The state’s signature housing law promised to measure whether Vermont is closing its housing gap. The first report landed in May — and it shows production falling, public money propping up its best recent year, and the one question that matters most still unanswerable in most of the state.

by Compass Vermont

When Vermont passed Act 181 in 2024, the headlines went to what it loosened — land-use rules, appeal rights, the machinery of Act 250. The quieter and, for the housing debate, more consequential piece was a mandate to keep score. The year before, the HOME Act of 2023 had required the state to set housing targets — region-by-region numbers for how many homes Vermont must build to climb out of its shortage. Act 181 added the accountability: it directed the Department of Housing and Community Development to build the tools to measure progress against those targets and report to the Legislature every year through 2030.

That measurement now exists, and its first report arrived in May 2026 — one of the clearest statewide pictures Vermont has had of its own housing production. It is not encouraging.

A new way to see

For years, Vermont could not say with any speed how much housing it was building. It leaned on U.S. Census building-permit estimates, released once a year and already a year stale. The Department of Housing and Community Development’s new Housing Development Dashboard changes that. Drawing most heavily on Enhanced 911 address data — the same system that maps a location for emergency dispatch, refreshed weekly — the dashboard tracks new units close to real time, in the state’s own words as close as it has ever been able to get. Its counts now generally land within 300 to 400 units of the Census permit figures, close enough to trust the trend.

This is a genuine capability the state did not have two years ago. It is also the reason the rest of the report carries weight: these are not advocacy estimates but the state’s own preliminary measurement of its own performance.

What the count shows

The numbers are sobering. The dashboard’s preliminary counts — which DHCD cautions are not yet official or final — show statewide housing production falling sharply in 2025, to roughly 1,600 new units from about 3,000 the year before. Across recent years, Vermont is averaging about 2,300 new homes annually. To reach the targets the state set for itself — between 27,900 and 41,200 new homes by 2030, a range built to account for the roughly 15 percent of Vermont’s housing that serves as seasonal or second homes — it needs to build 5,600 to 8,200 a year. Vermont is producing roughly a third of what it needs, and the most recent year moved in the wrong direction.

The report adds a detail that should temper any optimism about the better year. More than $700 million in state and federal housing money was invested between fiscal years 2021 and 2026, and the report says that influx “may help explain” the 2024 increase in units, particularly multi-family ones. In other words, the year Vermont came closest to building enough followed an extraordinary surge of public investment — a surge the report does not establish as permanent. The next year, production fell by nearly half.

Why the count matters

A production target can read like bureaucratic bookkeeping. It is not. The number of homes Vermont builds is the lever that moves what Vermonters pay, through a mechanism housing economists call filtering. When new housing opens at any price point, the households who move into it vacate other units, which are filled by households leaving cheaper ones, and so on down the ladder. New supply at the top sets off a chain of moves that reaches the middle and the bottom — slowly, imperfectly, but measurably. Economist Evan Mast, studying 12 metro areas, estimated that 100 new market-rate units set 45 to 70 people moving out of below-median-income neighborhoods within about five years; a register study of Helsinki traced the same chains reaching lower-income residents quickly; and a review by NYU’s Furman Center found that added supply generally moderates rents, while cautioning it never reaches the lowest-income renters on its own.

Vermont has one place where the data is rich enough to watch this happen. Chittenden County tracks its own production through the Building Homes Together scorecard, a tally drawn from every municipality’s records — the kind of granular local count the rest of the state cannot yet produce. In 2023, the most recent year scored, the county added 720 homes against an annual target of 1,000 — 72 percent of its goal, far ahead, proportionally, of the statewide third. And the county that built nearest its target is the county now seeing its rental market loosen: an appraisal firm’s local tracking, reported by VTDigger, shows Chittenden’s rental vacancy climbing back toward a healthier range over the years those new apartments came online. Where Vermont built closest to its need, the squeeze appears to have eased — a pattern consistent with the filtering mechanism, though not proof that supply alone drove it.

What the count still can’t show

Here is the limit the new dashboard does not erase. It counts units built. It does not track rents or vacancies — so it can tell Vermont where homes are going up, but not what that construction is doing to the cost of living. Chittenden has independent market data because a private appraisal firm produces it; most of the state does not. For cities like Rutland, the only public rent figures come from commercial listing sites, which can swing from month to month and often reflect a handful of listings rather than the market. They are not a substitute for a consistent rent or vacancy series — which, outside Chittenden, does not exist.

The yardsticks themselves are not fully locked in. The targets are, in the state’s own words, an aspirational planning tool with no penalty for a town that misses them, and the regional future-land-use maps meant to steer Act 181’s growth toward those targets are still moving through Land Use Review Board approval. As Compass reported in April, only five of Vermont’s eleven regional commissions had submitted draft maps, none had received final approval, and the deadline for the rest does not arrive until the end of 2026. Vermont, in other words, has built the instrument to measure its housing crisis faster than it has finished agreeing on what counts as success — and faster than it can measure whether the building it does is reaching the people priced out.

Why so little of what counts most gets built

Part of the shortfall is a cost problem the state’s own numbers lay bare. The households with the least room sit far below the line the private market serves: Vermont’s Housing Needs Assessment puts the median income of a tenant in one of the state’s 7,268 federally tax-credited apartments at about $16,800 a year. For those Vermonters, only subsidized housing is within reach.

But subsidized housing is the slowest and most expensive kind to build. The cost of developing a rental unit in Vermont has risen roughly 50 percent since 2020, the Vermont Housing Finance Agency reports, and its own cost analysis found evidence that affordable projects’ costs have climbed faster than construction costs generally, partly because such projects lack economies of scale and must stack many funding sources, each with its own compliance burden. The Terner Center at UC Berkeley, analyzing California projects, found each additional public funding source adds about four months and roughly $20,460 per unit — a California figure, not a Vermont measurement, but one that points to a financing burden that travels. The result is a squeeze the dashboard’s falling line reflects: the homes Vermont most needs cost the most to build, public money appears to have lifted its strongest recent year of production, and that money is not guaranteed to last.

None of this argues against subsidy, which buys what the market will not — a two-bedroom tax-credit apartment in Vermont is rent-capped around $1,382 or lower, locked in for decades. It argues that subsidy alone cannot carry the load, and that the production Vermont can sustain without a permanent public surge is the production its new dashboard now shows falling short.

The measurement caught up. The building hasn’t.

Vermont spent two years building the ability to see its housing problem clearly. The first clear look shows a state building roughly a third of what it needs, producing less in 2025 than in 2024, leaning on public money it has not promised to sustain, and still — outside one county — unable to see whether the homes it does build are reaching the people being priced out.

That is not a failure of the dashboard. The dashboard is the rare piece of good news here: Vermont can finally count. The harder news is what the counting reveals. The instrument has caught up to the ambition. The building has not.