Doris Bedinger keeps the door to her apartment open often.
“It’s not unheard of for three or four of us on the same floor to have our hallway doors open,” she said. “Just sort of a continuous flow, like we’re living in this big hotel with multiple suites all attached.”
But Bedinger doesn’t live in a traditional apartment. Her home is the Burlington Co-Housing community, a 32-unit cluster of homes in the East Village that blurs the line between a neighborhood and an apartment building.
Each household has its own private indoor unit, but the community shares the same outdoor space, common areas and responsibilities.
“It’s integrative, and it encourages people like me, who kind of come from kind of an individualistic American background, to think much more cooperatively,” said John Patterson, another resident of BCOHO.
Burlington Co-Housing is just one of the innovative solutions that are emerging lately for the affordable housing problem. And the problem is both broad and deep.
In the midst of the Covid crisis, housing advocates and government officials are worried about the immediate future of affordable housing and preventing homelessness. But the concerns about housing in Vermont — what’s available, how people can live there, and at what cost — have been decades in the making.
Champlain Housing Trust is one recipient of a $37 million housing bond in Vermont, with the goal of building 550-650 units in the next few years — at an average cost of $62,000 a unit. But Chris Donnelly, director of community relations at the housing trust, said that work is only a small part of the solution.
“Affordability in Vermont hasn’t changed that much in the last four years, even though we’ve made the biggest investment in affordable housing production we ever have,” Donnelly said.
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According to the state government’s assessment of 2020 housing needs, nearly 90,000 renters and homeowners — 36% of all households in the state — pay 30% or more of their income to cover their housing costs. That 30% threshold is considered the maximum a household can handle. And 39,000 households (16%) spend more than half of their income on housing.
On the annual one-night count of the homeless population in January 2019, 1,089 Vermonters were homeless, and the length of stay in Vermont’s homeless shelters reached an all-time high in 2019.
In addition, the report said, at least 19,054 Vermont households live in homes with serious housing quality issues.
Some new ideas
Vermont is building fewer new homes for homeowners and renters, according to the 2020 state report. Housing experts say the cost of construction, particularly in weather-worn northern New England, is a big barrier to getting new affordable housing.
At the same time, demand is rising, particularly in the Burlington area — one of the few pockets of the state with a growing population and new jobs, at least before the pandemic.
“Everybody wants to live in Burlington because it’s close to jobs, it’s close to social life, it’s close to transportation,” said Kirby Dunn, head of Homeshare Vermont.
In confronting Vermont’s housing issues, some people are rethinking the concept of home.
For instance, Mikéla Sumner, a Vermont native who’s an architect, recently published a research thesis, “Adapting Home: Residential Development and Domestic Comfort in Vermont.” It proposes a new type of development in Williston, based around adaptable housing.
“Affordable housing is a basic need of life and yet an incredibly complex topic,” she said via email. “While it is a form of architecture we interact with every day, it has been eclipsed by the one-off civic, commercial and residential projects that generally garner more attention and acclaim.”
Sumner believes homes should be designed and redesigned to fit the needs of homeowners, able to change over time as the needs change. Now, she says, Vermonters force themselves to fit into the commonplace single-family standalone home, both economically and socially.
Her thought experiment is a development in Williston, a suburb of Burlington with increasing development centered on standardized, single-family standalone homes.
“These houses break down community, are grouped inefficiently, and detract from the existing local character,” she said. “It is crucial to provide an alternative means of housing that favors privacy while strengthening the community’s identity.”
She proposed an alternative: A neighborhood built around a flexible home design.
“People are different, and live differently, and should have the ability to customize their housing based on these differences,” she said.
Shared and flexible housing
Beneath the radar, flexible-living programs have been around for decades. Homeshare Vermont, which operates in seven central and northwestern Vermont counties, is in its 39th year.
The program brings together two types of Vermonters with different needs: Those who are looking for an affordable place, and can find it by living with people who have homes but want companionship or help around the house, said Kirby Dunn, executive director of the program.
Dunn herself has been sharing her home for roughly a decade. At first, she was caring for her aging mother and took in a renter to help with housework.
“I was just run ragged and couldn’t sort of keep track of everything that my life required, so I had somebody to help me with the household pet while I focused on my mom,” she said.
Now, it’s the social side: “I think I would have gone nuts during Covid if I didn’t have somebody else in the house,” Dunn said.
In return for their work, the renters get a place to live at a below-market rate. The renters pay an average of $314 a month, and one-fourth of them pay no rent at all, depending on their arrangement.
Homeshare doesn’t dictate the arrangement, instead gathering both groups of people, screening them and matching them up depending on what they’re looking for, Dunn said.
Companionship is a particular goal for homesharers who lived alone. In Vermont, 18.7% of homeowners live alone, compared to 14.5% nationally.
Designing for a solution
Home design may help to address the social issues with Vermonters aging in place.
Sumner’s housing proposal is based on accessory dwelling units — apartment-like living spaces that are attached to a main house or on the same property, essentially expanding on the idea of a mother-in-law apartment.
The design also gives homeowners the option to adjust their home over time. New homeowners can start with a small home, then build additions or adjacent structures that provide space for their growing family or aging parents.
“Here is a possible scenario of how these three parts are utilized,” Sumner said. “A young woman purchases a home, she gets married, has children, the children grow up and move out, she retires, and she and her spouse age and eventually require live-in care. The adaptable home can handle and adapt to these changes.”
Her design is based on the Side Hustle House, an adaptable home design created by Union Studio in Providence, Rhode Island, where she now works.
Joel VanderWeele, a Union Studio architect and one of the Side Hustle designers, said he was inspired by his own experience as a young professional struggling to afford his first home.
The Side Hustle has a easy-to-build, box-like design that is meant to be changed and adapted to fit the needs of the homeowner, he said.
“If in a moment of, you know, trying to stretch the dollar, or if you have a home health worker, or if you just want to create an additional unit within the existing home, you can do that without tearing apart the house completely,” he said.
Developers and designers have struggled to reconcile the demand for affordable housing with a painful reality of New England: Construction costs are very high. There’s a shortage of labor, particularly during Covid, and material costs are skyrocketing, he said.
But the adaptable home has two advantages. First, its options for changing over the life of the home lead to long-term savings, he said.
“It is going to serve the needs of people for a long time, so that after the upfront expense of new construction is paid off, it can still be usable, flexible, lovable and durable,” he said. “And then that contributes to the affordability equation long term, even if at the beginning, it’s not what most people would consider affordable.”
The second is that it allows for different configurations of Vermonters — young people, families of different sizes, and seniors — to fit comfortably within one household rather than being forced to change themselves to fit their space.
It’s not entirely a new idea. The traditional New England home often had those shifting conceptions of auxiliary dwelling units and home additions, VanderWeele said.
“The life cycle of a typical New England farmhouse: It’s sort of a compact, around 1,100-square-foot cottage form, that can serve as a two-bedroom house, one bedroom with an office, it can also accept a side attachment and a rear attachment of bedroom, workshop, garage, whatever, and can even be turned into multiple units,” he said.
Dunn said Homeshare Vermont has begun promoting the concept of an auxiliary dwelling unit “as an alternative, or as a support way of having a homeshare with a little more privacy.”
Housing, big and small
The key to tiny homeownership, says Erin Maile O’Keefe, is to “keep it clean all the time.”
“If you make a mess, you’re tripping over it,” she said.
O’Keefe moved into a tiny home after she realized her old family camp home in Brattleboro was unlivable. Now she and her husband live in the Paper Boat, a 300-square-foot home built in 2018.
O’Keefe, an artist and organizer, runs the annual Tiny House Fest in Burlington, where people drive in with their own tiny homes, and where panel discussions and events are planned around them.
Her advice to people considering the tiny home lifestyle: “You cannot spend enough time on design.”
“Consider how you live every day, you and whoever else is living with you,” she said. “How do you move in the space? I think about it as the choreography of your day, and really examining yourself and examining what you need, and being really realistic about what you need, and what is something you can let go of.”
At first glance, tiny homes seem very different from the co-housing model, which can combine dozens of people. BCOHO is one of about half a dozen co-housing projects across Vermont, including communities in Bristol, Hartland and the Mad River Valley.
Some communities have religious or political affiliations, but many are simply people looking for a different way of living.
Patterson, the BCOHO resident, said it’s not for everyone — you have to be willing to contribute to making the community work.
“There are people who really like to have things done for them, and if they’re able to afford to have things done for them, then they just expect that, and those people would tend to have a difficult time in co-housing, because it’s a different mindset,” he said.
Yet it’s a mindset that an increasing number of tiny homeowners are adopting, O’Keefe said. Tiny home communities, where individual tiny homes share one piece of land, have cropped up across the country, and one of O’Keefe’s colleagues just started planning one in Vermont.
“It’s really harkening back to how we used to live as humans,” she said, in contrast to “the feeling of disconnection that we’ve been going in, that direction of spreading out on the landscape and creating bigger houses.”
More people, less space
In a way, tiny homes and co-housing both try to fit more people in less space. VanderWeele noted that home size has increased 50% since the 1960s.
“We have not enough homes for the number of people who need them, but arguably too many bedrooms, or many unoccupied bedrooms, in homes that are too large for the household,” he said.
Still, tiny homes and co-housing communities struggle to be truly affordable for low-income Vermonters. O’Keefe warned that building costs for tiny homes are higher per square foot than traditional homes, because you need to set up the same infrastructure in less space.
Don Schramm, one of the founders of BCOHO, said many co-housing communities across the state aren’t particularly affordable. BCOHO has some affordable units thanks to the Champlain Housing Trust, which helps to subsidize the cost, lowering it to more affordable levels.
Bedinger is one of the residents who has benefitted from those affordable units. She sold her house in Kansas to move to the Burlington area to be close to family, but quickly realized housing costs were far higher than she was used to.
The grants from Champlain Housing Trust allowed her to live in a community that she says fits her lifestyle well. “I think I’m a really good fit here,” she said.
Donnelly skepticism
Before the Covid crisis, almost a third of Vermonters couldn’t afford housing, defined as spending more than 30% of their income on their home, according to Census data.
The pandemic only worsened the issue. With record-high unemployment and increasing financial trouble for everyday Americans, the state has swooped in with rental assistance to avoid a cascading crisis for tenants and landlords.
Elsewhere in the country, advocates call a boom in evictions its own epidemic, as families across the income spectrum find themselves homeless for the first time. The federal Centers for Disease Control called for an eviction moratorium, but it stands on shaky ground, leading to uncertainty over the future of millions of renters.
So it’s not surprising that, when discussing creative solutions to affordable housing, Donnelly — of Champlain Housing Trust — admits he was a skeptic.
“I like to say we’ve been building tiny houses for years — we just stack them all together in one big building,” he said.
Along with subsidizing housing costs, the trust builds new affordable housing, runs those developments, and helps people looking for housing to find homes there.
Americans love the idea of living in their own home “on their own little piece of land,” he said. But the reality is many low-income Vermonters, or even middle-class Vermonters, can’t save enough money to buy or build a home.
“In this country, our housing policies are backwards,” he said. “We subsidize people like me who own a home; I get a guaranteed subsidy, because I can deduct my mortgage on my taxes. When you rent a home, only one in four people qualify for any assistance.”
He also worries when developers use terms like “regional character” as a goal for designing a home or neighborhood.
“The use of character, in terms of architecture, has been used as a way to zone out people that are ‘undesirable.’ And we see that in multifamily housing. Certainly, I’ve seen it in suburban areas where they were worse than redlining.”
Particularly in Vermont, where towns are attached to their own histories, “the word character has been used in zoning regulations as a way to say, well, that’s just not what we’re like here in terms of the architecture, and then that segregates our communities,” he said.
“You know, when people are used to living in a tent, or on the streets, they don’t really think about what the outside of their building looks like that much when they find a home,” he said.
A sense of place
VanderWeele said there’s a value to subsidized affordable housing and conventional apartment buildings that try to lower design and construction costs.
But he believes a sense of place — that regional character — can also be important, even in affordable housing.
“I think human health values stability, and stability is sort of tied up in a sense of rootedness in place,” he said. “I think it’s important long-term to balance these things.”
The regional character associated with Vermont has practical value, too, he said. The state’s first architects didn’t design pitched roofs because they were pretty, but because they were best in heavy snow.
From the different camps of fixing the housing crisis — those in favor of subsidized housing, or deregulation, or financing, or zoning — VanderWeele is in favor of a “broader solution.”
“From design, to financing, to zoning regulations to federal housing programs, I think all of it needs to be used at the same time,” he said. “Because housing, what people think of as necessary for their own housing situation, is different for so many different people.”
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The Link Lonk
October 25, 2020 at 09:35PM
https://vtdigger.org/2020/10/25/affordable-housing-vermont-ideas-solutions/
Fresh ideas are popping up for bringing more affordable housing to Vermont - vtdigger.org
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