The flood that forced a housing reckoning in Vermont

Brittany Powell moved from the Bay Area to Vermont in 2016, just as wildfire smoke was becoming a regular summertime occurrence in California. She watched in horror from afar as friends and family living in her home state fled wildfires made larger and more intense by climate change-driven drought. 

“You’re so lucky you live there,” they told her. Powell thought so, too. The Northeast tends to have big summer thunderstorms and frigid winters, but it’s rarely beset by hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes — the cataclysmic natural disasters other parts of the country have to navigate regularly. And, unlike nearby New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — states where acreage is a hot commodity — Vermont, the most rural state in the U.S., has ample open space. 

After renting for a few years, Powell and her husband bought an old farmhouse just outside of the state capital Montpelier in 2019. Their town is known for its dirt roads, spring-fed wells, and old-school New England appeal. When she moved there, Powell remembers thinking that it was the closest thing she’d be able to find to a place safe from the effects of climate change. 

Soon, Powell would be dealing with a set of issues reminiscent of the state she had left behind.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading across the country and many people began working from home, middle- and upper-class Americans started trading dense urban areas for rural ones. Vermont towns whose populations hadn’t changed in a hundred years, towns that the state was desperate to fill before 2020, were startled by an influx of new residents. Abandoned houses were quickly sold, renovated, and resold. The state’s housing stock was thoroughly gleaned, and the cost of housing increased close to 40 percent between 2019 and 2023. 

As affordable housing became nearly impossible to come by, the homeless population grew. There were rumors of traveling nurses forced to sleep in tents near the hospitals they were treating COVID patients in. Some companies hiring out-of-state applicants gave their new employees 12 months to move to the state, to account for the difficult housing market. 

And then, last July, heavy rain started to fall on central Vermont — and kept falling. Flash floods swept across the state. Trickling rivers roared to life, swelled, and burst into the towns and cities clustered by their banks. More than 12 inches of rain fell on Montpelier that month, breaking a rainfall record set in 1989. The Winooski River, the artery that runs through the capital, crested to its highest point in close to a century. 

At 7 p.m. on the night of July 10, as rain poured, Powell and her husband checked their basement and saw that it was dry. Twenty minutes later, there was three feet of water in it. They didn’t know it yet, but the road drainage culvert above their house had failed, sending a wave of water onto their property. They were soon plunged into darkness, as thousands of customers in their area lost power. When the sun came up and the flooding had receded, 6 inches of mud lined the floors of their basement. Even with help from their coworkers, friends, and neighbors, it took the couple weeks to clean it out. The flooding ruined their HVAC system and required $25,000 in repairs. Powell’s house wasn’t in a flood plain, so she hadn’t bought flood insurance. But after months of filling out paperwork, she got reimbursement from federal disaster relief programs. 

On July 10 this year, a year later to the day, another bout of heavy rain flooded Powell’s house again. The damage was just as bad the second time. The couple considered moving, but quickly realized that the real estate market had changed drastically since they’d purchased their house in 2019. The cost of buying a new home aside, Powell, like many of her fellow climate-conscious Vermonters, doesn’t know where she would go. “We thought we were in this climate change haven,” she said. “Then you realize that that doesn’t really exist.”

Listen to former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris stump on the campaign trail, and they’ll tell you that America has a housing crisis of epic proportions. It’s one of the only issues Republicans and Democrats in Congress agree needs to be fixed, and fast. 

The problem dates back to 2008, when the Great Recession caused real estate developers to cut back dramatically on the number of new homes they were building. The rate of new homes coming online has lagged ever since, adding up to a deficit of 3.8 million housing units across the country as of 2020. 

What’s more, many of the cities where Americans want to live have strict zoning laws on the books that restrict new developments and stifle the constriction of multi-family homes in particular. Even as states have tried to make it easier for developers to build new homes, local governments and residents have conspired to stop the flow of new housing. Meanwhile, as everything has become more expensive over the past half-decade, the cost of building new homes has skyrocketed.  

Now, extreme weather events are squeezing already-limited housing options. Climate change-driven disasters have been hitting the U.S. with more intensity over the past quarter-century, creating tens of billions of dollars worth of damage every year, as global average temperatures climb. Last year, 2.5 million Americans were displaced, either temporarily or permanently, by extreme weather. And much of America’s existing housing stock is not built to withstand the consequences of climate change, which means that tens of millions of renters and homeowners are vulnerable. 

Climate change isn’t the root cause of America’s housing crisis, but it is an erratic compounding factor that officials from the smallest towns in New England to the biggest cities in California are being forced to reckon with. This summer alone, Hurricanes Helene and Milton temporarily displaced millions of people across the South and caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure, businesses, and properties. 

A year out from the devastating flood of 2023, which killed two people and damaged 4,800 homes and businesses, Vermonters are confronting the difficult reality that extreme weather is shoving the state deeper into a housing deficit. Vermont’s historic downtowns, clustered along the rivers that once served as vital transportation corridors and provided power for mills and factories, are being drowned by the very arteries that once gave them life. “People want to stay in the community, but there’s a close to 0 percent vacancy rate,” said Lauren Hierl, a nonpartisan member of the Montpelier City Council. “When you have an event like the flood come in that takes offline even 50 units, there’s just nowhere for people to go.” 

A recent report conducted by Vermont housing officials found that Vermont needs to build between 24,000 and 36,000 new homes by 2029 to accommodate its growing population. The cost of building a small home or apartment rose from $370,000 in 2022 to $500,000 a year later. Half of renters in the state spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing — widely considered the threshold between affordable and unaffordable. 

Seth Bongartz, a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives, sees the housing shortage in his state as a “little microcosm” of larger national housing and climate trends. Bongartz recently introduced a bill that makes it easier for Vermont municipalities to approve new housing developments in the state’s most populated areas, the idea being that building denser housing where amenities like gas, water, and sewage already exist simultaneously expands housing stock and prevents sprawl into the state’s revered wilderness. The state’s Republican governor vetoed the bill, but Democratic majorities in the state legislature overrode him, and the law was enacted in June. The loosened restrictions will help jumpstart more development, Bongartz said: “It’s coming.” But so are more floods. 

In Vermont’s capital, city leaders, nonprofits, business associations, and tourism boards are trying to take on the city’s twin housing and climate crises. And they’re doing it with community input. A series of public meetings held in the months after the 2023 floods, attended by hundreds of concerned residents, spurred the development of a new commission dedicated to figuring out how to protect the city from the effects of climate change. Working alongside the city council, the coalition is racing against the clock to make Montpelier more resilient before the next heavy rainstorm. 

To the passing leaf peeper, hiker, or skier, Montpelier, the smallest state capital in the U.S., is the picture of Vermont charm. Brick houses line the Winooski River, which runs parallel to Main Street. Small businesses sling lattes, pizzas, and secondhand flannels. The gold-domed capitol building, on State Street, stands sentinel over a city that’s home to just 8,000 residents. 

But things have changed since the event the National Weather Service dubbed the Great Vermont Flood of 2023. Close to 100 buildings in the capital, many of them businesses, were damaged. Some shops never reopened, and the ones that did are struggling to recoup losses from closures forced by the disaster. The only federal post office in Montpelier has been shuttered for more than a year, meaning that residents of Vermont’s capital city have to go to a nearby town to mail their packages. On the far side of State Street, a mother is still camping out with her two teenage sons in the shell of their former house. A small number of houses have been abandoned permanently — their owners are in the process of getting buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, the federal government’s disaster relief arm. 

To those in the know, it’s obvious that the floods sparked the beginning of a precarious new era in Montpelier, one that has not yet come into full focus.

Melissa Whittaker and her husband, Carlo, own a pizza restaurant called Positive Pie in downtown Montpelier. On the morning of July 10, 2023, water started rushing into their basement faster than they had ever seen — and soon, into the first floor, too. Keeping the water out was futile; they had to close the restaurant and speed home before the roads washed out. When they came back the next morning, Positive Pie was utterly wrecked. Prosciutto and mozzarella were scattered on the floor in indistinguishable black piles. In the basement, the wall separating their building from the neighboring building had been blown into bits by the force of the water. Gobs of pizza dough hung like stalactites from the rafters. 

The federal flood insurance they had only covered the first floor of the restaurant — the national flood insurance program doesn’t cover basements in flood zones. In order to reopen the restaurant, they needed new floors, walls, plumbing, electric wiring, and a mezzanine steel loft to store the goods they had previously kept downstairs. The upgrades and repairs cost them $800,000 over the course of more than 12 months. Melissa and Carlo got a little over $100,000 from their insurance company and $200,000 from a Vermont state business assistance program. 

They applied for a small business loan from the federal government to cover the remaining $500,000. The money came with an unthinkable price: their house as collateral. “If we go bankrupt, we lose everything,” Melissa said. 

Melissa and Carlo aren’t the only homeowners in central Vermont who are one disaster away from homelessness. After more floods hit the region this summer, city and state leaders are desperately trying to find answers to a question thousands of other American communities, from Florida to North Carolina to California, are also struggling to address: How do you help affected citizens in the short term and prepare for next year at the same time? Two projects underway in Montpelier hint at the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

Ben Doyle is president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, a nonprofit organization that works to safeguard old buildings and other heirlooms of Vermont’s long history. In his spare time, he volunteers on the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience — an agency that was created after the flooding last year at the urging of Montpelier residents. Since he began volunteering, the commission has taken up just about every spare minute he has. “I can’t coach basketball,” he told me on a drive around Montpelier in September. “But I can do this.” 

The Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience was born of a series of well-attended public meetings, organized by three local organizations, that took place in the months following the 2023 flood. Paul Costello, a local with an uncanny knack for mediating tough conversations, led the discussions. The conversations were focused on climate resilience, Costello told me: how to build better communications and early warning systems ahead of disastrous floods; whether the city’s water treatment facility, which almost flooded, needs to be hardened; and, crucially, how to direct water away from houses and businesses downtown. 

Many of the roughly 1,000 people who attended the meetings had just lived through their first climate-driven disaster and were struggling to navigate the slow, bureaucratic, and confusing federal disaster relief process. Less than 2 percent of Vermonters had flood insurance before the floods hit.  

The effect of the flooding on the state’s housing stock was a hot topic at the public meetings. People who had never considered moving before started looking around for new places to live and were startled, like Brittany Powell was, to discover that there was virtually no affordable real estate to be found in the entire state. Addressing the multifaceted problems driving the housing shortage in Montpelier, Costello said, wasn’t something the meetings were aimed at fixing, but the issue was inescapable. “It weaves through everything in our community,” he said.  

At the last of the meetings, more than 300 people crowded into the auditorium of the local High School. Its basement had been steeped in four feet of water just months prior. Attendees were given six blue stickers, which they could put on more than a dozen resilience projects they had come up with over the course of the previous two meetings. The most popular initiatives fell into three buckets: establishing an emergency response system, restoring the floodplain, and creating a more resilient downtown. Soon after, the city, in collaboration with two local nonprofits, officially established the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience, a group of 14 volunteers and one paid executive director, which would be tasked with working in parallel with the city to accomplish the goals the community put forth.

For the past year, Doyle has been trying to make one of the most important of those directives — establish areas that can serve as giant sponges for flood water around Montpelier — happen. The project that’s closest to coming to fruition is called 5 Home Farm Way, an 18-acre parcel and the site of a historic home owned by the founding family of Montpelier. Doyle took me to the site, which the Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the resilience commission and the city, aims to turn into a natural containment area that can hold water that would otherwise flow from the Winooski River into Montpelier during a flood event. If the Great Vermont Flood hadn’t happened, the decrepit house on the property might have been turned into a museum or the headquarters for a nonprofit. But after the rain fell last summer, Doyle — who had dedicated his career to historical preservation — knew the house had to go. “The idea of more public investment going into a building that is no longer sustainable because of climate change is a bad idea,” he said. 

Removing the house and creating a channel connecting the property to the Winooski river will take roughly two years, Doyle said, and the engineering studies haven’t been completed yet, which means that no one knows exactly how much flooding in Montpelier will be averted by the project. But once it’s done, 5 Home Farm Way will serve as natural flood protection for the town, hopefully preventing more homes from being destroyed in future years. “The idea behind it is that maybe it drops the floodwater in Montpelier down by six inches,” he said. 

Still, Doyle knows the scale of the flooding to come can’t be stopped by a single, 18-acre parcel. “There’s a bunch of other parcels in this region that if you could coordinate them all and have it all be floodplain restoration you’re starting to actually do something,” he said. “But it’s going to take like 20 of these projects to make a difference. That’s tens of millions of dollars and decades of work.” 

Right across the street from 5 Home Farm Way, the city is embarking on a project that tackles Montpelier’s climate and housing predicament from the other direction. There, the local government is building a new affordable housing development on the site of an old golf course formerly owned by a fraternal social club called The Elks. For years, the Montpelier City Council hoped developers would buy the vacant property and turn it into an affordable apartment complex — something Montpelier desperately needed even before the floods hit. But there was little appetite among developers for such a project in Montpelier, said Hierl, the city council member. Developers were more interested in building more lucrative single-family condos in Stowe and other areas of Vermont where wealthy people tend to buy expensive second homes. 

So in 2022, the city took matters into its own hands, purchasing the 138-acre property with a $2 million bond with plans to turn it into a recreational site and a housing development. “We felt like we needed to take a more active stance, as our local government, because housing is such a crisis,” Hierl said. “We need to be proactive.” After the floods hit Montpelier and dozens of houses by the river were inundated, Hierl and other members of the council realized just how important their investment was. 

The former Elks Club is located just a few miles from downtown, but it’s a world away in elevation, located at the top of a hill that’s never been touched by flooding. The aim is to eventually build approximately 300 units of housing on the site, which would significantly alleviate the housing shortage in Montpelier. But there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before the city can break ground. The property still needs sewage, water, and electricity lines put in. It needs a road with two exit points, per Vermont state law. It also needs a developer on board to cover most of the upfront costs of building. The city has $500,000 in FEMA funds to use, left over from 2023, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Hierl estimates it’ll be three years before the city breaks ground on the project, and a couple years after that before the new housing comes on the market. Still, she said, the simple reality is that there is no one else in Montpelier committed to providing affordable housing opportunities for residents. 

“In some of the towns in Vermont that are successful in the development of new housing units, it’s often taken an intervention from the municipality to make it happen,” said Doyle, standing in front of the old Elks Club and looking out over the acres of sloping lawn that surround it. “Some people don’t believe that’s the role of government, helping facilitate the development of affordable housing. And yet, if the city didn’t step in, that’s not what would’ve happened here.”

It’s one thing for a city like Montpelier to take steps toward building a single affordable housing development, but it’s quite another to build enough affordable, climate-resilient housing to meet the need across Vermont — and across the country. Alex Farrell, Vermont’s top housing official and a Republican, said that, while Vermont has made strides in becoming more climate resilient, he doesn’t know how his state will address the toll extreme weather is taking on housing across Vermont without outside help. “To ask states to take this on alone, it’s just not doable,” he said. 

This year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, both Democrats, introduced a bill that would create a $30 billion social housing authority within the federal government aimed at financing affordable units across the U.S. The bill pulls from green housing legislation that AOC and Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, introduced in 2019 that would have directed billions toward making existing public housing stock climate resilient, had it passed. 

The new legislation is a long shot — congressional Republicans want less social safety net spending, not more. And record-high inflation has led to a situation in which new federal spending, in general, is increasingly frowned upon by voters who will be casting ballots this fall. But in Vermont, where extreme weather events are just starting to affect communities, local and state officials — both Democratic and Republican — say out-of-the-box thinking is exactly what’s needed. 

“It’s not like this kind of disaster is a one-off thing that’s really unusual or that we might not see again,” said Hierl. “Our federal, our state, and our local government all need to be better equipped to help people through these challenging climate disasters that we know are just going to continue growing. We need to do better.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The flood that forced a housing reckoning in Vermont on Oct 22, 2024.

 The interconnected climate and housing crises are putting some Montpelier residents one disaster away from homelessness. Housing Grist