would say that this would be very important to VHFA, and I would love to have it in as many vehicles as possible. And it was non when I presented this at senate housing committee, and it is changing the slightly tweaking the definition of who's eligible for the rental revolving loan fund to match the intention of the legislation. You all wanted us to be able to use those valuable 4% tax credits more. I've talked about how they're unlimited, and they they're not as valuable, but, we we don't use them as much as we could. And this change in who's eligible for the rental revolving loan fund means that we can pair the RLF money with the 4% tax credits better, and that's why we're asking for it.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Are there any comments or questions on these on these section four, section five? Seven a and b, we've heard about in section 12.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah. And I don't think I I don't have this in front of me, but I believe the other section you said we're related to, it is the down payment assistance, and it's the extension for five years. Is that correct?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: That's not in here.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: That's not in here. Okay.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I was just going to ask out of curiosity, threshold was of like 65% or whatnot and 80% for AMI, were those set for any particular reason? Was it likelihood of ability to pay back? Was it something that you thought the banks would look better on this if it was not somebody who's living so, so precariously? And do you think that we're still going be able to make everything work if we now open up that

[Unidentified committee member]: population? Is it exposing the funds? I want to

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: help people who are in desperate need as much as anybody else does. So I'm just trying to understand the history of why it was ever Yep.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Are great guesses, but the origin was actually that this was designed to be a middle income program. And it was designed to differentiate itself from the traditional affordable housing sources that you all typically consider that flow through the Vermont Housing Conservation Board. And so it set a floor slightly above the typical ceiling that VHCb uses. Now I wanna be clear, VHCb can go higher, but that typically, they max out at tax credit rents usually. And so I was trying to show that this was serving a different part of the market. And what we are trying to do with this change is to support more mixed income communities where we're not so clear about you're eligible up to here and then this one serves up here, but allow a little more blending in the middle. And that's why eliminating that floor helps us with that goal.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Any other questions of more before we let her go? She's been with us quite a while and I'd like to wrap up by floors.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I could I just ask, because I don't have the bill in front of me, I thought you said that VHFA was in two of the sections. I'm just curious what the other part was.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: No. That's they're both the same thing, section. They're both having to do with one is just expressing an intent. Oh, And the

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: second puts all the language in it.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'm where you are right now. Yes. Thank you.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Okay. Hey, Jay.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Maura Collins (Executive Director, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Sorry I couldn't be there in person today, but thank you for

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Very helpful, Morris. Thanks so much.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Have a good afternoon.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Any further thoughts or comments that you'd like me to pass on on these four sections? Codifying the rental housing revolving loan fund, the technical corrections to section seven A and B that make sure that this financing device of Special assessment. Special assessments based backed by bonds that are revenue bonds are not eaten up or otherwise messed up, should a TIF or a etcetera district be used, and then the gardens.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: And also, it looks like an annual report.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Right. They sweep it into the annual report, yeah.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Is this new language on page 20, line 11, Section 10, required provisions and development provisions. There's a highlighted line there. What's that? That's part of a section that's not in our bill. Are we gonna talk about it or go before we Well,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: it's not in our bill.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: We're not voting this out anyway. It's not like

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah. They fooled around with seven seventy five, and the real there are two possibilities. One is seven seventy five doesn't move out of the senate, in which case three twenty eight is the deal, and that's what's being contemplated here. The other is they pass seven seventy five with a bunch of changes and it comes to us and we either concur or we replace that. And I just don't know yet. I have no idea. I cannot predict the future of a day, much less the next two weeks. Any other final thoughts? Tomorrow, everyone, 09:00 here, we start touching on. Thanks? Alright.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: We are adjourned.