By Guy Page
Almost every issue of VDC contains a story directly or indirectly about homelessness or drug abuse. The suffering is raw, appalling. I look around at the Vermont I grew up in and have covered for decades as a reporter on the state and local level, and here’s what I see:
When growing in-migration and substance abuse collides with decades of elite-driven anti-housing policies, the poorest and the most needy suffer.
Growing in-migration: how many well-off Covid refugees, illegal immigrants and home-seeking homeless people have moved to Vermont since 2021? The question is fraught with political blame, so government isn’t holding press conferences to give us the answer. We just don’t know.
We do know the U.S. Census shows that net in-migration has been on the rise since 2021, when the office-free Covid work policies and urban unrest drove northeastern city dwellers here in droves, spiking the already prohibitive cost of housing. And like a vicious, unending game of musical chairs, people started getting left out.
Covid policies also threw people out of work and into isolation, exacerbating an already awful substance abuse epidemic. And the federal and state governments provided free housing with little if any restraints on behavior short of beating up a fellow free tenant. Requirements to work at getting off drugs or become more employable are considered victimizing, rather than the tough love they truly are.
Vermont’s restrictive state and local housing construction laws and policies have only grown since the inception of Act 250 more than a half-century ago. If you have enough moolah to buy 10 acres in Underhill, you can build your McMansion. For doctors, professors, technocrats, and trust funders, it’s a beautiful thing. The bears and the deer are welcome in your neighborhood, the riff-raff, not so much. For them, decades too late, and under great pressure, the Legislature relaxed Act 250 in some urban centers.
‘Green’ building codes and other red tape make it more expensive for well-meaning entrepreneurs to renovate old apartment houses in urban cores. Surely no-one in Montpelier or City Hall foresaw desperately needed but uninhabitable living spaces when they imposed a myriad of new building codes.
But they should have.
Instead, they’ve made the landlords the bad guys. They see themselves as the new sheriff in town, ready to impose rent control and ‘just cause’ eviction.
The Biden Border “contributed” bigly to Vermont drug abuse and homelessness. It let in record amounts of illegal immigrants and fentanyl.
Result of all this mismanaged mess: more people to house, fewer habitable homes, fewer people able to work to pay the rent, and who suffers? Not Vermont’s elite, snug in their comfy homes and secure jobs.
No. It harms two groups of people (and their families).
Hard-working low wage earners who simply can’t afford to pay market rates in the midst of growing demand and declining supply. And, drug addicts who can’t work to earn rent money and instead commit property crimes, sell drugs to others, panhandle, couch surf, or just plain live outside.
If Montpelier had heeded the countless warnings of the human consequences of restrictive housing construction policies, and if Montpelier had imposed tough love housing and criminal justice policies on drug abusers, we wouldn’t be in as big of a mess.
Here’s hoping Senate Pro Tem Phil Baruth and whoever ends up as Speaker of the House swallow their pride and decide to appoint committee chairs who value people more than bears, and recovery more than enabling.