by Olga Peters, Vermont Business Magazine What could a town do with 139 acres? Chester’s new Housing Commission seeks to answer that question.
Surprise! Like many Vermont communities, Chester has a housing shortage and the municipality needs to act to attract more young families and middle-income workers.
“I’m biased,” said Town Manager Julie Hance. “Chester is fabulous.”
The Selectboard hired Hance as town manager in 2020. She has devoted more than 15 years to the town in various jobs, including assistant town manager, assistant town clerk, assistant town treasurer, and zoning administrator.
Chester provides multiple services for a town its size: fire, police, library, school, municipal water and sewer.
“We have all the amenities in Chester,” Hance said. “I mean, it’s growing in the sense that we do have a lot of interest from people moving here.”
According to census information through Datausa.io, Chester’s population grew 8.8 percent between 2020 and 2021. The median house sale price is $266,000, according to the VHFA’s website HousingData.org. Historically, 30 - 40 percent of the homes serve as second homes.
Enter the preverbal, but… Chester’s housing has fallen behind how people live, Hance explained. Families are having fewer children and rarely living in intergenerational households. So essentially, the town has more (and smaller) households yet has not added housing.
Hance said the town needs a range of housing specifically for young families, middle-income workers, and seniors. During the pandemic, the local housing scene hit frantic. Buyers snapped up houses hours after sellers listed them. People engaged in cash bidding wars and bought properties sight unseen.
According to Hance, the housing market has become tight for all and unaffordable for many, especially workers.
“We want this to be a community where it’s not just a bedroom community to bigger cities,” said Hance. “We want to be a place where you can live here, you can find a job here. In order to do that, you need to have affordable housing. You need not just to be attracting the wealthy.”
Developing housing is usually left to the private sector and, therefore, unknown territory for most municipalities.
To help navigate this, Chester established a seven-member commission last year. The commission has met a handful of times. It plans to consider multiple options for new housing, such as renovating vacant houses, installing accessory dwellings, or subdividing larger properties.
One of the commissioners, Jason Rasmussen, AICP, is the executive director of the Mount Ascutney Regional Commission.
He said Chester is in good company in its attempts to address housing. Cavendish, Springfield, Windsor, and Ludlow are all working on housing somehow.
For a long time, people have waited for the free market to fix housing, he said.
“We can’t just wait for the market to fix it. It’s not working,” he said. “So what can we do? How can the town be active in trying to make something happen?”
Chester received a $30,000 municipal planning grant to conduct a feasibility study on 139 acres of town-owned property to see if it could become a new neighborhood. Hance anticipates the study starting early next year.
Hance believes the property has the potential for 30 units of workforce and senior housing. She said a private developer would build the housing. She thinks the town could incentivize the project, for example, by selling the property for $1 or extending municipal water and sewer.
“If there are things that we can do to incentivize and make development in Chester attractive for developers, then we definitely want to be all in on that,” she said.
She acknowledges that such an effort might take a lot of work for community members to understand. For example, why pay $100,000 to pre-permit a hunk of land only to sell to a developer for $1?
Hance encourages people to view the longer-term benefits. Through pre-permitting, the town has a say in the type of housing development. New housing creates tax revenue and grows the Grand List. Finally, the people living in the new housing add their money to the local economy and participate in the community.
She skirts calling Chester’s tight housing a housing crisis. At a recent meeting of town managers, a presenter’s description of Vermont’s housing market resonated with Hance. According to her, the presenter said that a crisis is unexpected. Instead, communities created Vermont’s housing shortage through decades of policy and zoning.
“The housing issue that we have was created because of how we zoned in the 60s, 70s, and 80s because it’s what we wanted Vermont to be,” she said.
This image of Vermont included one house on a large plot of land and towns separated by rolling hills and green farmland.
“And so we zoned for that. And we set up all of our environmental rules based on that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s just what we wanted,” she said.
Yet, as household sizes and employment have changed, the old zoning no longer serves, she said.
The next steps for the Housing Commission include meeting with housing experts from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and the Windham Windsor Housing Trust to develop a more comprehensive work plan.
Some towns, such as Montpelier or Saint Albans, have successfully leveraged public funds into partnerships with private developers. Yet, it can feel strange to some downs to dip into housing.
“Historically, we have been: these are public funds. Those are private funds. They don’t touch. They don’t communicate,” Hance said. “But if you want your town to grow in certain areas, the municipality almost needs to take the lead.”
