Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: I just want to make sure, can everyone see the screen share Yes, I'm

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: we can. Yes, thank you. Awesome. So we are live. Good afternoon, everybody. It is Tuesday, May 12. And this is general and housing in the House. We are here to discuss housing demand and supply issues and proposed policy solutions from across the country. As a reminder, we heard from a UPM professor who had completed a study last week, and we're just hearing other testimony to see if what we're hearing from that study aligns with Vermont and the rest of the state. So because, Francis, you are new to our committee, I think we're gonna go around really quickly and just introduce ourselves. And then we'll give you the floor.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Perfect. This is

[Rep. Deborah “Debbie” Dolgin (Member)]: Deborah Dolgin. I represent St. Johnsbury, Concord, and Kirby.

[Rep. Thomas “Tom” Charlton (Member)]: Hi. Tom Charlton, Athens Chester, Grafton, the Windham, which you may have never been to before, but you're very welcome.

[Rep. Leonora Dodge (Member)]: Gayle Pezzoille Dodge, City of Essex Junction and Town of Essex. Ashley Bartley, I represent Fairfax and the project.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Hi, Saudia LaMont, and I represent the Washington District. Mary

[Rep. Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Howard and I represent Rutland City District 6.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: The floor is yours. We are excited for your presentation. You want to just introduce yourself for the record, can start.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Sure thing. Members of the committee, thank you so much for the opportunity to testify. I am Francis Torres, and I'm a director of housing and infrastructure at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a VC based think tank. And with that, I can kick it off. Sounds great. So again, thank you for the opportunity to testify. I'll give you a little bit of background as to who I am, what the organization I represent is and what our focus on housing has been over the last few years. And then I'll dive into the topics of conversation I was asked to prepare for today.

[Unidentified Member]: So

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: by way of background, a little bit about VPC. As I mentioned, I'm a director here for our housing initiative, which is housed under what we call the Ronald Terwilliger Center for our Housing Policy. So VPC as a whole is a Washington DC based think tank that works across party lines to forge durable and effective solutions to our nation's major problems, traditionally via federal policy, but also in providing issue education and research at state and local levels of policymaking. And we have a lot of different policy areas including housing, economics, energy, human capital, etcetera. But our housing center, it's Williger Center was established in 2021 specifically to advance bipartisan solutions to address America's housing affordability crisis which we think is both something of focus for the federal government and important for state and local decision makers such as yourselves to make important decisions on so we can solve it comprehensively. So, to that point, I'll just dive into the first area I was asked to discuss by your staff. What are some of the approaches that communities across the country are taking in response to the housing crisis with an emphasis on supply oriented reforms as well as other kinds of reforms. Later in my presentation, I will also discuss at more general level the other theme I was asked to prepare for, which is more around whether supply side reform ideas have generated a meaningful impact in the case studies that VPC has produced and reviewed as might be expected by classical economic theory. But before I get into all of that, I wanted to just level set a little bit with the specifics of Vermont's housing challenge. This is I'm sure going to not be news to many of you, but Vermont is not a bystander to the national trend, both in terms of a housing supply crunch, but also in terms of supply focused housing reforms. As you know, Governor Phil Scott signed the Housing Opportunities Made for Everyone Act, the HOME Act a few years ago in 2023, which at the time was one of the more significant state level housing reform packages enacted into law. And that law like laws that have been passed since in other states focused on ideas around allowing duplexes and places where single family development was allowed, allowing more dense developments in areas that were served by services like water and sewer services, setting minimum density requirements, and in general providing for the possibility to develop more housing supply. And this is not a, it's underscored the importance of these ideas are underscored by some key indicators, which here are some of our market indicators. But I would just note that these are paralleled in many, many different jurisdictions. A very low vacancy rate as per the last available numbers for Chittenden County, quite high percentage of renters that are severely cost burdened. So paying 50% or more of their income in their rent. And per state agencies, a established goal of between 28,000 to 41,000 homes needed to meet statewide needs by 2030. So even though there has been this reform already passed and a lot of work happening, there's clearly still a housing crisis that does have an important supply dimension. Now to inform your work and then our conversation, I wanted to bring to bear a few case studies that BPC has, researched and written as well as with some insights from some of our partner organizations in this space. These case studies focus on reforms that center the importance of supply but also include other elements in terms of preservation, terms of demand supports that I think are instructive to the case that you're evaluating. So the most important or maybe salient is the word recent case study for the question that this committee has been asked to consider is in my view, Austin, Texas. Now Austin is an important case study because it's a city that built housing at a genuine large scale over a sustained period in response to conditions of significant demand pressure. And now ten years later, are seeing measurable outcomes. So you have some of the list of the key reforms here on the slide. I'll just give you the general narrative. In the 2010s and into the 2020s rents in Austin increased immensely, nearly 90% more than most other major American cities. Home prices also rose during that period. It was a city that in the words of some friends over the Pew Research Institute was a victim of its own success where with a significant amount of influx by high-tech employment and high earners and a vibrant culture, a lot of people were coming in and were competing for too few homes. But beginning in mid of my 2010s, Austin enacted a series of policy reforms aimed at increasing housing production, particularly rental housing. These included changes to zoning to allow the development of large apartment buildings by right, near jobs in transit, the elimination of parking minimums, reforms to make it easier to build what are called accessory dwelling units, Also bonuses for greater density and crucially voter approved housing bonds totaling over $600,000,000 over two cycles to spur housing development. As a result of these and other measures over the course of a decade, the city added approximately 120,000 new housing units, which at the time was a 30 increase over its total housing stock at a time where the national growth rate on housing stock was around 9%. This is a very striking outcome and not just in terms of the supply boost, but also in terms of its rent effect. So according to analysis from BPC and the Pew Institute and other research organizations, Austin's median rent fell from around $1,500 in December 2021 to just under $1,300 by January 2026, which dropped it below the national median rent even as the city's population continued to grow. And this was especially stark in apartment buildings with 50 or more units where rents fell 7% between 2023 and 2024 alone. I do want to note also importantly for the committee's work, this was not exclusive to new development. In fact, our research shows that rents in older non luxury buildings that lower income residents depend on fell as well approximately 11% over that period. And this goes to show what is often described as a filtering effect where a new development doesn't just decrease rents at the high end level or for newer units, it can decrease rents for older units whose residents filter up to new housing, making that unit available to someone for whom previously it was not. This directly addresses one of the concerns that sometimes is raised about supply side reforms that new construction can primarily benefit higher income households. I think in Austin there's data to show that there was a widespread benefit from the level of housing development that happened. And I'll just move it on to a

[Unidentified Member]: case I'm study gonna interrupt you. I think we have a question.

[Rep. Thomas “Tom” Charlton (Member)]: Yep, specific to Austin. Sure. When these larger projects like 50 plus unit buildings put together their financing stack, they assume a certain amount of revenue or their investors do to pay the loans and mortgages that they have. To the best of your knowledge anyways, has that drop in rent affected their ability to pay back the financing?

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: That's a really good question. And I think it points to an often under discussed dimension of this issue, which is of course that developers build private developers build the housing they expect to be profitable for them. So in the context of significantly reduced rents, it follows that development might cool under the expectation that those rents are not enough to cover their capitals or their costs. So the ROI might not be enough. However, what we've seen in Austin is that the effect of liberalizing development of making it easier and more streamlined to get developments from concept to fully online has also represented a cost decrease such that it is cheaper to bring buildings online than it used to be. And so under those conditions, there is a kind of sweet spot where you actually can have rents say more or less the same or even go down with the developer still being able to have a return on their investment. And importantly, this is the case for new development. However, even in a situation where there's a boom bust cycle, which is typical to housing, or perhaps there was a lot of development in one decade and then less development in the next, the amount of new supply also reduces rents for existing housing for older buildings. And so we're not just talking about what's been brought online recently, we're also talking about the existing supply of homes, both for rent, but also for homeowners. Hope that clears up the question.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: We have a few more questions.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Sure. And happy to I wasn't sure if you prefer to do questions at the end or in the middle, but happy to

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: We answer tend to really like questions throughout in this committee, if that's okay.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Well, if it's gonna interrupt your thought process,

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: I can hold my question.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: No, no, happy to answer if it's relevant to the case study. I'm also happy to kind of have it be more of a conversation.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thank you. I'm just curious on how exactly, what is the mechanism that folks use to reduce rent in pre existing buildings and structures? How does that take place? I'm really curious about the actual mechanics of the stock increase and the reduction of the current cost of rent. I can understand the reduced the reduced rate in the new structures. But if someone's residing in a structure, how does that work with the reduction of what what does that look like over a nation? Well, anywhere, what does that look like?

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely. So perhaps to illustrate the point, it's helpful to think about it in kind of simplified terms. Let's say you have a community, a neighborhood of Burlington where you have a 100 existing housing units and folks already live in them. It could be rental, it could owner occupied. And for some reason there's a demand shock. There's an increase in demand to live in that area. Maybe that has particularly strong amenities, maybe there's new employment opportunities. If the amount of homes stays the same, but there's more people wanting to live there For landlords, they can now ask for a higher rent for the property they own because of the higher demand for that property. And so absent rent protections, right, in the following rent cycle, a tenant might see their rent increase because of the increased demand to live in that place. However, if there is a supply response to the increased demand, so now instead of 100 people living there or 100 households, an additional 50 want to live there but you build 70 more units. Then you not only bring in the new demand but you're also creating a slack in supply such that there's like your kind of equilibrium price ends up going down. And what often is the case, what often happens is this plays out in real world all the time. A good example is people talk about gentrification oftentimes in terms of new structures. However, it is often the case that folks tend to get gentrified out of their existing homes first. You've seen this in a lot of communities where maybe historically there were families inhabiting neighborhoods and homes that then get inhabited later by upwardly mobile professionals without the structures changing at all. If there are new structures where those new perhaps higher income, higher ability to pay residents can move to, then that reduces the pressure on the existing tenants to either pay more in their rent or potentially become displaced. And so it's really about the fact that when you're a renter and I'm a renter, I see my rents go up or down at the end of the year. Whether that happens and to what extent it happens is a function of how many people want to live in that place and how many other places exist for those folks to live in. And if there's more places, then there's less competition for the place I live in. So I don't have to outbid them at the end of my lease.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thank you.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely.

[Unidentified Member]: I had one more question, which was the,

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: maybe, and I don't know if you're

[Unidentified Member]: going to address it in the later slide where you analyze the percentage increase in Austin's housing and then the national, for the national decrease. Is there sort of like a point at which, like, there a minimum percentage increase that you need to see before it will take, before it will actually affect rent prices?

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: This is a really good question and a challenging one to answer because it depends so much on the specifics of a local market. Something I didn't add in the slide, but I'll mention it here is when you have a new supply in an extreme case like Austin, you can see very dramatic rent decreases in a short period of What is more common is a decrease in the rate of cost increase. So for example, if let's say I live in Washington DC, if DC had built 100,000 fewer units over the last ten years, then the existing units would have had a rate of increase that would have been higher than what we actually saw. They still went up, but they went up by less than they would have. And that's an important point too, is like there's a continuum of effects of supply. It's not that you hit a magic threshold after which it flips from rents going up to rents going down. It's that the less supply you have in a in a place that has a lot of demand, which I believe Burlington is and a lot of parts of Vermont are, the higher the rents go up by the faster they go up. The more supply you have, the more you spread that out, the longer it takes for rents to go up and in very dramatic cases potentially they go down.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: Great, thank you so much.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely. Happy to answer more questions on the Austin case or keep moving. I have a few more. Awesome. Great. So moving on, I'll kind of blitz through these a bit but I just wanted to bring up another case that is maybe more close to home, Auburn, Maine, a small city, 24,000 residents and like many Vermont communities, it has abundant employment opportunities but failed to grow its population for several decades. And here this was a case of just a particularly enterprising mayor, Mayor Jason Levesque, who made a point to set an ambitious goal of new units. I think it was around 2017, a goal of 2,000 additional homes and 6,000 new residents within eight years. And to get there, the city eliminated exclusionary single family zones, allowed accessory dwelling units citywide and increased density allowances to 16 units per acre in areas that already had existing infrastructure to absorb the impact as well as simplified the city's residential zoning categories. And we saw there was a pipeline response. So by October 2022, so about five years after the reform started, there were more than 400 homes in active development, many of them multifamily and generally just a strong response from developers who, as you can see by the permit numbers there reacted well to building more housing. Ultimately a lot of these reforms were then folded into state legislative reform in 2022. But I bring this point up because actually I'm going bring up another case study and then kind of close them all out with the insights from each. A state level case study I wanted to flag for you is Montana, which is a Republican led state, but a great model for bipartisan reforms in a rural state. This was a place where over the last few years been dubbed the Montana miracle. The state legislature and its executive branch have really emphasized some key housing reforms to make it easier to build more housing and respond to increased demand pressures, especially after COVID where a lot of people are moving to Montana. Some of the key aspects of the legislative package that reformed how housing works in Montana were legalizing accessory dwelling units and duplexes statewide, allowing multifamily housing by right in commercial zones, streamlining permitting and environmental reviews, as well as then having a second round, a kind of iterative round in 2025 of additional legislation to tweak some of those reforms and get at some of the unaddressed concerns, for example, parking minimums and eliminating parking requirements for new multifamily constructionists. I want to flag this because from the Bipartisan Policy Center, this was a really interesting example of a bipartisan deliberation with representatives of democratic and republican party working together to put forth a package that the governor then signed, as well as advocating for this across many different lines. So we saw from the right framing this housing supply concern as a property rights issue, allowing property owners to do what they want to do with the property they own as well as an economic development issue. And then from more of a progressive bent, thinking about this as a social equity issue about allowing low income folks to be able to live in the communities in which they work, about allowing for more inclusive communities where more people can live and capitalize without being cost burdened for their housing. So it's just a really interesting bipartisan example of housing reform. And then the last case study and I'll take questions after this real quick. I wanted to bring up was Minneapolis, Minnesota just to not oversell the point and emphasize some of the complexity behind housing reform. Minneapolis made headlines in 2018 when it became the first city to eliminate single family zoning citywide and has become a highly studied case because of that. However, its implementation of this reform has been a little bit challenging. There were legal Hello?

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: I'm pretty good. We're here.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Okay. Great. There were legal challenges causing the implementation of the zoning reform, and ultimately other obstacles that led researchers, including researchers from the Federal Reserve, to find that there wasn't a significant change in housing costs as a result of their zoning change. And so, in our view, this emphasizes the key point. There is no silver bullet. There's no one action you take to address housing costs. Zoning liberalization is a very helpful tool. It creates the legal capacity to build more housing in places that need it, but it will not by itself build more housing. Developer pipelines and financing structures for new housing have to be in place for that new capacity to be acted on. And especially for what's often called missing middle housing, so not single family, but also not huge multifamily, duplex and larger and four to eight unit structures. In many places, the developer know how and industry for that is just not in place. And so it's important to think through sure one can rezone and change some of the codes involved, but it's also important to think about what the incentives are for the folks actually building the housing in order to have the necessary supply response. And I'll take a break there if there's any questions from those other case studies.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: Anybody else have any questions? Don't think we have any more questions.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Then I'll quickly wrap up here just for

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Just wait. Just a minute.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: Sorry. I I did not see Sean's hand.

[Rep. Thomas “Tom” Charlton (Member)]: Yep. It's kinda always up. Sorry. I'm going back to Auburn, Maine. They I see that they have a higher number of units permitted and in development. We've had feedback from Burlington in particular that the housing that's being created tends to be fairly expensive housing. There's housing being built, but it's not the missing middle. How did they have this situation in Auburn? Did they have a way to address that and ensure that they're providing affordable and missing middle housing as opposed to making it available for the highest bidder.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely. So on that point, I'll need to get back to you with some of the specifics on what Auburn did just to make sure I get all my numbers correctly. But generally from my recollection of that case study, I think they as well as with other cities and states that have taken on this kind of reform really emphasize the connections to sort of the developer pipeline. So I think there were ongoing conversations with developers, with folks in the housing real estate industry to understand what could be changed in order to allow for a certain kind of development. It's often the case that what people will often call luxury housing is a response to many factors but one of the factors is as zoning and land use and codes and other kinds of regulation increase the cost of development along with other things like interest rates, macroeconomic factors, then developers have to invest more money in building housing. And housing development is a highly leveraged industry. It has a lot of equity and debt involved. And the more expensive it is to build housing in a place, the more expensive the housing that's actually built ends up going for in order for those developers to recoup the cost of their investment. And so it's not by any means the only way of addressing this, but by facilitating the development of different kinds of housing types, eliminating exclusionary single family zones, allowing for the developments of duplex, triplexes, ADUs. You can spread the costs of development across more households. And so what each household ends up paying is a lesser amount of the increased cost of development that we've seen across the country. There's also places and I don't know that this is the case for Auburn, but we've seen this in Montgomery County, for example, very close to where I'm at that have created novel financing structures, bonds financed, revolving funds for developers, for example, where they provide some of the equity for a deal or they provide funding for developers at a lower interest rate, which allows developers to then build more cheaply in exchange for some concessions. So for example, having to maintain a certain percentage of units under a certain percentage of area median income. And that's one of the tools that exists. I would note that there's a sort of simplistic discourse that housing is getting built, it's way too expensive, no one can buy it. That definitely is happening. A part of the reason why it happens is because it's essentially unviable to build some of this cheaper housing that all of our communities want without either allowing for more dense development where the cost can be distributed across more households or providing other kinds of innovative financing supports so that developers can overcome the high costs, especially and unfortunately in these days where there's increases in material costs and labor costs, there's a bit of a workforce labor shortage across the country. So that's not helping the ultimate price, sticker price of the housing.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: I've got a question about the Montgomery County example you just gave. Do you know by any chance whether they are offering loans out of the revolving fund at a lower interest rate than the bonds?

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Than the what? Sorry.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Than the bond issue, which created the revolving fund.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: I will need to double check that. But the essence is that the interest rate is lower than comparable private financing for the developer. So there's an incentive for the developer to take it on and then there's a kind of exchange where the county government has a kind of involvement in the financing of the project. But I can certainly follow-up after this with some information on that model.

[Unidentified Member]: I was also wondering whether your research distinguishes what municipalities can and should enact versus what should be enacted statewide. And whether the statewide approach should sort of just open it up or somehow incentivize municipalities to do specific municipality wide things. Because that's sort of our We're facing pushback from some of the municipality dwellers, some of the people that are in the dense zones that say, I don't want density in my backyard. And then you have people who are in the more rural areas that may want to be able to build without as much regulation, even though they may be near streams or there may be other issues that limit. And so when we try to enact a statewide solution, it can only come after a lot of discussion, debate and compromise. And so I was just curious whether you had some input or insight on that.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely. And it's a question that I wish I had made a slide for because it's so relevant right now to the broader national conversation. So thank you for bringing it up. There is an inherent tension in the cases that we've studied and with the conversations we've had with lawmakers at different levels between local or county, municipal or county governance and state governance in this particular domain. And the pressures that local policymakers face are not insignificant. A lot of communities have pushed back of many different sorts to new development and of course a lot of that is based on concerns that should be taken seriously. I'll note that what some states are doing, Montana as the example I brought here, but also California, historically New Jersey and a few others is moving the direction of state preemption of zoning and creating statewide zoning codes or statewide land use maps that take some of this decision making away from the local level. And I say that and I know that's already a very challenging thing to do, think in terms of authority being taken away. But what I'll note is in California especially where you've talked to a lot of folks involved in state and local governance, there is a sense that there's shared priorities at the state level that are very hard to implement at the local level and the state can be a

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: bit

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: more generative and pushing forth some reform ideas for more housing development. And there's also ways of doing this that are not about reducing the authority of one body versus another, but rather about conditioning state funding. So I believe that's also something that California has done with regards to homelessness where they've conditioned some state funds on measurable progress in reducing rate of unsheltered homelessness in different counties and cities. And that's just saying, okay, you can do what you want, Orange County or city of Santa Monica. But if you want to be eligible for these state funding, you have to hit these state goals. And that's certainly, I think a trend we're going to see more of. Illinois has just done a state preemption of their state zoning as well. And it's not, again, it's a very bipartisan thing. You have states like Montana, Republican led and Democratic states as well taking on this idea.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thank you.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Thank you.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Thanks, Bhutland.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: Are there any other questions for Francis? Great. Well, you so much, Francis. I really appreciate you being here.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: I mean, I have, I can keep going, but I'm also happy to, you know, I'm sensitive to your time constraints and.

[Unidentified Member]: We wanna hear more from you, go for it. Okay,

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: thank you. I'll just know and I'm sure this material has been shared with you, but the four lessons from the case studies, zoning and land use reforms in many cases are necessary but not sufficient. It's helpful to have innovative financing ideas as well as of course demand side supports that we all understand low income families need in order to afford housing. The development pipeline, so ensuring that you have a sense of what developers can do in community it's important to realize that the promise of reform legislation can pass, but a change on the books is not a change out in the world unless you have the folks who actually build things in the world able to do the building. We've seen a lot of places iterate on their progress, less so passing one big landmark bill and more so passing a bill then reviewing and passing another a couple of years later, synchronizing changes at the county and city level, which changes at the state level. It's a long all conversation. And then to the point of the, I know you heard from a professor who wrote a paper kind of positioning on some of the underexplored elements of the housing crisis and the demand side aspects of it. I just wanted to emphasize there's not really an inherent tension here. Supply side and demand side reforms are complementary, not competitive. You can have a world where you can simultaneously address the concerns of low income families in terms of providing sufficient and ample and accessible rental supports, tenant protections or representation and eviction cases, things like that that we historically think of as supporting households to make sure that they afford the housing they're in. You can combine that with policies to ensure that you are adding supply and different kinds of supply in order to meet the needs of the current and future communities that you represent. So I wanted to close it out there and if you wanna kind of talk about that, the report or the study and my take on it, happy to do that as well. But these were kind of the big ideas I wanted to leave you on.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: I think given that we, Cameron is, Miriam is Cameron, yeah, okay. Given that we have two more witnesses before 02:10 and the witnesses who appear then have have timing problems, I think we should move on if we can. So if it's okay with the committee?

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Yes, thank you. Although I would just like to say if you did want to submit your written thoughts on the reports, I would appreciate that if you felt like it, but if not, no worries. I totally get it.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Absolutely, make sure I actually have them all written up already. So I'll just make sure to get them to your staff.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: That would really so much. That we would really appreciate.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thank you.

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: Well, thank you for the opportunity, and have a great day.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thanks. Okay.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: So is this Cameron? Cameron, can you hear us? Good. I can.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: I can. Can you hear me?

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Yes. Clear as day. So tell us give us your name for the record and take it away. Absolutely.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: My name is Cameron Rifkin. I am a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures. I I, am on their children and families program.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Cameron, I'm just gonna set the stage by saying, as you probably know, this is the committee, the housing committee of the house, although we do labor and other general matters, And frankly, I mean, the situation we're in in Vermont, in fact, we've done a lot in terms of certain amount of state preemption. Any place, for example, that allows single family housing now has to allow duplexes, and in certain situations, quadruplexes, and we've had a statewide mapping process underway, which creates zones around the state, they're called tier one, where more density is allowed. The problem we're facing is, it costs somewhere north of $500,000 here to produce a unit, and sometimes fairly far north of that, regardless of what form it is in, Vermonters can't afford that. So, we struggle because we only have a certain amount of subsidy money available and, you know, we're just struggling with that issue. Done a We've lot, we'll be doing a lot more to lighten regulatory barriers, etc, but that's we don't want to get to a situation where we have a lot of $700,000 houses in places we don't want them, it's just not going to address supply side problem. We So, we do have do it's a very rural state, a very small state, but very rural. Burlington is a smallish city, but outside of Burlington, Vermont is very rural, and, you know, we all represent towns with populations of 2,000 or 3,000 people, there's no question that there is an actual shortage of housing. There are places outside of Burlington where there just aren't houses for sale. At the same time, that which is for sale goes for a very high price. So that's our, just in two minutes, our problem.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: I appreciate that

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: additional sounds familiar to you guys.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah. We can certainly start with that. But, unfortunately, I don't think it's a particularly unique issue. I think communities across the country are facing similar issues. I do think that the data and research would support the idea that the supply side and the cost side are interconnected and the lack of housing is part of the reason why housing could be also very expensive.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Which by the way, if you and Erica are you're you're both from NCSL. Right?

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Correct. Erica is here to sort of just observe and Well you know, provide any additional support.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: There's no problem. Erica, introduce yourself. There's no problem with you both both testifying simultaneous.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: No worries.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: So, Erica, just introduce yourself for our record, and then you can both pipe up when you want.

[Erica Martinez (Policy Associate, NCSL)]: Okay. Well, good morning, mister chair and committees of members of the committee. My name is Erica Martinez. I'm a policy associate with the Children and Families Program at NCSL.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Thank you. Okay, take it away.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, absolutely. I did prepare a brief presentation. I think it'll touch on several of the topics you mentioned already, but obviously feel free to jump in with questions if you want to wait till the end. Questions are more than welcome. We're here to help. So I will quickly share my screen. And can you all see that?

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Yep, we can.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Wonderful. Well, again, my name is Cameron Griffin. Thank you all for the opportunity to speak and to join this testimony here today. I'm here to talk a little bit about housing supply and affordability, some challenges across the country, and options for state policymakers to consider. So a little bit about what you mentioned. This kind of highlights that Vermont is not alone and that there's a nationwide shortage of at least 1,500,000 housing units, and there are some estimates that put that as high as 7,100,000. I know that's a large range, it kind of depends on the source. So the National Low Income Housing Coalition is kind of on the farther end towards that 7,100,000. The National Association of Home Builders is sort of towards the lower end that 1,500,000 number while the National Association of Realtors and Freddie Mac are kind of in between they put it at about four to five and a half million. So all of that to say that no state has a sufficient supply of affordable housing. This is due to rising material costs, land costs, lengthy permitting processes. On average, it takes nearly eighteen months to build an apartment building in The U. S. And in a survey of developers, 97% of developers reported some form of construction delays and 83% of those developers cited it because of permitting issues. There's also, as you mentioned, restrictive land use regulations, workforce shortages, increased labor costs, prohibitory zoning, and minimum parking requirements. Some studies show that structured or underground parking can cost as much as $25,000 to $65,000 per space in metropolitan or urban areas. And then on the other side, the demand side considerations, current interest rates are hovering around 6.3%, which is more than twice the 3% rate we saw a few years back across 2020 and 2021. Additionally, the total monthly payment of a median priced home is over $3,000 This is only affordable by 8% of African American households, 13% of Hispanic households, 16% of white households, and 29% of Asian American households. And so you can see in that demographic breakup that even at the highest, you know, this is less than a third of folks and less than one in 10 folks for African American households who can afford a house. And so while homeownership is very expensive and sometimes out of reach for many folks on the renter side, there's also $21,000,000 cost burden renter households according to some of the most recent data. This is representing nearly 50% of all renter households and if you're not sure, burden is referring to any household spending 30 percent or more of their household income on household costs and so this lack of adequate housing is affecting both renters and homeowners alike. So in response, NCSL tracks a lot of this legislative action and in 2026 thus far, while not all legislative sessions have wrapped up, these are some of the biggest highlights that we've noticed. We will dive into a little bit more detail into a few of these, but as you know housing security is a complex puzzle and states are exploring a variety of strategies address these supply and affordability challenges. So they include incentivizing housing construction and streamlining the processes or reducing zoning barriers, which it sounds like you have also explored, Encouraging workforce housing, advancing manufactured housing, regulating investor purchases and short term rentals, and promoting homeownership. So here at NCSL we are very non partisan and bipartisan so we want to highlight a few different legislative examples from across the country. If you have any particular questions about these feel free to ask and we're happy to dig a little deeper. But these are some of we'll talk about

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Cameron, Yes. Yes. I got an email. I thought it was from you guys with a list of these things just recently. It's was it from SESL? Yeah. So is that is is what you're showing us in that email?

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: I'm not sure.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: I did send a

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: copy of this presentation to Miriam yesterday.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Okay. Well, who knows? Okay. Anyway, go ahead.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: No worries. And, you know, apologies if this feels duplicative. Feel free to let me know. I'm happy to again kind of highlight certain topics that may be of more interest. But this is what we've noticed thus far in 2026. We'll highlight mostly enacted but as many of

[Francis Torres (Director of Housing and Infrastructure, Bipartisan Policy Center)]: you

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: know legislative actions can be a pretty iterative process so we'll talk a little bit about some introduced and pending legislation as well. But regarding promoting housing construction, this is all about exploring creative funding sources, cultivating public private partnerships. So Alabama recently began authorizing municipalities to establish community land trusts which are used to lease real property and create affordable housing alternatives. Maine recently increased the cap on bonds issued by the state's housing authority to reflect current housing production needs. So that was in response to again ongoing rising costs for housing in that state.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Do you have any idea? I mean, when you go on the market to sell bonds, you sell what the market can bear. What good is a cap?

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: I think it created more funding for the housing authority. So I think that raised the limit for money that they can spend in response to increased costs in the state.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Okay, so they raised the bond limit.

[Committee Chair/Moderator (likely Marc Mihaly)]: Correct. On bonds issued by the state's.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Mississippi recently authorized local housing authorities to participate in mixed finance projects. Oregon established a mixed income development loan fund to provide below market short term loans for the development of mixed income housing and Utah established a state housing infrastructure partnership fund to support not only the construction of housing but the infrastructure needed to support increased multi unit, multi family units which is sometimes an issue in areas that are not ready to support larger buildings. So it's not always just the land use. Zoning barriers a big issue. So Kansas recently enacted a pretty comprehensive bill. It minimized lot size requirements and provides a streamlined permitting process for by right housing developments. It also allows for third party reviews and inspections to expedite the processes as well. Kentucky recently made affordable housing developed by any religious institution of permitted use and requires only a ministerial review by any planning unit. Similarly, Virginia did pretty similar bill allowing for an administrative approval of housing approved on land owned by property tax exempts nonprofit or religious organizations. The one in Kentucky, the property must exclusively contain affordable housing and be less than 24 units. Washington prohibits cities and counties from excluding residential uses in any areas zoned for commercial or mixed use development. And recently Rhode Island introduced some legislation that would require single family residential zoning in municipalities with populations of over 40,000 more or more, and they would have to require forms of middle housing in their zoning ordinances. Workforce housing. Workforce housing might mean a few different things. It usually means based on income or particular professions such as teachers, first responders, healthcare staff. So recently Colorado authorized a board of any county commissioners to appropriate money to support workforce housing projects. Maryland in their application processes added an emphasis on promoting workforce housing for what they call their catalytic revitalization project tax credit. Nebraska extended the sunset dates for a few of their rural workforce housing investment fund and the middle income workforce Housing Investment Fund, and Virginia permits localities to offer residential housing assistance and grants specifically to enter into public private partnerships for affordable workforce housing. Hawaii sorry.

[Unidentified Member]: Oh he sneezed.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Go ahead.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: No way, apologies I thought there was a question. To continue, Hawaii introduced some legislation specifically to establish a teacher workforce housing stipend at public schools classified specifically as rural or underserved. Another policy trend we've been seeing get more and more attention at the state policy level is advancing manufactured housing. You may sometimes hear the term manufactured, modular, prefabricated. Is there a question? I'm sorry.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: We

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: have a bill on the subject we're familiar with manufactured versus off-site modular.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Sure. Well here's a few other examples.

[Unidentified Member]: Maybe our bill will be on the list for the next year's presentation.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah absolutely. I do want to highlight like I didn't include Vermont

[Unidentified Member]: because on this

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: I figured you all were probably a little more familiar with those particular bills.

[Unidentified Member]: But

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: yes, we definitely Vermont is very much in our legislative database tracking, so happy to hear that some of this is resonating and other states are definitely exploring this as well. Idaho, yes sir, please.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Oh no, please continue. Disregard. No worries. I'm sharing

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: my screen, so I'm only looking at the presentation. So that's okay.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: We're noting the main example because Sure. We have a bill which I think is going be pursued next session that looks at the whole issue of institutional investment in housing small home parks is a problem.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, that's a great point. We have seen a lot of traction for introduced legislation particularly to address institutional investors, short term rentals, things like that, And a subset of that is particular to manufactured housing parks and that kind of spans a pretty wide spectrum of even just establishing tenant protections for folks in manufactured housing parks requiring right of first refusal or some form of a tenant opportunity to purchase policy. And so I'm glad you mentioned Maine recently limiting some form of institutional investment in purchases and protecting affordability in their manufactured housing communities. I'm happy to dig a little deep if that one is catching your attention, I'm happy to dig a little deeper into that particular bill and perhaps provide some additional insight know,

[Unidentified Member]: Maybe at what some point over the call we might reach out to dig deeper.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Sure, absolutely.

[Unidentified Member]: Thank you.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, no worries. Idaho allowing manufactured homes consisting of a single dwelling unit to be sited on lots where single family dwelling units are allowed. Similarly, the legislation requires that a multi dwelling manufactured home may be cited in areas where there's multi family dwellings already allowed. That legislation also reduced size requirements for the units. It was previously a thousand square feet and it is now reduced to 400 square feet for a single section or 800 square feet for a multi sectional home, manufactured home. Virginia permitting landowners or homeowners to place manufactured homes that meet the current HUD code requirements on any open lot in a valid and non conforming mobile or manufactured home park. Connecticut similarly would prohibit zoning regulations from imposing any additional conditions on modular or prefabricated homes that are substantially different from the conditions that are imposed on single family dwellings. And finally, I believe this is the last one, expanding homeownership opportunities. So I know some of the data points at the beginning kind of talked about how elusive and challenging and costly it can be. So Nebraska allowing individuals to open first time homebuyer savings accounts. This is to be used to reimburse eligible expenses for the purchase or construction of a residence, specifically a primary residence. New Mexico created a program, I believe it's called New Homes in New Mexico, established a program to provide loans for starter homes specifically eligible to first time homebuyers in high cost counties. So New Mexico has a few counties that are sort of resort towns and have much higher costs than the rest of the state and so to increase affordability in these particular areas they created this program. Oregon similarly in terms of the institutional investor question prohibits covered entities from purchasing or offering to purchase a single family residence unless that residence has been listed for sale to the general public for at least ninety days. I believe that also has a condition that if like an offer is made, even if that offer is declined, I think the clock restarts, but I'll have to double check that. And so to kind of echo the point that you mentioned, this is kind of aimed at that larger institutional investor issue.

[Unidentified Member]: I was going to say the bill I introduced on the matter is now going to be a study. So we'll have some more Vermont based data hopefully, but the one that I introduced has a ninety day thing as well.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, we are definitely seeing this more and more. I will say that I have additional materials and more detailed

[Unidentified Member]: reports about

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: institutional investor purchases. So I'm happy to share that after this presentation. That would

[Unidentified Member]: be so helpful, thank you.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Absolutely. In that same vein, the enacted legislation at this time is a little limited, but the introduced legislation is becoming more and more frequent and different sort of strategies to address it. Some are taking that path of limiting the number of properties an entity can own, some are taxing them differently or exploring strategies to tax them differently. And then similarly, some of this requiring them to wait a certain amount of time. So I'm happy to share more information on that as well. And finally, Illinois introduced a bill to require their Housing Development Authority to establish a first generation homebuyer down payment assistant program. So in conclusion, we have a ton of resources. The toolkit page is kind of our one stop shop for all of our publications and other resources. Our legislation database is very thorough. Erica and I track it regularly. There are thousands of bills currently, several 100 enacted, so feel free to check that out. And then we have what we call some policy snapshots, the increasing housing supply one, we have a webinar series, we have a podcast my colleague Doug and I did about transit oriented development, a few dedicated to manufactured housing. So please reach out if you have any questions, if you need additional resources. As I mentioned, happy to already get going on the institutional investors one. And then I would be remiss to mention that we have Summit. NCSL has their legislative summit coming up. It is in Chicago this year. It is at the July So we would love to see you there. There will be a housing session. It will be a panel discussion with state legislators so you can hear directly from your colleagues about the issues they're facing and the strategies they implemented and then the impacts and implications of said policies. So eager to do that, excited to have you all join if possible, but again thank you Chair, thank you committee members, really appreciate the opportunity. If you have any questions or anything along those lines, I'm happy to stick around.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Questions for Tamara or Erica? I guess I just or two just sort of administrative ones. So, if we have questions, we want information from NCSL on housing, are you the guy we should talk to?

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, I would say so.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Okay. And do you know, does NCSL have a housing subgroup or a housing conference?

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: It's a great question. We do not at this point, but I will say we do have some stuff in the works. We kind of kicked off last year a three part online series. It evolved each sort of go around and we are looking to reestablish that and to really build a kind of cohort around this particular topic because we're seeing a lot of traction at the state legislative level around housing homelessness issues. So we can certainly keep anyone in mind if you have particular interest in this topic as I assume this committee does. We can definitely kind of flag some stuff. We are trying to build a bit of a cohort. We have some focused on other topics. We have a youth homelessness fellowship that we do every year, every other year. We have some about child welfare, early childhood. That's all on our team, the children and families team. We're but more kind of human services oriented one. It's very possible that towards the end of this year leading into next legislative session there will be some form of group that we will bring together periodically to discuss with each other. Because obviously I'm eager and happy to give all these presentations and could talk about housing for weeks, but the feedback that we have heard is that you all love hearing from each other and we, you know, NCSL is happy to act as kind of that conduit and that connective tissue just to get you all in the same room, same space together, talking about these issues and how it impacts the communities that you represent.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: I do think it's worth thinking about for you guys. I a number of us have been to the conflict legislatures housing conference.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Sure.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Which was for CSG East. There are about 40 legislators there, and it was in you know, I mean, I hate conferences. They're so boring. Let's just go to meet people, but this is actually useful. It was really, there lot was of exchange between legislators. It was in person, which meant that you kind of met people you could talk to. So anyway, I'm just just mentioning

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: A 100%. I I mean, I'm I'm not to give away too much of the secret. I'm glad you get used the word exchange. That is we're we're kind of framing this as policy exchanges. That's kind of the way we're going to build this work up a little bit. And so, obviously, I'm very glad you worked with another Big seven organization and that they were able to provide that. We're hoping that we can do something similar for sure.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Saudia? Thank you. Pat, thank you so much. Not really a question, but more of a request. Sure. If you could please, Rep Saudia LaMont, you can find me on the general, the Our House Committee page. I'm really interested in information on the Youth Homelessness Fellowship and the other family oriented one that you just mentioned. Absolutely. You can send me information on that, I would really appreciate it.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah. Absolutely. We've done it three years thus far. We noticed we try not to do it on like the midterm election year, like big election years. So we're not doing it this year, but it should be again next year. So happily, I can share those particular issues. And in that same breath, please, Erica and I's main focus are housing homelessness, but it's very intersectional topics. So if you do have other questions, particularly some realm in the human services, feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to kind of put you in touch with the right person. We have a pretty robust team now on the Children and Families program, so we cover, I mean, early childhood child welfare, child neglect, a little bit of family law, food security is a big one, youth homelessness is its own separate kind of bucket. That is also in the legislation database. It's quite comprehensive and so in that legislation database there's maybe 10 subtopics dedicated to youth homelessness. So yeah, again, just to kind of throw that out there, feel free to reach out to us if anything else comes up, but we'll definitely share that info.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Other questions by members of the committee? Well, Eric and Cameron, you very much for taking the time out of your busy day to be with us.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Likewise, we know that you all are incredibly busy as well, so happy to help. We took some notes. We know that there's some follow-up. We'll follow-up accordingly. Would it be best to just send that to Mary, some of the more general stuff directly

[Unidentified Member]: to Yeah.

[Rep. Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Thank you.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: That's then to kind of disseminate out accordingly.

[Unidentified Member]: Yeah, especially the institutional investor stuff would be really helpful.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Absolutely, absolutely. And then I think you should have gotten a copy of the slides. My info is in there, so feel free to reach out if anything else comes up between now and then.

[Unidentified Member]: Thank you. You.

[Cameron Rifkin (Policy Specialist, National Conference of State Legislatures)]: Yeah, thank you all. Have a wonderful day.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Okay. Members of the committee, we have scheduled, we are at the point where our next two witnesses are scheduled. Do you feel we can keep going?

[Unidentified Member]: Debbie, shake your head nod.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: You need a break? My watch says it's time for me to stand up.

[Unidentified Member]: Yes. Maybe just like four minutes.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Could we take a very brief break considering that our witness is here? Can I urge people not to wander away to the cafe and do whatever? You know?

[Unidentified Member]: The cafe.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: You know? And just well, it's closed, I guess, right?

[Unidentified Member]: No, closed at three.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Three, okay, especially, and

[Unidentified Member]: Don't wander to the cafe. There's cookies right here.

[Chair Marc Mihaly]: Yeah, So, Mihaly, my apologies, but people's been sitting

[Unidentified Member]: for hours. You're early.