GREENSBORO – I read Sheila Dillon’s op ed in last week’s Gazette and thought it deserved a response as well as corrections. Here are some basic facts.
Contrary to Ms. Dillon’s claim, the proposed conveyance would not transfer title to the Town Green. The Town retains ownership of the Green.
Vermont has the third oldest population in the country. Vermont’s median age is 42.9. Today the median age of Greensboro is 68.2. Greensboro’s population is 1.5 times older than the rest of Vermont. Greensboro has now become one of the oldest communities in the entire country. https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US5030100-greensboro-vt/
There was a time when the voices of a hundred children, teenagers, teachers, custodians and others rang through the halls of Greensboro’s old high school. Today, except for the few voices in the Town Clerk’s office, those halls are virtually silent. [ed. note: The Hardwick Gazette and artist Nancy Riege rent space on the main floor of that building, as does the Giving Closet.]
The old high school, also known as town hall, is over a hundred years old. Because of fire safety issues people can’t even occupy large parts of it. The walls are covered with lead paint that we now recognize poses a serious health threat to young people. The building is full of asbestos, once thought to be a fire retardant, but now recognized to be carcinogenic.
We have talked about repurposing this building for years. In 2018 tens of thousands of dollars were spent on an architectural report to tell us how that might be done. For six years those plans have done nothing but gather dust. Nobody has lifted a finger to “save Town Hall.”
While this building ages and deteriorates, the shortage of housing and the high cost of what little housing becomes available, has made it almost impossible for young working families, especially young working families with children, to find a place to live in our community.
Largely because of this lack of affordable housing, today even the future of our elementary school is hanging from a thread, further threatening our future as a viable community.
To restore this building will cost many millions of dollars. Greensboro’s taxpayers can’t do it alone. The suggestion that we might sit down with multiple developers to negotiate a deal to restore and redevelop the building is silly. It is a spectacularly unprofitable project. And the only not-for-profit in the Northeast Kingdom with access to the necessary capital is the Gilman Housing Trust/Rural Edge.
Greensboro has an opportunity to direct and dictate almost every aspect of the design and aesthetics of this project by adopting subdivision regulations that lay out the blueprint for this, and future development, and what we expect of that development.
It is ironic that most opponents of this project all have nice houses. In many cases they have two houses and/or Airbnb’s they don’t offer for long term rentals. This was once a farm community. Most of the farms are now gone. Fortunately today we have a new, emerging value-added agricultural economy that is providing desperately needed jobs, without building Amazon warehouses, Tesla manufacturing plants or Microsoft data centers.
Ms. Dillon writes “since 2012, as chief of housing for the City of Boston, I have been in charge of both the disposing of surplus city owned property and the siting of affordable housing.” There is some serious irony there as well.
Among large U.S. cities, Boston now has the second highest rate of people experiencing homelessness in the entire country. In Boston the rate for Black people experiencing homelessness is 11 times higher than the comparable rate for white people. https://www.bostonindicators.org/reports/report-detail-pages/homelessness_and_housing