A few days ago I read and shared an article by Ruy Teixeira on his Substack page, The Liberal Patriot, titled The Democrats’ Governance Problem; They’re bad at it and getting worse. It contained this key insight that I think applies particularly keenly to our little state of Vermont: “Democrats have developed a philosophy … that prizes ideological commitments over mundane realities….” And, as such, they don’t solve – and in many cases exacerbate – the day-to-day problems citizens want government to solve from crime to healthcare to housing and more.
That was the theoretical notion. Then on the heels of reading that, I tuned into the Senate Economic Development & Housing Committee’s testimony of January 31 where I saw this hypothesis on full, real-world, practical display. The issue under discussion was our housing crisis. Why is it so expensive here, and why is it so hard to build? The witnesses, experts from the building and construction trade, had answers. The big one: Vermont’s “green” agenda is adding cost and regulatory barriers so far out of step with our region and the country that nobody (or not nearly enough somebodies) wants to build here.
Erik Hoekstra, Managing Partner at Redstone, a company that develops commercial and multifamily housing project summed the situation up thus:
The housing crisis that we have, in some ways, we’ve created this crisis. And we’ve created it with policies that are generally well intentioned, but the compounding impact of these policies creates hurdles, creates barriers, creates costs. When we require a certain energy code that’s way beyond federal standards, when we have environmental standards that are way beyond EPA standards, when we impose affordability requirements, you name it, all of these things add cost, and all of these things add regulatory hurdles that make it more challenging to develop and create the housing that we all know we need. We need to start knocking down these barriers.
Another witness, Kurt Naser of PC Construction, listed a number of environmental requirements that are unique to Vermont and are adding between $30,000 and $40,000 per housing unit. These include mandated solar-ready zones, electric energy storage system ready, EV charging requirements, electric readiness requirements for future, Energy efficient credit requirements, renewable and load management credits…. “With each of these,” Naser concluded, “you can say cha ching in your head because it adds money to the cost of construction.” A lot of money.
It was at this point (and other points similar) we can see committee chair Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor) sticking her fingers in her ears and belting out a chorus of “Lalalalalalalalalala!” Well, not really, but metaphorically speaking. The exchange between her and Naser went like this:
CLARKSON: Yeah. So, however, what we don’t see is the savings as a result of the homeowner going forward. I mean, I think that’s some I mean, yes. When you ask which house would — where would you rather live?… But the objective and the reasons we’ve supported a lot of the work that’s added to these costs in the hope of, a, reducing our emissions, and, b, reducing costs in the future for our residents. [Note which is A and which is B priority.]
NASER: So, there is savings on the utility front, but they pale in comparison to the add for the first cost of construction. We’re seeing big adds, thirty to forty thousand per unit. And, I mean, how many years does it take in utility bill savings to pay off thirty to forty thousand? A couple lifetimes, probably.
The upshot here is that Clarkson and her “ideological commitment” to net-zero emissions are killing normal people with a poisonous brand of kindness that ignores the “mundane reality” of affordability. By mandating that every car produced be a Cadillac doesn’t result in everybody driving a Cadillac, it results in only those who can afford Cadillacs get to drive cars. Or, in this case, live in houses. See Vermont’s skyrocketing homelessness statistics (we are now 4th in the nation).
And not all of the mandates result in any sort of savings at all. Senator Tom Chittenden (D-Chittenden) recounted a story about a builder he knows who is being forced to put in an “indoor, electric bike charging room” at a cost of, according to him, a half a million dollars that will never return a dime of savings. If anything, just a bigger electric bill.
Naser highlighted this other mundane reality,
We are at a competitive disadvantage with our neighboring states. I would say, on average, I get a get a phone call once a month from a new developer that is looking to build housing in Vermont. And they reach out. They’re excited. They have funding. They’re ready to build. They’re looking at land to buy until they hear what the cost of construction is and what the permit time timeline is. And then they’re out of Vermont. No matter how much I plead with them to build housing in Vermont, they move on to the next state where they can build. In New Hampshire. They can build in Maine for cheaper and get the same rents or higher rents than they are here in Vermont. So, we really have to look at reducing cost. Permit timeline, I didn’t talk about it much during this presentation, but that needs some advances. There has been some Act250 advances. It’s still not going far enough, and I haven’t seen an appreciable difference yet in that.
But it’s not just the big wig investors who don’t want to do business in Vermont, it’s also the construction workers who want no part of dealing with our politics. Naser shared statistics showing that since the pandemic, New Hampshire has grown its construction labor force by over 11 percent, and Maine has grown its by over 8 percent. The national average is around 9 percent. Vermont: 1.3 percent. This despite the average salary for a construction worker in Vermont being $31.70 an hour, versus $30.78 in Maine and $28.56 in New Hampshire.
In other words, Vermont is offering construction workers a roughly ten percent raise to come here instead of New Hampshire, and the answer is a collective, yeah, ummm, no thanks. That is how toxic Vermont’s Progressive brand and economic policies are to working people. We can’t just pay them more to come here because it still isn’t worth it.
Chair Clarkson pressed Erik Hoekstra on this labor point as well, and got an answer she clearly didn’t like, but is again illustrative of Teixeira’s point.
HOEKSTRA: The way we do that [attract more labor] is by removing barriers to create new housing, to create the opportunities for people in the workforce to live here. We aren’t gonna do it throwing money at education. I’m sorry, but we’re not. What we have to do is we have people that want to work and can’t afford to live here. And so, if we can remove the barriers and actually create opportunities for people to live here, those things will over time improve. We’re a very small state with limited resources. We ain’t gonna throw money at this problem and fix it. What we have to do is remove the regulatory barriers that exist. That’s the only tool we have as a tiny state like Vermont. We can certainly encourage the federal government to create programs that support what we’re trying to do here and what the whole country needs, but there is very little we can do in Vermont with dollars. We need to remove the barriers.
CLARKSON: I think there I disagree with you. I think there’s lots we can do in terms of growing our workforce, and we have a lot of young people now who are very excited about earning serious money and staying in Vermont and working in an industry that actually supports them with a with a first class paycheck.
HOEKSTRA: I don’t think the demographic data supports that assertion….
It doesn’t. But Clarkson doesn’t care that it doesn’t. She remains wedded to her ideological commitments over Vermonters’ mundane realities. And until she and those like her in leadership positions are gone, we will continue to suffer the consequences.