To Build A House ...

... or, perhaps, four thousand of them.

That's the size of the housing shortfall, according to this Freeps story.  That is the bad news.  The worse news is:

legislators and the administration agree that creating more housing will be a top-tier issue in the 2008 legislative session.

This news will, doubtless, be greeted by wild celebrations across the state.  Giddy Vermonters will greet their neighbors with cries of joy: "The legislature and administration are going to step in.  At last, there will be affordable housing for all."

Of course, the administration and the legislature can't seem to agree on much beyond the need to agree that it would be a real good thing if we could build more houses in Vermont and, you know, make it so they weren't so ... well,  so darned expensive.

Aside from that, what one sees is the usual spirit of comity:

Despite the feel-good notion that these different interest groups can find common ground, there is also a level of mistrust. The Douglas administration has bowed out of the sessions, except when legislators convene meetings to hear an update on the progress. Kevin Dorn, secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said he is leery that the housing group is too closely aligned with the Democratic-controlled Legislature. The discussion should be between the executive and the legislative branches, he said.

That stance has irked some members of the group and legislators, who say it would be more productive to have the Department of Housing and Conservation involved now, before the part-time Legislature convenes.

But that's just politics, which is the surface manifestation of a more fundamental divide.

As soon as a discussion starts about where to build new housing, builders face off against environmentalists. Throw in the notion of offering incentives for the construction and it raises philosophical differences.

Incentives?  How quaint.  What about the most reliable incentive of all, the possibility of turning a profit. There are reasons why builders can't make money on "affordable" housing. These have been pointed out, here and in other venues, over and over, and ignored by the legislature just about that often. One of the reasons for the high cost of housing is price of land.  And land is expensive because, increasingly,  it is scarce.  Or, rather, it has been made scarce by, among other causes, the efforts of trusts whose raison is to make more and more land off limits to development. The campaign to sequester more and more of Vermont may or may not be a good thing but it undeniably reduces that amount of land on which builders can put up houses.  And where development is allowed (once all the requisite flaming hoops have been cleared) it is more expensive than it would otherwise be.  Scarcity tends to drive up prices that way.

One suspects that the legislature and the administration will find it tough to repeal the law of supply and demand, even if they could agree to meet somewhere, "sit down and talk reasonably."
 

Comments

[Lani Duke]

Builders tell me one reason they do not build affordable housing is Vermont's permit process. If a builder has to venture than $10 thousand in the permit process and then put the project on hold while it waits to get through the approval process, it might as well be for an upscale dwelling with a higher profit margin.