Amid the lowest rental vacancy rate in the nation, the second worst rates of homelessness and a record rise in home prices, Vermont lawmakers vowed to make housing a top priority this legislative session. And indeed, the General Assembly has considered spending roughly $100 million and making a slate of regulatory reforms aimed at increasing the supply of housing.
But proposals to improve renters’ rights have received far less airtime — and even less action. To advocates pushing for stronger protections for some of those at the bottom of the housing market, the policy direction in Montpelier is a natural consequence of who writes the laws.
“The Statehouse has been known for years as the house of landlords,” said Tom Proctor, a housing organizer for Rights & Democracy, an advocacy group that has pushed for a “just cause” eviction standard at the state and local levels.
In the Legislature’s upper chamber, that reputation is not without warrant. A third of the Senate’s 30 members have made money buying, selling or renting real estate, according to 2023 ethics disclosure forms compiled and analyzed by VTDigger as part of its Full Disclosure series. Seven state senators disclosed income from rental property, and two others own or have a stake in real estate companies. Yet another is a retired realtor.
VTDigger could not determine the percentage of Vermonters who are landlords, but nationally a little less than 7% of all individual filers reported rental income on their taxes in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center.
And while nearly 30% of all Vermont households rent their homes, only two out of 30 state senators do so, according to property records.
Those with real estate interests also hold a significant share of the Senate’s most influential posts. On the Senate Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful committee in the chamber, four of its seven members, including its chair, Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, reported rental income on their most recent financial disclosures.
And landlords also chair the Senate panels with jurisdiction over housing and economic development, agriculture, education and transportation, while a former realtor, Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, helms the tax-writing finance committee.
There are proportionally fewer landlords in the 150-member House of Representatives, according to 2022 campaign disclosures also analyzed by VTDigger (Unlike state senators, House members are required to report only their employers, not sources of income, upon taking office, so VTDigger relied on campaign disclosures for this count.). Twenty members reported rental income in their campaign disclosures, and five others reported working as real estate brokers or for property management companies.
But tenants are just as rare in the House as they are in the Senate. A VTDigger analysis of property and business records found that at least 94% of the 150 lawmakers in the lower chamber own their home, or live in a house owned by a family member.
Legislative ethics rules don’t prohibit landlords — or renters, for that matter — from voting on legislation that deals with landlord-tenant issues. But critics of the Legislature’s current makeup often argue the problem is less about conflicts-of-interest and than it is about a skewed perspective.
Proctor, for example, thinks some lawmakers are hostile to renter-friendly reforms because they fear losing money from their investments or power over their tenants. But he argues the larger problem is that, for the vast majority of people serving in the Legislature, the concerns of tenants are abstract and remote.
“When you’re hearing stories from your landlord friends in your social network, and you’re not hearing stories from your tenant friends — because you don’t have any — of course you’re going to end up siding with people who are kind of within your class strata,” he said.
And that’s compounded by how hard it is to get low-income Vermonters and tenants to lobby for themselves, he said. Landlords and others with real estate interests, meanwhile, can much more easily afford to take time out of their day to testify before the Legislature. (And they don’t risk being kicked out of their home for speaking out.)
Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, one of just two renters in the Senate, recalled piping up in committee last year upon hearing from landlord after landlord during a debate on landlord-tenant relations.
“I was like: Is anybody gonna stand up and talk about the rental experience? And so finally I was like, ‘I guess I have to.’ It was just really wild,” she said.
Lawmakers introduced bills this session to stabilize rents and to prevent evictions statewide for no cause. But those measures never made it out of committee. Another bill, which is advancing, at first attempted to revive yesteryear’s fights for a rental registry. The measure would have created a statewide database of rental units, and an annual $35 per-unit fee paid by landlords would have funded the state’s rental code enforcement office. But the version that passed out of the House has punted the issue another year and instead asks state officials to write a report on the matter.
A month before adjournment, Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, who chairs the House General and Housing Committee, said his panel was exploring an eviction diversion program and a pilot program in two counties that would pay for attorneys for low-income tenants who face eviction, since the vast majority do not have legal representation. Since it’s already far past March’s mid-session “crossover” deadline, any such measures would need to be appended as a friendly amendment to a bill already in motion, since no legislation featuring such proposals has advanced this session. Stevens made no promises — but insisted he’d try.
“Stranger things have happened,” he said. “Harder things have happened in a short amount of time.”
In the absence of state action, voters in individual municipalities have successfully petitioned to enact protections at the local level in Burlington, Essex and Winooski. But charter changes need the greenlight from Montpelier to go into effect. And Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, P/D-Burlington, who is sponsoring H.474, this year’s effort to get Burlington’s charter change approved by lawmakers, said she’s been told it might need to wait until next year, when Winooski and Essex’s proposals are up for consideration, in order to standardize language.
“I certainly hope that it moves this session, because Burlington has been waiting since 2021,” she said, referring to the date when voters backed the tenant protections by a 2-to-1 margin. (Winooski and Essex voted on their charter changes this year.)
According to Rep. Taylor Small, P/D-Winooski, the housing policy conversation in Montpelier is ignoring an important driver of the state’s homelessness problem. Vermont has successfully found permanent housing for thousands during the pandemic era, but more are becoming unhoused each day as advocates point to a steep rise in “no cause” evictions and rising rents.
“If we want to address homelessness, it means keeping folks in their housing to begin with,” said Small, who rents her home.
Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D/P-Chittenden Southeast, who played a key role in crafting this year’s housing legislation as chair of the Senate Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee, owns a multi-unit home in Burlington that she rents to long- and short-term tenants. She’s also married to Jacob Hinsdale, the scion of the Hinsdale family, which owns over 160 rental units across Chittenden County, although she said she is not involved in his family’s business.
Ram Hinsdale declined to comment on a recent public dispute between her husband and a Moroccan restaurant in Burlington, in which protestors repeatedly suggested her husband’s practices contradicted her purported beliefs. But asked if her present situation has impacted her approach to policy, Ram Hinsdale instead pointed to her past.
Her family lost its home to foreclosure when she was younger, she said, and her father had for years lived in motels after losing his business. Ram Hinsdale added that she’d helped pay for his subsidized rent for a period in her twenties and that her sister had also previously been homeless for a long period of time.
“Those are the experiences that you kind of can’t forget,” she said. “They’re very deeply imprinted in who I am.”
She also argued that those with privilege can be effective advocates for those without it. The bill her committee advanced, S.100, would pave the way for moderately denser development, particularly in municipalities that have effectively outlawed cheaper multi-family housing through single-family zoning. Ram Hinsdale noted that she and her committee’s vice chair, Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, hail from two of the richest towns in the state — Shelburne and Woodstock, respectively.
“We are pushing back the hardest on wealthy communities segregating themselves off from the rest of the population,” Ram Hinsdale said, something that she said took “bravery.”
“We’re hearing from our neighbors: ‘What if now people are parking on the street?’ And, ‘What does it mean to have a duplex next to me?’ And sometimes, we can be the actual best messenger to say that it’s not the end of the world if that happens,” she said.
Ram Hinsdale also noted she’d supported measures to beef up tenants’ rights in the past. And she pointed out that, while not the focus of S.100, the bill, as advanced out of her committee, did include money for a housing discrimination investigator and $2.5 million to help tenants pay for rental arrears.
Sen. Richard Westman, R-Lamoille, has been renting out homes for over two decades. Having spent the bulk of his working years serving in the Legislature, which offers only part-time pay and no benefits, he said it was the best way he could find to make money and retire securely.
“I got elected in 1982. Other than a short period of time being tax commissioner in between, I’ve been here every winter,” he said. “After 40 years, when I decide that I want to not run anymore — there’s no retirement from here. I will walk away with no health care.”
Westman described himself as the kind of landlord who generally hesitates to raise rents and tries to keep his tenants for as long as possible. One recently got cancer and fell eight months behind on rent, Westman said, but he’s allowed the man to stay in the apartment while he works to get caught up.
But asked if he believed tenants were sufficiently protected from less scrupulous landlords, Westman flipped the question around, and wondered whether landlords were sufficiently protected from bad tenants.
“We’ve created a situation where tenants that are difficult are extremely hard to move out of an apartment — which costs everybody,” he said.
But Vyhovsky, Westman’s colleague, argues the conversation in Montpelier too often centers the risks and inconveniences borne by landlords. And that, for her, overlooks the dramatic power imbalance between the two parties — particularly in today’s market.
She’s experienced this firsthand. Vyhovsky said her own doctor has written letters to her landlord, asking for mold and water damage to be remediated in the house she rents. That remediation hasn’t happened, but with nowhere to go, Vyhovsky feels like she has no leverage with which to press the matter.
“Investments come with risks. You have a choice to have passive income or to choose a different income source,” she said. “Renters don’t have a choice. The choice is ‘rent here or be homeless.’”
Erin Petenko contributed data analysis.
Next up in VTDigger’s Full Disclosure series: Vermont lawmakers frequently serve on the boards of nonprofits they fund. Is this an example of civic virtue — or a conflict of interest?
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