Vermont Housing Boom Fails to Attract Younger Residents

Vermont lost 700 residents last year. A construction wave rolling through Chittenden County isn’t fixing that, and one prominent critic says it’s actively making recruitment harder.

John Bossange, president of Better (not bigger) Vermont, doesn’t mince words: new housing in Vermont is priced for wealthy out-of-state buyers, not for the younger workers the state desperately needs. He’s made that case publicly, and VTDigger’s coverage of the commentary ran it in full.

The prices he cites aren’t abstractions. At Spear Meadows in South Burlington, homes start at $769,500. O’Brien Hillside lists units from $640,000 up to $1.2 million. Over in Shelburne, Kwiniaska Ridge runs between $850,000 and $900,000. In Williston, new construction starts at $500,000. None of those numbers describe a starter home.

“Where are the moderately priced homes that a new, younger employee or a family can afford?” Bossange said.

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a policy failure with a demographic price tag.

Vermont’s population numbers tell the story bluntly. From 2010 to 2020, the state added residents at a modest clip, reaching 643,007. Since 2020, six years of growth have added only 4,457 people, bringing the total to 647,464. That’s a 0.69% increase over half a decade. Last year the count actually fell.

Bossange lays out three reasons younger workers skip Vermont entirely: housing costs are punishing, the overall cost of living ranks 10th highest in the country with an index score of 113.6, and the winters don’t help. Food, heating fuel, electricity, property taxes, and state income taxes hit simultaneously. It’s not one thing. It’s everything at once.

The argument gets sharper when he addresses the supply-side theory that dominates housing policy conversations. Build more units, the conventional thinking goes, and prices will fall. Bossange says that’s wrong, because wealthy out-of-state buyers and second-home investors will absorb new inventory before it can produce any affordability relief for working Vermonters. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has documented similar dynamics in other high-demand, low-inventory markets where new construction consistently skews toward high-margin units.

The legislature has at least started noticing. House bill H.607 targets institutional real estate investors who’ve been buying up single- and two-family residences, the kind of homes that once served as entry points for first-time buyers.

Dartmouth students finishing their degrees and eyeing the Upper Valley job market won’t find much comfort in the Vermont numbers. Hanover sits right across the Connecticut River, and housing pressure doesn’t stop at the state line. A 25-year-old taking a position at DHMC or a local business faces the same arithmetic as someone relocating to Burlington: where do you actually live when every new unit opens above $500,000?

The free market case Bossange is making cuts against a broad policy consensus. Developers, advocacy groups, and many lawmakers have treated supply constraints as the root problem and new construction as the primary solution. That framing has shaped Vermont housing conversations since at least 2010. What it hasn’t done is produce housing that working families can buy.

The population data suggests the strategy isn’t working. 647,464 residents, and trending down. That’s the number policymakers are sitting with in 2026.