by Stephanie Gutmann

Vermont is at a tipping point.  Vibrant little towns like my beloved Wallingford—where one still sees mothers pushing strollers, school kids trooping home with their backpacks, and deer hunters hanging out in driveways to show off their trophies—could become frigid, exquisitely-maintained mausoleums inhabited only by one or two affluent summer people whose children have long since left.  

I have just come from living in a town like that—in Northeast Iowa, of all places.  In the summers I walked the streets agog at the period homes with landscaping that seemed designed to be a feature in Architectural Digest.  

I admired the strategically-planted shade trees, the decks, the wrap-around front porches, the fire pits…Until I began to realize I’d never seen anybody using those immaculate Weber grills, never seen kegs on the lawn, never heard the noise of parties where the dogs run off the leash yapping with joy and the children shriek and chase one another.  

There were very few energetic, cook-out loving people around because younger people, especially younger people with children had been priced out of Decorah, Iowa.  The residents of those heritage-site houses were either too old to make much use of their properties or were merely using them as pied a terre, for the rare occasions they hosted the grandchildren.  Still, they could afford to live in Decorah and younger people without say, the pension wealth, couldn’t.

Ultimately I left that town and convinced my husband, a life-long Iowan, to leave too because the place gave me the creeps.

And that is my nightmare vision of what could happen to Wallingford, (where I am a third generation property owner) if we allow more stultifying regulations like those hiding out like cockroaches in Act 181.  

Yes, there has been an exhilarating demonstration of People Power which has managed to shave off the most egregious parts of 181 like the “road rule.” 

But a tight-mouthed, grim-faced ideologue like Representative Amy Shelton (who apparently lives to control other peoples’ lives) is not going anywhere. She will simply write a new bill with the same intents (appropriation of private property, more state control) and package the aims under new coloration.

Once again, Sheldon (who was the initial drafter of the act) and other Montpelier progressives will try to fob off a  new package with warm and fuzzy verbiage:  The intent of 181 was merely to “create more housing” you see, Sheldon told us, because Vermont suffers from a housing shortage.  

And Vermont does have a housing shortage. But Vermont’s housing shortage does not follow from a lack of government subsidized rental housing (which Act 181 is set up to fast track) but from the hurdles in front of people who are too rich for welfare but too poor for Vermont’s taxes who want to build on and deed land to their children (thereby ameliorating the housing crisis!)

Vermont has been notorious for decades for its surreal maze of building regulations. Ask your local contractor and watch his brain start to smoke.  When he can find would-be home owners with deep enough pockets to build here, the act of “compliance”(as bureaucrats like to call it) adds time to the project, which adds to his invoice.  But find me a contractor who likes and respects that compliance maze.  They hate it, because they are good people.  Does 181 recognize any of that part of the problem?  Of course not.

Why has Vermont come to imitate one of its neighbors, another place with a housing shortage, the “Moscow on the Hudson” that is New York City?  The answer is that for too many decades people of a more Republican temperament (who bend toward smaller government, lower taxes, local control and fewer regulations) have abdicated the public sphere to maniacs like Senator Bernie Sanders.

Senator Sanders is an avowed communist (er…socialist, so that’s ok, right?) and too many of our representatives, his acolytes, legislators like Rep. Rebecca Balint, are on the spectrum.  At the core of the communist/socialist creeds is a loathing for private property (whether its money you’ve earned or property you bought or inherited) and a belief that that property must be appropriated by the government, whether by confiscatory taxation or over regulation.

Act 181 oozes hatred of private property from its very pores. I’m not going to break down the details.  Surely you’ve read about them elsewhere by now. But Governor Scott had it right when he said that 181 as originally written “would significantly expand the bureaucracy, inevitably resulting in more delays that make it more expensive to build housing now and deepen the disparity between the ‘haves and have-nots’ in our state, especially for rural Vermont, where expanded regulatory requirements will fall on the shoulders of communities with the least capacity.”

In the case of Rutland, the city I know best, the city government has used a Tier 1 designation to conveniently chuck the land use regulations which have been strangling us in order to build, for one example, Maplewood Commons, which Vermont Digger described as, “a nonprofit-developed, permanently affordable rental housing [developed] with a mix of subsidies, including  federal low-income housing tax credits and private equity. Six are set aside for people exiting homelessness or at risk (with services from the Homeless Prevention Center).”

I know there are people just looking for a hand up, not a hand out who may thrive in Rutland’s new housing project but why do I have the feeling that the city fathers want to get the walking wounded who now carpet Rutland streets (with the zombie look of the hard-drug addict) into housing pronto because they have succumbed to the romantic (and widely discredited) notion that the “homeless” are homeless just because they lack a nice apartment.

Why do I have the feeling (I would be happy to be proved wrong) that Maplewood Commons will only encourage pathologies like family breakdown, single motherhood, drug addiction and alcoholism?  Perhaps because, among other reasons, I did a lengthy piece about single mothers in the shelters of New York City when I was reporter at the New York Post and met young mothers who had become young single mothers precisely because (they told me) New York City had written rich incentives (like your own apartment as soon as you have a baby) into the legal code.

Pretty much everyone else is in Tier 3, which means the clamp downs on building will even become more onerous.  

What do they think, that we’re all panting to sell off acreage to ski resort developers?  

Is that Rep. Sheldon’s paranoid fantasy?   I don’t want to live next to a ski resort either, Rep. Sheldon.  Nope, what one reads on Facebook groups covering the Act is that people mainly want to build a little house for grandma so she doesn’t have to go in a nursing home or a starter home for one’s newly married children. 

Why do progressives seem to hate peeling off some of one’s land for a family member?  Don’t progressives favor keeping families together so, for instance, grandmas can help take care of a new baby? I guess I forgot my Marx 101.  Communism hates families because families will set up their own little world where they can be independent of the state and its “programs.”  

Family ties influenced my return to Vermont.  My brother lives a mile away and my parents had deeded their house to me. After years away Vermont is still very lovely except that I’m getting a fresh look at Rutland (our nearest metropolis) and what I see is deeply disturbing.  Rutland seems right on track to become another Portland, Oregon, a Minneapolis, Minnesota, a San Francisco—all beautifully situated cities that have been ravaged by “progressive policies.”

There still time to save cities like Rutland, but not a lot.  

Everyone should be celebrating the gains of the 2024 election.  According to Vermontpublic.org, the GOP picked up 17 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate — a bigger net gain than by any party in Vermont in at least three decades.  Democrats and Progressives will retain a majority in both chambers, but will no longer hold a veto-proof supermajority.”

You may be mad at Republicans right now, you may want to punish, say, President Trump for various reasons (I don’t), but put that aside. The devil is in the details.  The stuff that impacts your life is mostly drafted at the city and state level.  We would have been in much worse shape if the Dems hadn’t lost that super majority.  

Act 181 does nothing significant to ameliorate the housing shortage—and the flight of young families that comes with it.  In fact it will just accelerate the mausoleum syndrome in which cities lose the multi-generational aspect that makes them vibrant and appealing.  

Your local GOP people get that.  Fall is coming and with it many elections. Vote GOP!
______________