WALDEN – A recent Vermont Digger piece “Vermont House poised to roll back portions of Act 181” included a quote from House Energy and Environment Committee Chair, Amy Sheldon: “We don’t need our shared interest in protecting our environment to divide Vermont.”
There’s certainly plenty of division in Vermont, but I don’t agree that the root cause is our desire to protect the environment. Instead the division originates with profit-seeking entities that see environmental protection as an obstacle to their development dreams.
Whether it’s cell towers, Amazon distribution centers, wind projects on ridgelines or massive solar projects on what was once forest, these kinds of projects divide and fracture communities, often irreparably. The best way to heal these divisions is not to scale back our concern for the natural world, but to recognize the role of developers in influencing policy for their own selfish ends.
In recent years, those developers have tried to paint environmental regulation, especially Act 250, as the primary obstacle to building the 40,000 new homes that Vermont supposedly needs.
The number is a mirage as researcher Alexsys Thompson meticulously documents in her essay “Vermont’s 40,000 Home Problem”. It stems from flawed projections of future population growth using a short-term and temporary surge during the COVID years as a baseline. Developers don’t care that the 40,000 number is fake because it’s a convenient way to instill a panicked “build baby build” ethos on the state.
As Thompson points out, solutions to the housing shortfall “do not require a land use framework built on a pandemic-era projection that the demographic data has since contradicted.”
Many of the sources of division in Vermont originate outside the state. Amazon is the most obvious example of that, but even seemingly home-grown entities have deep connections beyond Vermont.
For example, Let’s Build Homes, the pro-development organization headed by Miro Weinberger, is largely funded by Arnold Ventures, a national philanthropic LLC founded by hedge fund billionaire and former Enron Executive John Arnold. Among other activities, the company funded a spy plane to surveil the citizens of Baltimore (a project abandoned when it was ruled unconstitutional), and a $100 million project to encourage think tanks and academics “to drive a wedge between different hospitals to advance their policy agenda,” according to the American Hospital Association. Its many critics argue that the group gives money behind the scenes to bypass traditional lobbying transparency.
Vermont’s real need for affordable housing will not be met by scrapping environmental protections so that developers can build unaffordable homes for the affluent.
As Alexsys Thompson argues, we instead need “investment in rehabilitation of existing stock, replacement of flood-damaged homes, and targeted production of affordable units in communities that need them.”
None of this is contradictory to our shared interest in protecting the environment, nor should it be cause for division.
The legislature is obligated to represent the citizenry, not profit-seeking exploiters who are willing to sacrifice the natural world for their own selfish ends.
Suzanna Jones lives in Walden.
