See, this is what I'm talking about. Why do we dream so small?

>No matter what you are not getting there in 90 minutes without billions of investment in infrastructure.

Yes, let's do that! This is what I want to do! Let's invest billions of dollars in infrastructure.

Let's reduce car usage, make our towns walkable, cut down on polluting air travel, and generally improve our quality of life. I've lived in Switzerland and let me tell you: the trains fucking rule. Being able to go to almost any small town from Geneva while barely having to plan in a quiet, comfortable train is incredible. Everyone loves it. Even rich people use it because it's faster and more convenient than a car.

I have so many questions! Did you make that? If not, where did you find that delightful illustration?

I just want to point out that all these suggestions aren't just attainable - they're actually incredibly modest. It's not a fantasy to get to Boston and Montreal in 90 min from Burlington. In fact, we should be mad that we can't. Something happened to our society that we can barely maintain the infrastructure that previous generations actually had to go out and build, much less imagine a world where we expand it. It's really sad to see how small our dreams have become. We've settled so low that when asked to fantasize disregarding cost, our responses are basically "any train would be nice."

The Swiss have much rougher terrain than us, and their train system will take you to some of the most podunk towns from Geneva in an hour. Spanish high speed rail will take you to the capital from any other major metro area in a few hours tops through more mountainous country. Quito, Ecuador is currently building a subway - a country with nowhere near the wealth we have can break ground on public transit. Meanwhile, we can barely imagine replacing our trains that are 10 years past their service date.

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I'm totally with you, friend. A lot of people seem to forget that most of us are just one accident, crisis, or diagnosis away from being desperate. It's disheartening to read people actively stigmatize our friends and neighbors. I hope they learn to have a bit of humility, though I hope they're never forced to learn it the hard way.

There's really no need to be so condescending. I know that's what's happening. Enough of my comments are already anti-capitalist rants that sometimes I decide to spice it up and criticize specific policies on their own terms. What frustrates me so much about this program is that it's both excessively neoliberal and objectively a failure even within that bean counting, neoliberal framework that increasingly dominates every aspect of our lives.

Did you know that they don't just means-test it, but the means-tesitng depends on the month and the weather?

>Last year, under pressure to let hundreds of Vermonters experiencing homelessness who had been booted from a pandemic-era assistance program back into motels, the state significantly relaxed the cold-weather rule. Anyone making less than $24,000 a year could seek shelter in motels from Nov. 22, 2021 to March 1, 2022, regardless of the forecast, DCF said at the time.

>This year, the state has made a similar announcement: From Dec. 15 to March 15, 2023, temporary shelter in motels will be available no matter the forecast, and can be authorized in increments of up to 30 days.

>But that rule doesn’t kick in for another month. From now until Dec. 15, and again between March 15, 2023 and April 15, 2023, emergency housing for cold weather will be regionally authorized based on strict criteria:

> * Temperatures (or wind chill) must be forecast to dip below 20 degrees Fahrenheit or, > * Temperatures must be forecast to dip below 32 degrees and there must be a greater than 50% chance of precipitation. > * Either condition must be forecast to be met for at least three hours within the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., based on the town in which DCF’s local district office is located.

Absolute madness. Who even writes this shit? I don't even think I could come up with a better parody of a neoliberal housing program. Are we really asking social workers to refresh the fucking weather forecast over and over to see if their clients can get off the street for the night? Incredible.

We should learn from our mistakes and look to other countries' successes. There are good examples of government owned housing being very desirable. More than 40% of French renters live in publicly owned housing, and French cities and towns are pretty universally beloved by residents and tourists alike.

edit: The writer of that Atlantic "article" is associated with several conservative think tanks. He's the VP for research at the Manhattan Institute. They're for privatization of public services and have published many books about supply side economics. They're also for increased incarceration and "broken windows" theory, and they were against the ACA and oppose basically any health reform. This is not an article; it's an op-ed from a hack.

No you're right the hotel program sucks. Hotels aren't a substitute for a house even when they're well maintained, and at this point it's well documented that these guests are not being treated well at these places. Paying hotel owners gobs of money so our fellow Vermonters who need our help can live in inadequate housing, without kitchens, and often without access to transportation is a shitty program. It's LOADS better than not helping them, but it's not the kind of environment that poor woman in the article needs. She's been through a lot and deserves better.

What bothers me so much about it is how expensive it is. I'm for doing the right thing even when it costs money, but in this case, it's not even the financially responsible decision. The state could actually invest money in building houses and let folks stay for free and the paypack period at these hotel rates wouldn't even be that long.

Build public housing.

edit: and ban Airbnb.

My comment is proving to be pretty controversial. People post on this sub about housing almost every single day; you'd think it'd be a pretty uncontroversial stance.

Sure, those too. I take no stance on the concepts of camps or vacation cabins or whatever right now. My point is all those things existed before Airbnb, but what didn't exist is the plundering of our housing stock for short term rentals.

I think you're confused?

Airbnb is a website that allows a property owner to book any property for short term rentals. Vacation cabins are sometimes called camps here, and they're usually a small building in a scenic location with limited amenities intended for short-term, recreational use. I have no problem with the concept of vacation cabins. I do have a problem with people depleting our housing pool by converting single family homes and apartments into short term rentals.

Yes. For once, the solution is so simple. I don't understand why everyone wants to make complex tax systems that add more nonsense to our already byzantine and often unenforced tax code to disincentivize Airbnbs. Ban them and be done with it.

Ban airbnb. We don't need it. We were fine before and we'll be fine after. There were inns, hotels, vacation cabins, etc. before Airbnb. There's no need to allow a company to cannibalize our housing stock for short term unregulated hotels.

I've given you so much actual data. This entire comment is literally a made up story, an anecdotal observation, and ending on an unsupported (and factually incorrect) claim based on absolutely nothing, all while completely ignoring all the actual real data I've laid out for you.

>But it does. Even an infinitesimal demand side imbalance can cause chaos on supply and price. Look at the stock market, and the concept of a squeeze. If you can get demand to even slightly outstrip supply you can create a cyclical effect where price rises because price is rising. The market snowballs.

How changes in supply and demand affect pricing in general and in housing specifically are both open areas of research in economics. Papers are still being written about it.

Squeezes are the result of derivative financial instruments. That has absolutely nothing to do housing. Like, there's no point here. There's no analogous situation in our housing market to a short squeeze. The only thing they have in common is that they're both markets, but you could not have chosen two more different markets.

>If you have 10 houses on the market and 10 buyers the price will be at or below ask. If you have 10 houses and 11 buyers someone (the out of stater with means) will bid up the price on one property. When they do that the market resets at that new rate Bob down the road says “I have equity now as the market is up, I’m going to list” he lists at the inflated rate, and because we had 11 buyers and 10 houses the 11th buyer is suckered into that higher rate. And since thats the new rate Suzy across town says “I wonder if I can get x for my property and lists even higher, Bob pockets full from the inflated sale bites on that and we keep the cycle going up. Add in near 0 interest rates, full employment, Covid relief money, millennials starting to inherit boomer money, stuff goes arwry. It doesn’t take a large imbalance in supply and demand to make that swing. Houses needing work have been selling above assessed value no inspection, because demand is there.

This is a work of fiction. Boby and Suzy aren't real. There are more than 10 houses in the world. Yeah, no shit the hypothetical you invented supports your argument. I don't know why you're making up stories when I've given you actual, real data.

>All of my friends who have been outbid were outbid by cash offers who are residing in the homes.

Anecdote. That's entirely possible, but if it is the case, then it's a statistical anomaly. Again, we have really good data on who is buying homes, and we know that regular people like OP buying houses in cash is the exception. 70% of home buyers finance, and once you include financing and contingencies on selling their previous home, that's virtually all regular human buyers. No contingencies and with cash, statistically, is investors.

>The investment thing is an issue in places where there is a value in investing in property. But that’s not Barton, or Orange, Or vershire.

Unsupported claim. You have no idea and clearly just made that up.

Yeah exactly. This is happening all around the world. The world's rich have been getting steadily richer since 2008, and they're moving that capital into housing. This is why it bothers me so much that people here blame "out of staters." It's an international crisis, not some hyper-local niche situation in our little backwater.

You're right; idk how I misread that graph. Will edit.

It really doesn't change the argument though. Doubling or even quintupling the number doesn't change anything when we're talking about different orders of magnitude.

>I know countless people who in central and eastern VT have been outbid by cash offers at or over asking price by out of staters who have remote jobs, or have accepted a local job, and are fleeing stuff in other places.

Those out-of-state cash offers are basically always investors. Private equity firms usually don't say they are private equity firms when they're buying houses, and people who lose out on houses don't get to meet the people who outbid them. What you're hearing is what your friend's realtor heard from the seller's realtor who heard it from the other buyer's realtor who probably heard it from the buyer's lawyer, because they're an investment firm, and not a person.

It's gossip, and it's gossip that suits the investors because it distracts from what is happening. I wouldn't even be surprised if they are telling sellers' agents that they're out of state remote workers just to muddy the waters. Seriously, this isn't even an anecdote - it's a rumor. This is why we use data to understand what is happening, and not what the local rumor mill is saying about it.

I believe you that your friends have had that experience, and that REALLY FUCKING SUCKS. I am SO MAD on their behalf. I don't want to live in a world where my friends and neighbors are priced out. I want to fix this problem, but like I have said over and over, you are angry at the wrong people. Your friends keep being outbid by investors, not by people like OP, because there are not enough people like OP to even come close to explaining your friends being constantly outbid. Your friends don't know they are losing out to investors because why would the investors go around advertising that? How would your friends even know? They are reporting the best information that they have, which is a rumor they heard from their realtor.

Pulling up the number of houses for sale right now on Zillow in one of the slowest months of the year has absolutely nothing to do with anything. In fact, if you knew at all what you were talking about, you'd realize that actually hurts your point. Let me explain.

Here's some actual data. It's a graph of the number of houses for sale every month for 5 years. In the on-season, it's pretty typical for well over a thousand homes to sell every month. Even in the slow months, it can often clear a thousand. If you look at a chart of how many houses get listed every year, that number is going down because, as I keep repeating, the wealthy are buying up more and more of the houses. That is what is causing housing prices to skyrocket. The pool is shrinking.

Why is the pool shrinking? As this graph shows, the pool shrinking is happening at the same time as investors are buying up the housing. Once someone who doesn't plan to live in it buys up a house as an investment, it is out of the homeowner pool and, in the best case scenario, it turns into a rental, though it is increasingly likely it turns into an airbnb.

We haven't even gotten to the vacation homes yet, which is approximately 10,000 homes. That is 5x the number of households as have moved here.

What you're doing is scapegoating, pure and simple. These effects cannot be explained by 2000 more households. The scale is off by an order of magnitude, and the timelines are off. This started before the pandemic. It's the continuation of a trend that has been going on since 2008, but has really picked up steam since 2017 or so.

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>At some point we can’t be the haven for everyone everywhere. People need to fight the systems where they are to improve things there, otherwise we will become those places.

You keep acting like people are moving here in droves, when in reality they are not. 4,800 people is absolutely fucking tiny. There are dozens of mid-sized cities throughout the country growing faster than that. You're making up a phenomenon that doesn't exist and then using it as a scapegoat for the more complicated problems that are actually happening that, for whatever reason, you have some vested interest in not accepting. I genuinely do not understand.

You misunderstand the scale of the data.

5000 people is about 2000 households. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the TENS OF THOUSANDS of houses that are second homes, or the approximately hundred thousand or so houses owned by landlords.

You are fighting over scraps with the least important factor in your problem.

You're wrong, actually. You're mad at the wrong people. From https://vtdigger.org/2022/08/12/wildly-unusual-census-shows-explosion-of-migration-into-vermont-in-pandemics-first-year/

>More than 4,800 people moved to Vermont between 2020 and 2021, the highest net migration total the state has reported in at least a decade, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates.

4800 people is around .7% of the population. That's not what is driving up the costs. Costs are going up because the rich are getting richer and are hoarding everything, including other people's houses. 50% of all new construction and 20% of existing housing is second homes. Corporate buyers are making up almost 25% of all SFH sales in the state, up from just 5% a couple decades ago.

And it's not just housing - oil companies have been consistently posting record profits since oil prices went through the roof, which is how we even got to this post.

We are watching our housing turn into a rent trap before our very eyes; we are watching our neighbors are increasingly unable to heat their homes, and you are taking it out on this poor fucking person who can't afford to heat their house.

You are on the same fucking team. You are both victims of the same system. Maybe, instead of being dicks to other people in similar situations as you because they moved here from a different state, we can learn a bit of class solidarity. Or you can keep doing what you're doing, and normal people can continue to squabble among ourselves for the scraps while the rich leave us less and less. The former actually has a chance of making our lives better; the latter makes you feel smug on the internet.

I really like that person's suggestion. If you bought in cash, a HELOC is a great idea.

Hey maybe don't be a smug jerk to someone in a tough spot. You don't even give bad advice; you're just an asshole about it.

That's a shame and honestly a bit surprising. Basically everyone around me is pretty friendly. Every time I'm doing some chore and my tractor looks like it's struggling with the mud, I've got every old farmer pulling over to see if they need me to bring their tractors over to help.

Neither do I, but I've learned "neighbors" here is a pretty expansive concept. My nearest neighbors are just under a mile away, but it doesn't stop us from treating each other as neighbors. I'd say anyone within 5 miles is basically a neighbor.

I'm really sorry you're in this predicament, and I feel your pain. I moved here 5 years ago, and right after closing, our house's heating system failed and we didn't really have the cash to replace it or install a stove. It was a very long, hard winter.

My only thought is go meet your neighbors and ask them for advice. We didn't know any of our neighbors then. Now that we do, they've all said how happy they would've been to help us out any way they could've, as I would for any new neighbor. If nothing else, you can have a friendly place to warm up on the coldest days.