Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Welcome everybody to the House Committee on General and Housing. Today is Wednesday, May 13, all day. We are continuing our investigation into a number of related issues, one is the relationship between housing supply and price, and whether the classical model functions in this case or not. We're also looking, we've been, we've last week and somewhat this week doing a somewhat deeper dive into how the state's housing targets were put together, what are the assumptions behind them, whether in light of recent demographics, how we should view them, etcetera. These issues are important issues for this committee of all committees to understand. So to help us in our inquiry, we have two witnesses today, Leslie Black, who's a research and community relations director with the Housing Finance Agency, and Nate Lanteri, who's also with the agency as a research coordinator. Would you guys like to testify together or Syria? How do you want to do it?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: That would be great.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Well, we'll get a chair here. Can you just get We can trade off. No, it's a chair, but we have chairs. Chair? Your kid.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Come on in. You usually get our boss, so we're not too experienced, we don't exactly know where to sit. Right here. Okay, thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Don't we have a seat, and we'll introduce the committee to you.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So you can lean on it. I don't think she'll leave much space. Thank you, though.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: That's what I used to say. I'm looking for things.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Why don't we introduce ourselves to you? Go ahead. I'm representative Deborah Debbie Dolgin, and I represent St. Johnsbury, Concord and Kirby.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: I'm Tom Charlton, represent Athens, Chester, Craft and Midlands. Joe Parsons, Groton, Thompson, and Deberry.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: You know a digested town that's

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: a huge distraction.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: My name is Marc Mihaly, and I represent Callis and Plainfield at Marshfield.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Emily, South Burlington.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Hi. I'm Elizabeth Burrows, I represent Windsor 1,

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: which is Heartland West Windsor and Windsor. Good morning, I'm Mary E. Howard, and I represent Rutland City District 6. Welcome Gayle Pezzo, Chittenden 20, Colchester.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Why don't you guys introduce yourselves and take it away, and if you have slides that you'd like to share?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Do you need to run the slide deck? I'm Leslie Black Lamoille, I'm the Director of Research and Community Relations at Vermont Housing Finance Agency. Been there for a long time doing this kind of work, doing housing research. About twenty five years prior to that, I worked in DC as a federal housing program evaluator. And I have with me today Nate Mantieri, he's our research coordinator. He is the brains and muscle behind our Vermont housing data website, housingdata.org, which we've been running for the past twenty years to provide you all with facts you need to make good housing decisions. We're gonna talk to you a little bit more about those facts today because we've been, some of the people behind the numbers that you've been talking about for the past week, and we've been talking and thinking about these numbers for years. So I'm gonna walk you through our role in terms of these numbers and the assumptions behind the numbers that you've been hearing a lot about. So I will break this up, this discussion, the timeline, talking first about 2024 when we completed the housing needs assessment for the state. Then in 2025, we completed the state's first ever housing targets. And now here we are in 2026, we're getting some metrics that have come out about the housing shortage and about our housing needs. I wanna help you all think about how those reflect on the plans we had laid in 2025 and in 2024 in terms of our housing, our most pressing housing needs. And I think that little circle there talks about the Burlington Investor Study. I understand you had a professor in here last week and he talked about a study and he raised some questions. We definitely want to cover those. So the housing needs assessment in 2024, it's done every five years. It is a requirement for states in terms of receiving HUD funding that requires that states complete a housing needs assessment. We have done it three out of the last four housing needs assessments for the Department of Housing Community Development. They are the ones who are responsible for commissioning the study and then making sure that it integrates with the state's comprehensive plan for how we are going to address our housing needs.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I remember they were in here. Was there one time when someone else did it?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, they can hire anybody they want. They always do a competitive bidding process, and in 2015, I believe the state chose a national firm called Bowen, Owen National Consulting.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But you've done the you did the 2021.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We did. Yeah. We did we've done most of the prior.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Now are you doing one now?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Nope. We've just completed one. No.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Have 2025. You completed 2025. Yeah. Okay.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Alright. We're we're we're good for

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: a couple of years. There'll be another look.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: For ramp ups and

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah. In 2030. We are somewhat of a natural choice because of this housing data website, which just keeps getting more rich in terms of the kinds of data and metrics that it provides for state level discussions about our housing needs. So when our team, Nate and I worked on the last housing needs assessment, we also need to bring in consultants who are experts in some of the nuances of housing research. So together that research team did the housing needs assessment, which was published in 2024 and identified four top needs for the state. We identified the housing shortage as a top need, the sheer number of homes in the state wasn't meeting the demand that we had and it was having rippling economic and social impacts. We identified that certain groups in the state were experiencing the housing shortage and other housing challenges disproportionately, low income households in particular, renters in particular, were experiencing the worst of the housing crisis. We also identified housing quality problems in thousands of units around the state. We have a very old housing stock and that is starting to become an issue for a significant portion of homes in certain regions. And then the fourth bucket of need is the rising need that Vermont is experiencing in terms of units, housing units. Connected

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: to two of these boxes.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'd love to ask a question.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We need more service enriched housing, and that population that needs that kind of housing is growing. So these were the four buckets. Yes. So,

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: I've been a very loud proponent of I do believe we have a housing shortage. Sorry, I've had

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: a lot of caffeine today.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: I want to connect it with service needs, because I also believe we have a very large proportion of overhoused individuals. And what I mean by that are individuals who are maybe older in age, have big, large five bedroom houses that they threw their family in, and now it's just maybe two spouses, somebody who's living alone. And I think I 100% don't believe that we have enough of these individuals to combat our housing shortage, but I'm really, Have we looked specifically into that kind of data as well? And where would we see it when we're looking at our housing needs? Where does that data fall? Is that more in the service needs or more in that shortage? Does that make sense?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when somebody is a household and they're living in a home, regardless of how big it is, that's not available. So we definitely look at, first we count just nearly the number of households that we have and that we're likely to have and the number of homes that we have and try to identify shortages.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Can I ask another question? Of course. Just so I understand, because when we did hear testimony last week, there was this idea of homes per household. What is your definition of a home and what is

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: your definition of a household? Yeah, I

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: had the same look on my face.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: No, no, think that was the UVM professor. Yes. But yeah, we often talk about household size, average household size, because that is a significant issue for the state. And when we talk about a home, there's two ways we should characterize it in particular. We have because we have households, and when we talk about households, we talk about households that are here year round. When we say households, we mean a household that's here year round. There's a lot of fluidity in Vermont's markets, a lot of homes that are used on a part time basis. But if somebody considers Vermont their primary home, they spend more than half their time here, they're considered a household. The homes themselves, obviously can be used in however way the owner wants. So sometimes owners use them as their primary residence and sometimes they use them as an occasional residence. So sometimes you'll see metrics where primary homes is called out. That means it's trying to get at the number of homes that are here in the state for primary year round residents. But other times you don't really know how a home buyer is going to use their home. So it's a little bit of a false precision to say that you know how this home is going to be used. So our targets are meant to encompass the entire housing stock. We'll a little more

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: about that. It'd be so frustrating. No problem. So you don't

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: use domicile as a way to define your main place where you live?

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: Occupant, like occupying it? Yeah.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: The household lives in it? I don't really know what you mean by, like, in your mind, what you're when you say domicile. Well, when you

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: wherever you're born, that's where you domicile until you change it. So when you domicile, that's where you pay your taxes out of registered vehicles, do all that tax stuff.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Your primary home is another kind of term for a domicile.

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: Well, you're talking about, like, you have to be there half a year or Yeah, that's a different definition.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, this has to do with the data sources themselves, which are for us largely the Census Bureau and how the Census Bureau defines your home. They define it as a place that you live at least half the time. So because that's the data that we're using, we have to define it that way. So if somebody has a home somewhere else, they meet I don't exactly know how different states treat domiciles. We do have a good amount of fluidity because of our pretty consistent vacation home portion of the housing market here. Let's go to the next slide. We'll talk a little more about the 2024 housing needs assessment. This was the study that was expansive and looked at housing needs in many, many buckets. And we just talked about the four top needs. Also in that study, we estimated the number of homes that would need to be added to Vermont's primary housing stock for year round residents over the coming five years. And in that study, we estimated that Vermont would need 24,000 to 36,000 homes over the coming five years for year round residents beyond the stock that existed as of 2025. And that methodology has been well vetted, it's used in other states, we really do try to read everything we possibly can to make it as accurate as possible, but it does help the state have a sense of what we're trying to move towards in terms of home building and creating additional housing within our current housing stock. The core drivers of those numbers are assumptions about how many households we're going to have in the state, because each household needs a roof over its head. And so to compute these numbers, we created a low end scenario that because we were doing this in 2024, right after the pandemic, we wanted to be able to embrace both Vermont's longstanding patterns of household growth and the patterns we were experiencing during the pandemic, not knowing whether those would continue or not. So we did a low end and a high end scenario. The low end scenario is based on a household growth rate of 1% per year. And this is what happened in the state prior to the pandemic. The number of households in the state grew by 1% per year in 2016 to 2019. There was little population growth, we just have additional households forming here as we get older. The high end scenario, that 36,000 number, that's based on an assumption that there are 1.8% growth in the households living here year round each year. That is exactly what we experienced in 2019 to 2022. That was the annual growth of households. And we did have some population growth during that time. One question.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So let's look a little closer at the low end. During the period between 2016 and 2019, did we have a population loss?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It was pretty stagnant. Yeah, I mean, was like each year's data is a little tricky because we're so small.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We kind of try to look at like overall. Welcome to Vermont.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It was a time of pretty level population.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Pretty level. Something I can add is that there's been negative natural population change since 2016, sets births and deaths. So every year since then, we've been negative. We've had more deaths than births. So whining population increase only gonna be coming from migration. And in that period from 2016 to 2019, hovered right around a little bit up, a little bit down, which is kind of

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: what we're seeing now. Do you consider, we've heard various different numbers actually of population loss. I've seen reported different numbers for population loss for this year. What do you think?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, it's interesting that the Census Bureau itself has two different divisions that both put out population estimates. Nate and I try to use broader periods of time rather than one year because they can vary so much in a small state like ours. So it's hard to tell. Between the two of them, one source, the American Community Survey has noted a small population increase. And this other division of the census, the population and housing unit division, they have noted a decrease in population. So I think between the two sources, I would assume stability like stagnancy now, perhaps we had a bump up in 2021, 2022. We all felt bad. And we had a jump in household formation rates here in the state. But now I think we're looking at like back to us, maybe a stagnancy, although we're still up, We had such a bump up right during the pandemic, so we're still positive, more than we expected for this period in terms of the population So, just following on this,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: one number we saw was two thousand loss. That seemed high to me. Did this, the one Census Bureau division that estimated a loss, do you happen to know what their estimate was?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, I think it might, I don't exactly remember, and what also happens is they estimate that in chunks. So somebody might have been reporting the migration piece of it, or the natural change piece of it. So there's two big chunks of population, natural and migration. And then even within those, there's death and births and a migration. There's in migration, there's out migration, there's domestic migration, there's international migration. So it could have been one of those numbers that I think people have been looking at. I can't recall what the net growth was or decline was.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Is So, the low end assumes stagnant growth. Stagnant population growth, but still a continuation of decrease in housing size, the household growth drives the low end.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It drives both of them,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: really. Yeah,

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: it's the biggest factor. Debbie, and then who you, Nora? I just want

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: to know how it's counted when the husband and wife, the husband will have his primary residence, let's say in Florida, and the wife has it in Vermont, so how does that get computed in the data? Is that considered just one person in that household?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's ultimately how they complete their census form, where they state their primary residence is. Well, that's what it would be.

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: Yeah. So it would be one person in that household

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: in

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Vermont. I think the census form has all, you state all members of your household that are there. So unless they really were considering themselves different households, they would be-

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: They do. One is in Florida, one's in Vermont.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I would be one

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: person household, or, unless they answered the survey to say they both lived in Vermont more than half the time, then it would just be a one person household.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, it really comes down to how they complete their census form though.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Yes, Leonora. So, when, I heard both growth and stagnant, you don't get stagnant, That would

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: be stagnant population. Growth of household.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: In household. Right. So this annual household increase assumption, the low end, you're saying the 24,000 is based on a 1% growth rate. Household. Household. Yes. That's what I mean. Household growth rate. And the 36 is the 1.8, which we only saw over COVID. And so you're saying that averaging out the one and the 1.8?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: No, they're not.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: What is the 1.7?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, we answered that.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: That's the actual.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I want to put a pin in what we're seeing now, but it's hard not to say that actually what we're seeing so far in terms of the change in households is about one point seven percent.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What you're seeing so far in what period?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, it's a good question. 2019 to 2024, we're seeing an average household growth rate of 1.7%.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, yes. Indicate, sorry. I'm sorry, go ahead.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: So that's just indicating that the 1.8 has like since the 2022, has come down just a slight. Okay, thanks.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: Okay, that was part of my question, so you answered that. So if someone lives in Vermont six months and one day, that's what they would report to census and that would make their occupancy in Vermont considered full time?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yes. Okay. Consider a primary household. What that practically means is that, like, I know someone, I know a number of people who go to Florida when they feel like it. You know, they'll go to Florida, they'll hang around here for October, and then they go to Florida until they get sick of Florida, and in May, March, or maybe April, they decide it might be tolerable here and they come back. Those people really are Vermont residents. They really are. It's the people who basically just come here in summer in the fall, but live in Florida, the rest of the year are not. I think

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: the thing that's important to consider too, is that until the person who owns that home sells or rents it, it's not available for someone else. So even if it's not occupied, no one's in Right, yeah.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, I think I understand what you're telling us, I'm just going to recapitulate, what you're telling us is, you based your low end number on a stagnant population, a 0% more or less population growth rate, and a 1% growth rate in households. Do you happen to know, or is it impossible, what that, you know, where you have the 1.7%, that's 2019 to 2024, do you happen to know what it was for, oh, see, for '20, let's say '22 to '24, really

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It was pretty high, actually I looked at that thinking I would try, it's more like two percent.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So, that's really interesting. Yeah. So, post COVID, the further away we've gotten from COVID, we still have a high household growth rate.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, I mean, we're still early into this period. This is just the beginning of 2026, so, you know, I'm really, I'm so glad that that we did this work in terms of scenarios, high end, low end. Even the low end is a real reach for Vermont anyway, to our base of building. But I think at least we can feel confident about how things change over the next couple of years in Vermont. I don't expect anything's gonna be wildly different.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So what you're telling us is that despite your 1% number for household growth rate, which produces the 24,000 number, when you look at actual growth rates in the last few years, it's double that.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, just one last thing.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Why?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We are up in terms of population. We got, like, next Oh, since

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I 20 see, we got it.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We still have more population than we expected. Those people are making their homes here. They're moving out of their friend's house and they're buying their own house. They came here during the pandemic and they're settling in. We also are aging at a very kind of rapid pace. We are the smallest average household size in the country. The nice thing about household growth rates is it really takes all of these things into one metric, both population, declining household size, other kinds of preferences for moving outside of your parents' basement into your own place now the pandemic's over. So we're still seeing a growth in the number of year round households in Vermont. Again, we only have two additional years of data since we completed this.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Is there any chance, I'm trying to figure out how I'd say this, that this household growth need is kind of a one time thing, in the sense that households can only decline. The household size can only decline to one, it can't be.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I thought about that.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So it can only decline so far. It can't decline forever. And since it's the driver, is it a mistake to assume that household size will continue to drive at 1% or 1.7 or whatever, 1.8 every year. How durable is this growth rate?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, that's so interesting you should ask. We did, we'll get to that. We did housing targets look at a longer period of time. And I looked at how much change should we make in this household size assumption over twenty five years versus five years and take a look at it, it does taper off. You're right, the rate of household growth is expected to become less large over time. By the end of the twenty five year period, we won't be having as fast. It won't be 1%. It'll be smaller.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Go ahead. I'm sorry.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Am Okay, no problem. Yeah, next slide. A quick explanation about the 2025 events. That was when we did the housing targets. This was statutorily required by the Home Act. And these were required to be targets for developing additional homes in the state and was added to this housing needs assessment as a special appendix. And it focused, I think, on exclusively the housing shortage. I told you about how comprehensive the housing needs assessment is, and we identified a number of different types of needs, including the four that I repeated for you earlier. This housing targets work is very focused on one of the needs, and it is the one that exacerbates the others. It's the housing shortage. So the housing targets work in terms of the housing shortage analysis that was required. It goes further than HNA. We were asked to compute housing needs estimates as a basis for housing targets for both 2030 and 2050. So a five year look and a twenty five year look, because in practice, a lot of Vermont's work is done at the local level and towns and regions that work with the towns, they don't operate in a five year world, they have a longer lookout. And so their regional plans are longer term and this twenty five year lookout was going to be the most activating for towns and regions. So we estimated housing, we did some analysis that helped prepare housing targets both at the state and regional level. It recognizes that some of the home building that's gonna happen and be counted as home building towards these targets are going to be used as vacation homes. So that was a difference in the housing targets versus the housing needs assessment. And the housing targets, particularly the high end of the housing targets, are aspirational. They were set by the Department for Housing Community Development. They are meant to foster a significant improvement in economic vibrancy in the state and shift our demographics. A

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: couple of questions. Let's go slowly here. First of all, in terms of disaggregating the housing need, did you, well, before we get to disaggregating, so is the number in your housing need assessment, the low end and the high end, those were five year projections, so you use those, are those identical to the numbers in the housing targets for 2030?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Not identical, but very close.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Very close.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: The reason

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: they're not identical is because we were asked to estimate the amount of home building and home development that would go to vacation homes.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Right. So those targets are a little higher.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, so they're a little higher because they assume vacation. Okay, and then, you disaggregated by RPC. What methodology did you use exactly to disaggregate?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's a great question. We computed state estimates. We disaggregated to the regions based on their percentage of the various portions of the market, except for Chittenden County. We did Chittenden County separately. It's large enough to have its own significant data, and some special uniqueness to it.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: We have a

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: lot of data.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Chittenden County subtracted Chittenden County from the state, and desegregated that balance of state

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: to the regions. So, when you say, so for example, if a certain area, a region, like the Central Vermont regional, okay, if it has, I'm just throwing out a number, 12% of the population currently, did it get, of the households currently, did it get 12% allocated in the future?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yes, generally speaking Minus

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Chittenden, okay.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We also looked at vacation homes, actually each county has a kind of like a different percentage that are used for vacation homes. There's a little bit of adjustment to it, but essentially, that is the methodology.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So, there's no If for some reason an RPC is development constrained because of, let's say, 40% of their developable areas in floodplain, that's not included here.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Except unless it was already kind of Constraining population. Existing what's already there.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So, right, yeah.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Kind of the way we gave it to was that we disaggregated it to the broad RPCs and then the RPCs were tasked with actually making sense of it in their local context. They just have so much richer local data than we have.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But that's how they Well, just to clarify, they use all kinds of data to further disaggregate it in the town, but the process did not involve an RPC saying to you, sorry, that number's wrong. It was not an iterative process.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Well, we were in communication with VAPTA

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: is the state association of

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: the I Great mean, we know VAPTA, we hear from them, yes.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: And we were in constant communication Constant,

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: but it's But not it wasn't tailored.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But it wasn't tailored. Okay, you had a question.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I do.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: This is a silly question. How do we define a vacation home? Because I think we kind of have two populations when we talk about vacation homes in Vermont, where we have individuals who are considering snowbirds, where I would say their primary residence is probably Vermont, and they have a vacation home somewhere warm. And then we have what I would consider maybe true vacation homes that are somebody not here comes during our warmer months, and those are the vacation homes. And then we also have this kind of group of individuals who have second homes where I wouldn't necessarily, like they're more, I would say, camps where they can only be there if they're lucky from June to October. Is that parsed out in these targets, or is there just kind of a broad washing of vacation home, it's not lived in full year?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah, what are vacation homes?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We dive into it later. Sorry. No, it's okay.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Should we talk about it? Wait.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'll wait. I'll wait. I'll I'll

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I'll

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: The next slide is really about how to make sense of what you're hearing this year about new data that has been released since the housing needs assessment was published and the targets were released. How are we doing? And we've talked about this a little bit because we were excited earlier on about talking about household growth. And so this is another way of thinking about how are or seeing how the household, the number of households in the state on the Y axis, year round households, how that has changed over time. That orange line is our actual household, number of households since 2016. And then the dotted green line is how many households we're assuming will be here based on our higher growth scenario. And then the purple dotted line is how many households we assume will be here based on our lower growth scenario. And then another, in terms of supply metrics, we see some interesting recent data about how many homes we're building in the state. Department of Housing Community Development, again, who was tasked with setting targets and then measuring progress towards those targets has created this amazing resource for the state, which you heard about last week from John Adams and Nate Formalari. But this on the left a little screenshot from their housing development dashboard, which we use quite a bit as well in our housing data website, because it tracks the number of homes each according to the latest weekly data. And so it's dynamic, it's showing us real time how many homes are reported here in the state and how does that compare to the housing targets. So we can see that we're on track right now to add about 12,000 homes here by 2030. The

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: chart

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: on the left, or I'm sorry, on the right is our vacancy rate, our rental vacancy rates in the state according to the latest data available, and it's pretty broad brush at state level, it's an estimate. But you can see, and I'm sorry that it's so small, but the furthest right year is 2025. You can see that the vacancy rate was very low in the pandemic in 2021, and then started to increase, which is exactly what we needed, still not up to a healthy level of 5%, which is the very top of this line chart, it has risen a little bit during the later years of the pandemic, but maybe turning down again in 2025, we'll have to keep an eye on these metrics.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: So just a numbers question. It says on pace to build by 2030, is that November, is that say permits or building starts to date or is that projected based on building starts to date?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's actually homes that are completed. It's based on homes

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: that completed. So the

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: bar chart, kind of in the middle of that page, the dark green, the lime green bar chart, that is showing by year how many homes were added in the state each year. It's pretty hard to see so small, but on the far right is twenty twenty six so far. That's why it's

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'm looking at the chart

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: to the left of it.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah. So twenty twenty six, super small. Yeah. You're looking at buildings. Yep. But this is based on this.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: This is big. Those

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: are the homes that have been built, that's not, if we build at this pace, this is all we're gonna have in 2030.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah, that's what that is.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Based on the average so far.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: To your question, Tom, it's based on the average per year of homes completed, not building permits. Right. Okay. Don't ask me how they know that. I think we can manage that at the

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: same rate. This is Okay.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So that rate needs to be up.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: And so these are all pandemic and since. Yeah. That's what the pace is set by. Yeah.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We started based this was started in 2021. So that's the best data that we that's the earliest we can go back to.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: So there's no other residential on twenty sixth because it's too soon to know?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Nothing's been reported yet. Okay. Yeah, Also like ADUs, homes that don't fall neatly into the single family or multifamily baskets.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: And VCGI and a lot of different partners in the state agencies are working to try to identify development sites before they're completed to get them as soon as they are completed through E nine eleven. And we're looking at some like aerial footage spatial analysis as different options. It's not counted here. It's not counted here, but they're trying to get it as soon as they can. Yeah. Okay.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So just to kind of wrap up this discussion of the current metrics that we're seeing, I wanted to summarize and just say that we're seeing that the supply continues to lag demand. We know that the rate of growth in year round households here it's is, continuing kind of what we expected when we did the, very much the way we expected when we did the housing needs assessment and the housing targets. We're now the smallest average household size in the state, in the country of the 50 states.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What our household size? 2.8.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: 2.18.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: There's a lot of room left to go to one.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, exactly. In 1990, was 2.56. So 2.18. 2.18

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: as Yeah, of 2020

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: was 2.8 in 1990. 2.56.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: 2 what? 56. It's 2.1 Not to be too precise, but

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: yeah, around there. Gayle? So that's a

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: very sensitive, it's very sensitive. Well, it's been a thirty year, you know, over time, and you can really track it over the census of it was 2.5, it was 02/2004, 02/2003, like, you know, ten years it

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: really went by. How are homeless that are in any kind of shelter or any kind of facility, how are they counted?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: They are considered not households, but what's called population living in group quarters. And those are for non traditional home settings. So whether it's a dorm or like a nursing home, or I believe congregate living is included in there too. There's about, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I think it's about 20,000 people in the state in group quarters. Very disparate kinds of things and especially as you try to get down to county level, it starts to get a little bit murky about what those groups are, but yeah. Thank you.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We include the latest estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness when we're computing housing needs totals, because we would like to be able to house people who are experiencing homelessness and they do not have a house, they do not have a home right now. So that is one of the components of our housing need estimates.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: So from what Debbie was asking about domicile, they're not considered having any domicile that can be calculated. Right. Okay.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: But they are considered part of the population.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: Maybe in census.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: What was that?

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: I said their domicile is where they were born until they change it. But you're based on a residency, so you're just basing your figures on the census that

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: I think both are legal terms.

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: No, there is a term for primary residence, but if you wanted to count how many people are actually domicile in Vermont, it's just a different database, I'd say.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: And I think I skipped over when we were talking about the 24,000 to 36,000 estimate of homes needed that the HNA computed. I wanted to address the misstatement by the Burlington study, the investor study UBM professor. I think he had mistaken these rates of household growth, thinking that we had made a mistake and that these were supposed to be migration rates, I think was what he had said. So I just wanted to alleviate your concerns that there was some kind of mistake in these calculations because

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: we have been

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: through it

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: many, many times. Multiple, I guess.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: But it is complex. As you're experiencing, there are so many ways. It's difficult to wrap your head around. So in other words, if the

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: if he expressed that these numbers were way too high because they were based on a one time blip of in migration, You're saying that that is incorrect?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I think he said that he thought this 1% and the 1.8 figures were wrong because they were He meant says that they I think he said he thought they were meant to represent the rate of migration in the state and that he knew that the rate of migration was lower than that. And he's right, it was lower, but they're not meant to represent that. They're meant to represent the increase in households. Not individuals. Yeah, not individuals.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: And sorry, connected to the slide about just going back because you're saying the 24,000 is based on actual growth, 36,000 is based on this model of this utopian economically vibrant Vermont. Is economic vibrancy defined anywhere? Like what is

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, so two things. The 36,000 figure for the high end scenario in that housing needs assessment is based on a household It's actually aspirational. It's based on an assumption that the rate of household growth will continue through 2030 at the rate that it has been since 2019. And that rate is 1.8%. And so far we're seeing 1.7%. So in that way it is aspirational, but we will probably see it's slowing down a bit.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: In the last two years, it's been even higher.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: But in the last two years, it's been even higher. Yeah. So when I was talking about aspirational goals, I was mostly thinking about these 2025. In the short run, there's not a lot of time for aspiration. 2030 will be here before we know it. So these goals and targets are based largely on just like what's happening right now? How is this train coming down the track? This 2025 lookout gives

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: us a- 2,050?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, twenty five years out to 2050. That lookout gives us a chance to be, gave the state a chance to be aspirational. So the high end estimates for, sorry? Is it 80,000? Well, we know we need almost 80,000 even just to house the people that are definitely going to be here. That's the low end. I think at the high end is much higher. And I didn't even include that here because I wanted to just talk about the methodology for the most part of the housing targets, the short run. But in the long run, we really do have an opportunity to make a difference. We have a very old population and we're already shortages in the labor, certain labor markets, and to turn that around would be a big shift, and that's what those higher end 2050 targets are meant to.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I I can add in that the lower end of the 2050 targets are kind of the alternative scenario of just, these are the people that are here now. If we look at population modeling and actually birth and death rates, we use what was called component cohort analysis. It's kind of the standard that states use for this, the actual main, same model that they use to look at what will happen based on that older population. So the 2050

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: is based on the low end of the 2050. Tell us as much as you can about that. It's based on a 0% population increase? It's based off of

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: the vital statistics that you can assume by the age of the people that are here. So for example, someone that is 35 to 40, they have a likelihood of X percent that they will have a child and an X percent that they will pass away in that year.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, it's not a total population stagnancy.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: There's like some- It'll continue to rise.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's a very small, almost stagnant population until like 2040, and then we're going

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: to start to decline a little

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: bit because we know about With a very large population 65. So, but just to clarify, so what you did is you looked at population cohorts, and you did statistical analyses of what happens to these people ordinarily in their life, like someone my age, ten or fifteen years out, what happens to me is I'm dead, Hopefully not. Yeah, but someone who's, let's say, 30, you assume X chance they're going to have children, those children have Y chance of staying in Vermont, and from all of that, you compile a population estimate.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Exactly, yeah, we have death rates and birth rates by age, and migration rates by age. And that's the, those were the And key

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: what was the net result in terms of population? It peaks

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: in like 2040?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: '6 At

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So hundred and eighty nothing too earth shattering. A lot of stagnancy. Our growth, the need for homes is driven largely by our

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: continuing increase in the number of one in two person households. But population, you estimated population, at some point, I would be really interested to see from you what your population estimates were Sure, it's actually in that

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: available on housingdata.org.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, and then

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: you applied to that your estimates of household growth because of declining persons per household. As well as other factors too, including like the secondary home consideration, homes lost due to whatever considerations, whether it's just a client or from natural disaster.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'm happy to share that

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: with you. We can follow-up with you.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: So in, I don't know that I've heard this in anybody's modeling yet. Is there, in all this forecasting, a high end, low end projection relative to interest rates? But right now, anybody, an older person with a five bedroom home, if they have a 2.8% mortgage, they are not leaving. And the families that are still on a 1,200 foot starter with three kids now, they are not leaving either, where if they can afford it, they might swap. So the churn starts in the market. Do we have, and building costs begin to come down a little bit. So do we have any analysis that would that would, speak to the impact of the interest rate going down or up for that matter?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah. We're we're we're largely using, like, historical larger scale metrics to kind of include whatever, you know, what's happened in the past in those regards, exactly understand your point about this notion of households being stuck, when that happens, then it definitely exacerbates the challenges, because households aren't where they ideally would be, like, solar That is

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: a supply issue, Tom, as opposed to a demand issue. Their numbers are demand. I mean, that plus capital gains, I agree with you, plus capital gains law is every incentive not to move out of your house.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Yeah,

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We found too, based on just median home sale price, as well as other factors like interest rates, and incomes as well, that the effective buying power of people in Vermont has really dropped significantly. The number of households that could afford a median price column has really dropped in the last five years. So it's not so much modeling as much as that just is what has happened.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: The rest of our slides are about some special topics, seasonal homes and short term rentals, and Nate was gonna run through those with you, but I know we've taken a lot of time.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: No, we've got you, our next witnesses are at eleven. So we have, let's say, twenty minutes, and then we'll take a break. So go ahead. Great. We're in thrall. Yeah.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: As you can tell.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: You have found an audience.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: We're talking about it all day long. Spend we spend every day to talk about it and think about it anyways. So just some baseline numbers to help kind of ground what we're

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: talking

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: about. So this conversation about homes and households, the way I kind of think about it is homes, buildings. The Census Bureau often uses the term housing unit to really kind of get at, like, outside of the emotional piece of it. It's just, is this a place that someone can live? And within those homes, there are 279,000 households, people that consider this their primary occupancy, whether a renter or a homeowner. So that leaves a balance of like 66,000 homes. Those by the Census Bureau are all considered vacant, And then within those categories, the largest in Vermont is the seasonal home category, as well as all other categories combined to 16,000. But kind of to drill in specifically on the impact of seasonal homes, something that's been around in Vermont for a long time, we have among the highest percentage in the country with Maine and New Hampshire, and you can see that as the housing stock has grown, so too has the percentage of these homes that are considered seasonal homes. So while there

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: were times when

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: there was a fair amount of development in the 1670s, '80s, there was a fair amount of seasonal development as well.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Then kind

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: of Wait, go back. I'm sorry.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: For a minute. So I have trouble seeing it. The graph, the lower graph there with the orange, that's the number of seasonal homes. Yep. And then it serves two things. Grew heavily until about 1990 and then it stayed kind of flat. What's

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: interesting too is that this is a usage consideration, and that's, I'm gonna get into that in the next slide, that a home that was a primary home in 1990 could be a seasonal home in 2012.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Right.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah. I'll let Gayle go first.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: What is the 16 ks?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Those are homes that are, whether they're for sale, for rent, there's a category that's considered other vacant, but that's often used by researchers as a proxy for homes that are not able to be occupied, disrepair or whatever. And then anything else.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: In that 50 ks,

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: would second homes be considered into the 50 ks?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yep. Okay. Yep, so that's about usage. It's how they're Yes. Current

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: We might get into this a little bit later if we're gonna also talk about short term rentals, but curious what else you looked at during this timeframe? Because I'm wondering, what were the housing policies? Were there other policies that you've looked at that could maybe shed some light on why we've seen such a drastic increase in the last thirty years?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Pretty stable in terms of the percentage of the housing stock. I just want to point out that this is just pure numbers of homes. It's a little hard to see, but

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: the

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: are also there. Since 1970, we've had roughly 15 to 17% of our housing stock used as vacation homes. 2020 was exceptionally, it fell a bit, I think, as people who had a second home decided, oh, I'm going to stay in Vermont during this pandemic. This feels better, safer. The estimates are back up a little bit if you look at the annual estimates. These are the decennial census estimates. But really, as a portion of our housing stock, generally about 15% of the homes here are used by their

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: owners for seasonal or occasional use. Does that include short term rent? That's a slightly different category.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: So I will hold my question. Just know that I'm gonna ask you the same exact question when you get to that slide.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Perfect.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So we can keep going and kind of just talk about some of the nuance of these different data sources and the way that we are doing our best to try to stack disparate ideas to try to get the most accurate picture. So we have two different sources here. We have our Census Bureau on the left, and we have Direct Analysis for Grand List on the right. And that's kind of what I was talking about, about its usage, its current tenure, that's determined in the research, if it's being currently used as a seasonal home, or as the grand list classifies its highest and best use. It can only be used as a seasonal home. It could not be currently used as a full time occupancy. And there has, from my conversations with the Department of Taxes, that's a field that they feel like is particularly getting better. Historically, as you go further back at Grand List, there was a little bit of this exact confusion that we're talking about of like, well, I use this as my seasonal home, but it could be a primary home classifying it as a seasonal home. Now they're really trying to say highest and best use, it could only be this. And we find that there's about 15,000 of those. If you've seen 1,000 of which 1,000, highest and best use seasonal. So that is my understanding the best proxy that's available for the camp idea. It's really the only data source that's been able to kind

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: of get at that. So of the fifty, fifteen thousand more or less are camps. So that leaves 35,000

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: other broadly. Again, because they're different data sources, you can't stack them exactly on top of each other from an estimate perspective. And then short term rentals are the third. I'm so sorry. No, you're good, you're good. I'm going.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: No, ignore me. Sorry, I just

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: All right, and then the last component is short term rentals. So that's something that is a more recent phenomenon in Vermont, really just with the proliferation of the ability to do so. There's been the history of vacation rentals in many different ways, but we feel pretty good about the data since 2018 and looking at active listings of short term rentals During 2025, at any time an active listing, there were 16,000 short term rentals. The most in any individual month was 12,000, which is about four and a half percent of the house's stock totally. The catch, again, with all of these stacking is that we don't know how these people that are listing their home are identifying their tenure or how they're identifying on their tax documents. It could be their primary occupant or primary occupancy, but three months out of

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: the year, they're rented out.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: So we can't quite directly say these are coming from the seasonal, these are coming from the owner, these are coming from the renter.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: They're probably not coming from

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: the renter. You're not gonna rent out your own, so it's probably coming from the owner and the seasonal stock. Yes.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Few questions. Why did you look at total bedrooms?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Just thought it was an interesting statistic.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: No, think this is the first time I've ever seen bedrooms looked at when talking about short term rentals. Just find that interesting as well. So going back to my question about a few minutes ago. We've seen the steady increase. I think a lot of the things at this point we've heard is pretty anecdotal, so seeing data is really interesting. Did you look into any policies, housing, you know, again, anecdotally, hear a lot of long term landlords are saying they don't want to rent long term rentals, and so they're moving to short term. I think we've also, and specifically the Homes Act made ADUs a lot, know, we've chucked a lot of the barriers, I think, that ADUs have off. And so I think we've seen more ADUs. Are those now being used for short term rentals? Did you look at the policies in housing around this time as well?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Not directly with short term rentals, especially considering that most of the policies are really still unfolding now. So it'll take a little bit of a longer time to see what those impacts are. But from the flip side of why is it that people are potentially doing this, there's a lot of reasons. It might be less wear and tear on your unit, different kind of tenure expectations. But one thing that we found was that many months, not every month, but many months, the median revenue a short term rental was receiving, not the maximum, what they were receiving in Vermont, was significantly higher than the median rental amount. So from that perspective, they can make more money from it on less burden in some ways. It's just shifting in that direction.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Can we go to the next slide and we can go I wanted to I stuck this one in here, even though he is really our short term rental guy, but I love this visualization on our housing data site because it shows us where these short term rentals are largely concentrated. And they really are largely concentrated in resort towns. Not that they don't exist in other towns, but that they are very concentrated in Stowe, Killington, Ludlow, Dover and Warren. Those are the top five towns. But Burlington's in the top 10 and it doesn't have, it's not a resort town per se. So we do have concerns that it does reduce, it can reduce, like every time a home is not available for a year round resident, that affects our housing shortage. So in that respect, there's a challenge.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Elizabeth? Thank you. Did you

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: take into account towns that are near large hospitals? Towns that are near hospitals? Oh, hospitals. Yeah, no, this is just all towns ranked by the number of short term rentals that they have. That makes

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: sense.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Marc? Yeah, go ahead. I want to make sure, no, no, it's not on this, but I want to make sure we leave time because I have a general question.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, we'll leave time. What

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: category would like a bed

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: of breakfast be put in? Yeah, so those are listed within the data that we have, but we filter them out.

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: So they're not counted?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, anything that identifies So we're basing our classifications off of the listing and the way that that listing is filled out, so if it's considered a hotel or an inn or something like that, we filtered those out because those are not really applicable.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Just to clarify, so how this is really interesting information, but how does it relate to your housing project needs assessment? How does it relate to your housing targets? What did you do with these numbers?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: These numbers do not impact the housing targets per se. They are meant to help towns and regions decide what to do, because if you have a town, you have a region that includes a lot of short term rentals, then it's possible that short term rental policy might be a lever you want to look at. So we presented information in our housing needs assessment about short term rentals, largely to inform regions and communities about their situation.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But you did, when you said that your housing targets are slightly larger than your housing needs, because you took into account construction of vacation homes, Are those in that what you took into account?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: They could be. It's interesting because we don't know if short term rentals we don't know what portion of the homes that are being listed as a short term rental are homes that normally are used only occasionally anyway, or are used as a year round household and somebody's going to go out of town for a couple of months, so they're going to use it as a short term rental. We don't really know. Of, I have to say, this is also, if we were to lay out what are the top towns for vacation homes, it's going to be similar. Stowe, Killington, Ludlow. Many of So there's an overlap, especially in the resort towns.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, I have one short term rental question. So I went to a presentation at the League of Cities and Towns on short term rentals, and one of the things that really struck me is that the number of visitors to Vermont hasn't changed over years, but the number of short term rentals has gone way up, which makes me think that all of those visitors were staying somewhere else, they were staying in hotels. Well, where else are they gonna stay? BNB is in hotels. So, all that's happened, far as I can tell, is that we've replaced, at least with those five towns, we've replaced BNBs and hotels with short term rents.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: To some degree. It's about, yeah, the whole society.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Go ahead. This is a question I just should note the answer, and I'm probably someone in this room will have the answer. Do short term rentals get taxed with the same room and board tax as hotels do?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: They have their own tax rates. They have their own tax rates, but it changes by county. Burlington only, and every other town there's, and they have a tax rate that we passed the year before last. It's a special I tax guess my larger question and then I want to turn it to Emilie. So, one of the tropes that we hear is, we really don't need to build a lot of housing, because the real problem is short term rentals and vacant homes that are dilapidated, and if we just address those issues, we'd deal with the housing shortage. Comment? No

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: pressure. I think a number, I'm not

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: sure the numbers would even be enough, but it's very difficult to control how somebody uses their home.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah. Because Well, I can see from your numbers, your numbers are rather spoiled, spoil that analysis, because the implication of your numbers is, first of all, the number of vacation homes is only 14% of the total amount of housing, and that a lot of those homes are concentrated in towns that are resort towns, and so they're there for a reason that way, and that the number of short term rentals are similarly concentrated in resort towns, and therefore they would have been hotels, now they're short term rentals, but that they don't address the implication of your numbers, I'm just putting it out there, you can do not tell me I'm wrong, please. The implication of your numbers is that neither of those are particularly significant factors in the need for housing, and furthermore, that no policy we're likely to adopt is gonna change that. Wanna comment?

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I think you said it better than a lot of Yeah, us possibly could

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I think the policy levers to try to convert these homes back into primary occupancy would be pretty significant. They'd have to be really significant about others. Especially like, so there's consideration through time of sale, going from secondary to primary, but also within continuous ownership. That one seems even harder. Emilie.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Hi.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: So I know that we've talked about this before, Nate, but I was just wondering if there was any time to comment about the institutional investors piece at all. I know that there's very sorry, my dog's squeaking into my I know there's very limited data out for Vermont right now, and we will be getting a study back from DHCD for next year. But has this come up in, you know, the if you can come comment publicly, has this come up in the work that you've, you know, heard about, looked at, people talking about it? Any sort of comment on that? And I know everyone thinks I'm obsessed with this topic, but I kind

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: of am. No, thank you for asking it. Thank you. So this is, I went back to the seasonal alarm slide just to show some of what's available with the grant list data. And that is that within that, there is a corporation owned category for properties. And I've looked into that in terms of the residential stock, and since 2011, it stayed about the same from a percentage perspective. The overall numbers increased from about 4,000 to 6,000. And that's corporation owned. What does that mean? Some of the same considerations that Joe mentioned about, how do you define a corporation? Is it one person with an LLC to run one rental, or is it, as I mentioned, BlackRock? Those two groupings are the same. But what we could say is that the percentage based on grand list filing hasn't increased significantly.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And an LLC would be a corporation. Yeah.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. See, I, you know, and we've talked about this, I, in the bill that, you know, I crafted, wouldn't have those same types of LLCs, but it's just so hard to parcel out what's what. But maybe we'll somehow get some better information back, but I I I'm going after more of the the very, very large as you know. But it's interesting just in general that it has increased, and, you know, that's something that I think is notable even so.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Sorry, did you say it was constant?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Percentage. Percentage. Percentage. Say it at about 3% over that time. The overall number. Members of the You had a question? It's a general question, so I'll let

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Leonora go. So I was wondering about the Burlington number of short term rentals, two ninety one, because it says that this is December 25. Do you know where that number has shifted since they've changed policies as a city?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I don't have they're on the ground off the top of my head, but it is available on housing data. Okay. So I could look at 2324.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: And this is like a raw number of It's not a percent Like percentage wise, I would also be curious to know whether

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: that If you I'm go on not change

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: it to just that. So, yeah, it's also important to look at the percentage because Burlington, both for short term rentals and vacation homes, is very low. And that's also part of why we consider Chittenden County separately in our projections, because specifically of that very low percentage.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, that's why I included the link here, because it is so different from town to town. This is a super, super, super built out tool for communities to use to look at their short term rentals and what percentage of the stock is it, how has it changed. It's got quite a lot of features that are meant to help communities understand how short term rentals may be impacting their market because it does seem to vary so much from town to town.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Ashley, Jeff.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Sorry. Thank you. I didn't see it, Sam.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Would I be correct in assuming that the housing targets that were created were completely outside of any notions of capacity or ability or financial constraints or all of that? It was just purely a

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: It's a good question. This is the number of homes we need to do these things, to house the households that are going live here, to

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: It might take $50,000,000,000,000 that's just a number, right?

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: None that was there. It's stated, you know, it's just general.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: No, just in general. It has nothing to do with your inability to do it, it's just Correct.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah, I'm hearing that, and correct me if I'm wrong, Joe, I am hearing that supply constraints are not part of these numbers. In other words, things like a town that things like no one can afford the house, or construction costs are too high, or that interest rates are too high, or that when you look at flood plains, there is a room, or that somebody, the private parties don't want to sell, or any of them, none of Two those are these in these sections is

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: a sand pit and a solar

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: field. Correct. None of that is in the numbers. Correct.

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: That's what's in the RBC breakdowns.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Right,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: yeah, this is simply a demand analysis.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Gayle Pezzo)]: Ashley?

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: If somebody is super nerding out, has lots of questions, Does Miriam have your contact information? Would love to set some time aside, maybe this summer, to talk more about this data and how we can use it in the future. I am a little bit sad, I wish we had had this the first week of the session.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: You know what I'm thinking. I'm thinking one thing, I've been wondering what would be the point of joint hearings with the environment committee, and I'm thinking that the environment committee as well as our committee needs to confront what's really inside of these demand numbers, and that these guys would be really, this would be a great presentation.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: All that to say, it's been great presentation. I think this has been really helpful for me. Thanks for being here, and you'll definitely be hearing from me.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I'm so

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: I'll leave some of my cards with Miriam, and yes, please reach out. We're happy to chat. We honestly just love talking

[Nate Lantieri (Research Coordinator, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: to about that. Any

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: further questions? Just

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: again, I mean, this was the whole point of the original bill was so that it could guide our policy, and I think it would be important for the environment committee to hear it as well.

[Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair)]: Thanks, Emilie.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Well, both of you, I think you know that we had a good time. Right? Thanks for having us.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Yeah, was great.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And we'll, I have a feeling, see you again.

[Leslie Black (Director of Research and Community Relations, Vermont Housing Finance Agency)]: Alright, thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you. Members of the committee, our next witnesses are due at eleven. Could we take a ten minute, no longer than ten minute break?

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: I'd say five, so it's ten. Very good.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Alright.