This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Middlebury is getting a new neighborhood.
About a half-mile from the center of town, Summit Properties has begun laying the groundwork for more than 250 new homes — both for sale and for rent, at a range of price points. The Stonecrop Meadows project is among the largest new developments outside of Chittenden County in recent memory.
“We’re building an ambitious, all-electric, innovative neighborhood on the scale and of a type that rural Vermont hasn’t seen in decades,” said Zeke Davisson, Summit’s chief operating officer, at a groundbreaking event on Monday.
The Seminary Street lot that will host this new neighborhood is still an open, snowy field, dotted with orange cones marking newly-installed water service lines. But the first houses to be sold there are on track for move-in this summer.
Getting a project of this scale accomplished has taken many hands. Middlebury College got the ball rolling, Davisson said, when administrators approached the developer saying the college had a workforce housing problem. The college then bought the lot on Seminary Street and passed it off to Summit with the goal of building housing available to the whole community, not only college employees. A 2023 legislative tweak to Act 250, Vermont’s land use review law, allowed the project to move forward without obtaining that state permit, which can often add time, cost and risk to the development process.
Summit had the tall task of installing key infrastructure — such as water, utilities, and roads — and used federal, state and local funding to do it. When that funding came up short, the college stepped in with $2.5 million in gap financing. The town will ultimately take over much of that infrastructure, once it’s built.
Gov. Phil Scott, who is keen to make it easier for developers to build infrastructure, used the groundbreaking event to make a pitch for a new infrastructure financing program for rural communities. The Republican governor is urging lawmakers to adopt his proposal, which is modeled off of Vermont’s existing tax increment financing program.
“The basic infrastructure needed for projects like water, sewer, storm water — those are the basics that really can be a bottleneck for some of these really effective developments,” Scott said.
Summit plans to open the development’s first phase — 45 duplexes and townhomes, built in an East Montpelier factory — later this year. They’ll be sold at a wide range of price points, from around $200,000 on the low end to over $650,000 on the high end, according to Davisson.
That’s largely because of a mix of different subsidies in play. Six of those homes will be sold through Addison Housing Works’ Shared Equity program, making them affordable to people making less than 80% of area median income, and 31 will be available through the Vermont Housing Finance Agency’s Middle-Income Homeownership Program, which caters to people at what Davisson calls the “workforce” income bracket. The remaining houses will be sold at market rate.
A 35-unit apartment building, financed with federal low-income housing tax credits, is on track to open next year. General plans for the remaining 174 homes have been approved, Davisson said, but the additional buildings are not yet financed or permitted. Given the uncertainty of key federal funding sources, Davisson could not provide a timeline for the remainder of the development.
The cadre of officials at the groundbreaking gathering lauded Stonecrop as a model example of how an employer, a town government, and a developer can join forces to ease Vermont’s deep housing shortage. Addison County needs upwards of 1,300 additional homes by the end of the decade to keep pace with demand, according to a state analysis of regional housing targets.
“That’s what a community chipping in and taking a big chunk out of their goal looks like,” said Alex Farrell, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Middlebury College, developer and town join forces on major housing project.