This year over 17,000 workers will retire from Vermont’s labor force and approximately 5,300 students will graduate from Vermont high schools. Many of those high school graduates will leave Vermont for college and stay for opportunities outside of Vermont; in fact Vermont measures dead last in the country for retention of college graduates with nearly 60% leaving Vermont upon graduation.
As a state, we are getting much older, much more quickly than we ever have. Vermont’s population only grew 2.8% over the last decade compared to 4.1% in the Northeast, and 7.4% overall across the United States.
Over the same period, the age composition of Vermont’s population shifted significantly, with the 65-plus age group growing faster than any other cohort, rising from around 77,000 in the year 2000 to over 144,000 in 2023.
In my town of Greensboro, the oldest town in the state, the median age has risen from 48 to 68 in the last decade and there have been fewer than 15 babies born in Greensboro since 2018.
This demographic shift happening in Greensboro and across Vermont will continue to have real consequences over time. Our local elementary school is likely to be closed as the supervisory union struggles to balance a declining number of children across our region with the escalating cost of educating them.
Copley Hospital, our local hospital, plans to shutter its birthing center because the volume of new births has declined to the point where it is not economical to maintain the service.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont is near bankruptcy; Vermont hospitals are all cutting services and the Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid threatens to force small regional hospitals and clinics out of business altogether.
Our healthcare system is at a breaking point with businesses and a shrinking number of working Vermonters shouldering the rapidly escalating costs of caring for the Boomer generation’s ravenous consumption of healthcare.
Just 20 years ago there were over 30,000 more working-age Vermonters than there are today. Because we have the lowest fertility rate in the nation, we aren’t going to breed our way out of this conundrum, we will need to attract and embrace new Vermonters if we are going to slow and ultimately reverse the slide we are in.
Kevin Chiu, the executive director of the Vermont Futures Project, estimates we will need to grow the population of the state to 800,000 residents over the next 10 years if we are going to get in front of the escalating cost of being a Vermonter. This means attracting 135,000 new working age Vermonters to boost the economy, pay taxes and reverse the crippling trends we are currently experiencing.
We can achieve this if every town in Vermont grows by just 2% per year for the next 10 years.
To their credit, the Vermont Legislature has laid the groundwork by passing the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program (CHIPs) Act for communities to finance both infrastructure and new housing development. But there are real issues with the State’s growth mapping process (Act 181), it is too incremental and will leave many rural communities that lack administrative capacity behind.
I have seen the preliminary maps for Greensboro, and we need to go much further than what the Regional Planning Commission is presently envisioning if we are going to add the number of working families in Greensboro needed over the next 10 years to solve for affordability.
Last year the Vermont Housing Finance Agency reported that the current median cost of new single family home construction in Vermont was just over $600,000, with over $170,000 (nearly 30%) of the cost being attributed to regulations. It’s no wonder that new housing starts have been decelerating for the past 30 years and are now at historic lows, even as the acute need for housing continues to rise.
Real estate values which skyrocketed during the pandemic put the opportunity of homeownership out of reach for most young Vermonters. The national vacancy rate for rentals is around 6.5% but in Vermont that rate hovers just over 3% making access to affordable rental units a real challenge. HUD estimates that half of Vermont households are rent burdened, spending over 30% of earned income on housing. There is a supply and demand problem, but one that the market is not rising to meet.
We have made it very hard and costly to build anything here. And yet, building more housing is the lynchpin to solving for affordability.
The real question is, “Do we have the will?”
At a recent forum on housing and land conservation sponsored by the Headwaters Community Trust, Gus Selig executive director of the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, was asked what the root causes of the housing crisis in Vermont are. His reply, “wealth inequality.”
This is specifically true in Greensboro, literally a town with two villages. The village of Greensboro on the shores of Caspian Lake, where 80% of the housing stock is comprised of seasonal second homes, and the rest primarily occupied by older, wealthy retirees. The other, the village of Greensboro Bend, where the town’s 25 school age children live in families struggling to keep up with escalating taxes and a cost of living that has been outstripping their growth in income for years. Greensboro is a stark reminder that there are two Vermonts and two very different experiences of the economy.
The Greensboro that I arrived in to start a business is fading to black and yet the resistance to intervention and change here is organized and the conversation around growth and change is tense.
One thing is certain, we can’t solve the education, property tax and healthcare challenges on our doorstep if we can’t build new homes, attract new members to our communities, think bigger and create a more equitable economy with room for more of us.
I would ask those among us who are living comfortably, particularly those of us that are older, to think about the legacy and the Vermont we are leaving the next generation. Will we take action in service of generations we will never know?
Who among us is doing the work that will make Vermont livable for our grandchildren and great grandchildren?
Who among us is planting the vines from which they will never taste the wine?
As we age, will we become elders? Or just older?
There is an opportunity for vibrancy.
Let’s welcome new neighbors, let’s create space for our descendants and for new Vermonters in our communities.
Let’s build homes.
Learn more and consider joining at letsbuildhomes.org/
Learn more about the state of housing in Vermont at outside.vermont.gov/agency/ACCD/ACCD_Web_Docs/Housing/Housing-Needs-Assessment/2025-2029/VT-HNA-2025.pdf
Mateo Kehler is the owner and cofounder of Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro and a board member at Let’s Build Homes, a statewide housing coalition working to advance policy solutions to address the Housing Crisis in Vermont.
