Population promoter pitches familiar figure: 802,000

Chu proposes a goal of boosting Vermont’s population to 802,000 — he tweaked the number slightly to make it familiar to most people who live in a state with only one area code. And he proposes doing so in the next 12 years.

Speaking last week at the Lamoille Economic Development Corporation’s annual meeting, Chu said bringing on 154,000 additional residents by the year 2035 will require an economic action plan, something he said is lacking at the state level.

He said it will also require adding 13,500 new workers each year, and it will need to happen as roughly 14,800 Vermonters retire from the workforce annually. That deficit is not going to be reversed using the people who are already here — he said last year across the entire state, there were only 5,300 high school seniors.

Chu said he saw a line in a Vermont Business Magazine story shortly after the 2020 U.S. Census showed Vermont’s population had grown in the past decade that read, “Vermonters can stop sounding the alarm about a dwindling population.” Sure, he said, the population had grown.

“But I’m going to sound the alarm on demographics,” he said. “Because Vermont is also growing older, and we don’t know what we want to be when we grow up.”

Among the data Chu pointed to illustrate that aging population:

• Over the past two decades, Vermont has had the lowest fertility rates in the country, and deaths have outpaced births every year since 2017.

• In 13 of the state’s 14 counties — Chittenden being the outlier — most of the people in the workforce are 45 or older.

• The census data showed a spike in the 15-to-24-year-old bracket, but that’s because the census counted college students. “But it means they’re here, and that, to me, is an opportunity,” Chu said.

• A decade ago, there were two job seekers for every available job. Now, it’s flipped, and there are two or more open jobs for every job seeker. He said if every person who was looking for a job found one, there would still be more than 12,000 open jobs.

Chu said that the net population change between 2021 and last year was a whopping 92 people.

“That’s not enough,” he said. “Vermont needs more people, but we also need to tell the story that more people need Vermont.”

He pointed to quality of life and relative protection from climate change, this summer’s flooding notwithstanding.

The key to bringing more people to the state is building more housing, and Chu said the Vermont Futures Project proposes just as audacious a goal as the population mark — 350,000 non-seasonal homes, also by 2035. Right now, there are 269,527 non-season housing units, according to Chu.

Chu said the project’s data shows there were only 1,000 active home listings in the state as of earlier this year, something that many people might attribute solely to the pandemic-related buying spree by out-of-staters. But he said dwindling numbers of house listings have been dropping steadily since before the pandemic, with nearly 8,000 listings in 2017, dropping to 3,500 just before the pandemic began.

“COVID did not cause it. It accelerated a pre-existing trend,” Chu said.

If hitting those two goals of population and housing seem like pie in the sky ideas, Chu urged the people attending the economic development corporation’s meeting last week to think about what could happen just at the county level.

He said the current Lamoille County population is about 26,000, and if it were to do its part to proportionally contribute to Chu’s big-number goal, Lamoille would seek to boost its population to 32,000 over the next dozen years, an average 520 new people a year.

On the housing side, Chu said there are currently 11,268 non-seasonal housing units in Lamoille County, and the 2035 target should be 14,632 units, or an average of 280 new homes a year.

“This is not prescriptive and it’s just a starting point for conversation,” he said. “But if every community around the state can be bought into this goal and we’re aligned toward making it happen, each county’s contribution, each town’s contribution, is really not that big. We can make this happen.”

Beth Foy, the selectboard chair for the town of Johnson, said part of the problem in creating new housing is how to account for the countless tracts of land that are 10 acres or more that only have one or two houses on them. Chu said data bears that out, too — he saw a statistic last year showing Vermont has the largest average lot size of any state in the country.

“It wasn’t even close,” he said.

Joe Woodin, CEO of Copley Hospital, said a major hurdle is Act 250, Vermont’s land use law, which he said discourages development and causes projects to “sit on the books for over a year.”

Rep. Saudia LaMont, D-Morristown, said the goal of building Vermont’s workforce involves having affordable workforce housing, and “our current housing landscape doesn’t support that.” She said the average one-bedroom apartment in the area is going for $1,350 a month, with studios renting for $1,100 a month.

“Our incomes do not match the current rental rates,” LaMont said, adding that high rents and low inventory require a roommate or partner, and the housing stock doesn’t support multi-generational living.

Chu said that may be the case now, but any movement on the housing spectrum is progress, whether that means single-family homes or bunches of small apartments that will allow an adult child to move out of home or a retiree to downsize. That will open larger units for larger families.

The bottom line is Vermont simply needs to build more housing of all kinds, and Chu said there is a mantra to keep in mind as he and his project look toward 2035.

“If housing is a human right, then it should be right to build housing,” he said.