Cold Open

Housing is unaffordable because too few homes get built where people can realistically live.

So when government responds by offering more subsidies while preserving too much political control over construction, it may be treating the symptom and refinancing the disease.

Vermont has passed a housing measure that contains one genuinely important reform: faster and clearer permitting for certain projects. The question is whether that reform will lead the policy, or merely serve as an accessory to a larger system of tax credits, grants, and government-directed development.

Opening Monologue

Good evening. I’m Daniel Halloway, and this is The Liberty Report.

Tonight, Vermont’s Affordable, Efficient, and Resilient Housing Act has passed. The measure associated with Sophia Delaney combines state tax credits, grants, and infrastructure aid for energy-efficient multifamily housing with reserved units for low- and moderate-income households. It also pushes qualifying municipalities receiving certain housing funds toward faster, clearer permitting for qualifying infill and mixed-income development.

My thesis is simple: Vermont has identified a real obstacle to affordability, but it is in danger of burying the cure beneath the machinery of government.

Housing policy is never just about housing. It is about who gets to decide what gets built, where it gets built, how long approval takes, which projects receive special treatment, and whether ordinary families can live near work, services, and opportunity without requiring a government program to make the math work.

The durable answer to housing scarcity is supply. Not slogans. Not paperwork. Not political favoritism dressed up as compassion.

Build more homes. Make the rules comprehensible. Let builders build. And stop forcing families to compete for a limited number of units created under a limited number of government-approved programs.

Facts Over Feelings

Here are the facts.

Vermont’s legislation passed by a weighted tally of 64 in favor and 36 opposed, with 0 present, out of 100 seats.

The law uses state tax credits, grants, and infrastructure aid to encourage energy-efficient multifamily housing. It reserves units for low- and moderate-income households and emphasizes village, downtown, and transit-accessible areas.

It also applies pressure to municipalities that receive certain housing funds to adopt faster, clearer permitting for qualifying infill and mixed-income projects.

That final point matters a great deal.

Permitting delay is not an abstract administrative nuisance. It is a cost. Unclear rules are a cost. A process that makes a project wait for layers of discretionary approval is a cost. Those costs do not vanish because the government uses pleasant language about resilience or community planning. They show up in the final price of a home, in rents, in financing risk, and in projects never started because the uncertainty was too great.

A faster, clearer process is an improvement because it shifts some power away from delay, ambiguity, and local gatekeeping.

But the bill does not simply remove barriers. It also creates incentives administered through state programs. Tax credits, grants, and infrastructure aid may encourage projects that otherwise would not proceed. Yet they also make access to housing policy dependent on navigating government criteria, qualifying categories, and public funding channels.

That creates a distinction policymakers routinely blur.

A government can make housing easier to build by getting out of the way. Or it can make selected housing easier to build by picking projects and subsidizing them. Those are not the same model. The first expands opportunity through broad rules. The second expands administrative discretion.

California’s housing debate offers a useful contrast. Malcolm Price has argued that affordability requires more supply and accountability, not a larger political bureaucracy. That principle applies in Vermont as well. The policy label may differ. The underlying test does not: does the government clear the path for more homes, or does it reserve the path for projects that fit a political formula?

Debunking the Left

The strongest argument for Vermont’s approach is not foolish. Housing markets can fail to produce enough homes affordable to people with modest incomes, particularly in areas where demand, land constraints, and local rules limit what can be built. Energy-efficient construction can reduce operating costs. Infrastructure often has to be expanded before new housing can function. And public incentives can be defended as a way to ensure that new development includes people who might otherwise be left behind.

That case has real moral force.

But it contains a dangerous assumption: that the same institutions which helped make housing scarce can be trusted to manage housing abundance.

When government makes development conditional on a growing set of subsidies, categories, and qualifying standards, it turns housing from a market where people build to meet demand into a political contest over eligibility. The firms and projects best positioned to benefit are not necessarily those capable of delivering the most housing at the lowest cost. They may simply be those best equipped to navigate the system.

And there is a deeper contradiction.

If clearer and faster permitting is necessary for affordability, then slow and unclear permitting was a major part of the problem. That should lead to a broad reform agenda: simplify rules, reduce arbitrary delay, and allow more construction by right where communities have already decided growth belongs.

Instead, too many progressive housing plans treat deregulation as a narrow exception available only to approved projects. The state becomes the gatekeeper of affordability, rather than the remover of barriers to affordability.

Energy efficiency is a worthy goal. Mixed-income development can be a worthwhile goal. But a worthy goal does not justify an endlessly expanding apparatus to supervise private life and private property.

The state should establish clear, lawful rules. It should not become the permanent broker between every builder, every town, every financing decision, and every family looking for a home.

Power & Politics

This bill shifts power in competing directions.

It limits some municipal leverage by pushing communities receiving certain housing funds toward faster and clearer permitting. That is a meaningful confrontation with local obstruction, and conservatives should be honest about it. Local control is not a license for local institutions to prevent all growth while demanding that everyone else absorb the consequences.

But it also strengthens state leverage because the pressure is tied to housing funds. Municipalities are not simply being freed from bad rules. They are being steered through the funding relationship.

That is the political tradeoff at the heart of the bill.

State officials gain influence over local planning choices. Program administrators gain influence over which developments qualify for support. Developers who fit the program’s framework gain an advantage over those outside it. Meanwhile, taxpayers take on the risk that the system becomes more complicated, more permanent, and more expensive without producing enough broad supply.

Liberals will likely see the law as a practical response to affordability, energy concerns, and the difficulty of getting mixed-income housing built. Conservatives will see the danger of a subsidy-driven system that treats private construction as something to be managed from above.

Moderate voters are likely to evaluate it more plainly. Will it make housing easier to find? Will the approvals become less confusing? Will projects actually get built? Will costs come down rather than merely move from a tenant’s bill to a taxpayer’s ledger?

That is where competence matters more than branding.

The media narrative will naturally favor the visible promises: affordability, efficiency, resilience, and assistance for households under pressure. Those promises are politically attractive because they sound direct and humane.

But the less glamorous question is more important: what happens when the state creates a program instead of dismantling the barriers that made the program seem necessary?

If Vermont’s faster-permitting provisions become a model for broader, predictable construction rules, this could help restore some rationality to housing policy. If they remain limited to preferred categories of state-backed development, then the state will have learned the wrong lesson.

A housing market cannot be made healthy by permanently rationing freedom to build.

Closing Monologue

Vermont’s new law gets one thing right: housing cannot become affordable if every worthwhile project is trapped in a maze of delay and uncertainty.

That is the beginning of wisdom. It is not the end of it.

The state should not congratulate itself merely for making selected projects easier to approve after it has attached tax credits, grants, infrastructure aid, and administrative conditions. Real reform is simpler and more durable. Clear the rules. Protect property rights. Require accountability. Allow supply to respond to demand.

Government has a role in setting fair rules and maintaining infrastructure. But when it tries to become the architect, financier, referee, and moral supervisor of the entire housing market, it creates dependence where it promised affordability.

Homes are not made affordable by making government indispensable.

They become affordable when government stops making them needlessly hard to build.

I'm Daniel Halloway. This is The Liberty Report. Good night.