Cold Open

Vermont has passed a housing bill built around a familiar political promise: if housing is too expensive, government must spend more, direct more, and pressure local communities harder.

But there is a serious contradiction here.

The same system that makes housing difficult to build is now being asked to solve the housing shortage by selecting favored projects, subsidizing them, and telling municipalities how quickly they must approve them.

That may produce activity. It does not automatically produce a functioning housing market.

Opening Monologue

I’m Daniel Halloway, and tonight, Vermont’s Affordable, Efficient, and Resilient Housing Act has passed.

The vote was 64 to 36, with no members recorded as present, in a legislature of 100 seats. Sophia Delaney’s measure combines tax credits, grants, and infrastructure aid for energy-efficient multifamily housing, including units reserved for low- and moderate-income households. It also pushes municipalities receiving certain housing funds toward faster and clearer permitting for qualifying infill and mixed-income projects.

Now, housing affordability is not an abstraction. It determines whether young families can stay near work, whether seniors can remain in their communities, whether employers can hire, and whether local economies can grow without hollowing themselves out.

The question is not whether Vermont needs more housing.

It plainly needs a better way to permit and build it.

The question is whether a state-centered model of subsidies, conditions, and funding leverage gets to the root of the problem, or merely enlarges the bureaucracy surrounding it.

Facts Over Feelings

Here is what passed.

The Vermont law uses state tax credits, grants, and infrastructure assistance to encourage energy-efficient multifamily housing. It targets projects with units reserved for households described as low- and moderate-income, particularly in villages, downtowns, and transit-accessible areas.

It also connects certain housing funds to municipal permitting practices. In practical terms, communities that want access to those funds face pressure to adopt a quicker and clearer approval process for qualifying projects.

That is the policy mechanism. Incentives for developers, aid for construction-related needs, and state leverage over local permitting.

There is a real economic logic behind part of this. Delays, uncertainty, unclear rules, and duplicative approvals all raise the cost of building. If an applicant cannot predict when a project will be approved, what conditions will be imposed, or whether the rules will change midstream, capital becomes more cautious. Cautious capital builds less. Less supply means more pressure on rents and home prices.

That is not ideology. That is how incentives work.

But we should be precise about what the bill does and does not do. It does not simply repeal barriers to housing construction across the board. It creates preferred categories of projects, attaches public assistance, and applies pressure through the state’s control of funding.

Those are very different approaches.

A clean reform says government should stop making lawful housing unnecessarily difficult to build.

A managed reform says government will decide which housing deserves expedited treatment, which projects qualify for assistance, and which local governments must align their rules to remain eligible for support.

The first approach reduces government-imposed friction. The second redistributes power within government.

And that distinction matters.

Lila Grant has framed housing, wage policy, and digital access as basic doors to opportunity. Fair enough. But a door is not truly open if every citizen must first obtain the right credential, locate the proper program, satisfy a designated category, and wait for a public authority to approve the route through it.

Debunking the Left

The strongest argument for this law is not absurd, and conservatives should be honest about that.

Its advocates can reasonably say that markets do not operate in a vacuum. Housing requires roads, water systems, predictable local rules, and communities willing to permit construction. They can argue that state aid helps overcome real infrastructure constraints and that reserved units ensure new development does not serve only those already doing well.

That argument sounds persuasive because some of it is true.

Government does have a legitimate role in maintaining basic infrastructure, enforcing clear property rules, and preventing local processes from becoming an endless veto machine. A town cannot claim to care about affordability while using opaque permitting to stop nearly every proposal that might add homes.

But then comes the flaw in the progressive model: it identifies a government-created bottleneck and treats a larger, more directive government apparatus as the default cure.

If permitting is slow, simplify permitting for everyone.

If zoning or approval rules are unclear, make them clear.

If infrastructure is inadequate, prioritize infrastructure rather than turning every housing project into a contest for tax credits and grants.

Instead, this bill risks creating a two-track system. Projects that fit the state’s preferred profile may receive help and expedited treatment. Other projects may remain caught in the same thicket of costs and delays. That does not create a broadly competitive market. It creates a political marketplace where success depends more heavily on fitting an official template.

And there is another problem. Energy efficiency can be a worthy goal, but when government layers goals onto housing production without discipline, affordability can become the slogan rather than the outcome. Every additional condition may be defensible in isolation. In aggregate, conditions can make projects harder to finance, harder to approve, and more expensive to build.

The left often speaks as though public money neutralizes cost.

It does not. It changes who pays, who decides, and who gets priority.

Power & Politics

The political appeal here is obvious. The bill allows supporters to say they are acting on housing affordability, environmental priorities, infrastructure, and local process all at once. It gives state officials a visible role. It gives advocates a concrete legislative win. It offers municipalities money while also narrowing the range of choices they can make if they want that money.

That is a powerful governing formula: call it partnership, fund it from the state level, and use eligibility rules to shape local behavior.

But partnership is not always decentralization.

When the state holds the purse strings, municipalities may retain formal authority while losing practical leverage. They can technically decline the terms. Yet when a community needs housing-related funds, that choice can become more theoretical than real.

Conservatives should not reflexively defend every local restriction simply because it is local. Local control is not a license for arbitrary obstruction, insider protection, or permanent scarcity. A property owner and a prospective renter also have interests that deserve respect.

But neither should conservatives celebrate a system in which the state becomes the chief planner, funder, referee, and compliance monitor for housing growth.

The conservative answer should be more serious than no. It should be this: protect property rights, streamline permitting through clear rules, reduce arbitrary delay, let builders compete, and stop treating ordinary housing construction as a privilege dispensed by political discretion.

Liberals may see this bill as a practical intervention against scarcity and exclusion. Conservatives may see it as another expansion of government’s power to choose winners. Moderates are likely to judge it less by ideological labels than by whether it delivers visible competence: more housing, clearer rules, and less bureaucratic runaround.

That is the political danger for both sides. The public is tired of promises. It wants results that show up in the cost of living.

If this approach produces merely more paperwork, more conditions, and more dependence on state-directed incentives, public trust will not improve. It will deteriorate further, because people can recognize when a system is busy without becoming effective.

Closing Monologue

Vermont’s housing problem deserves more than slogans about affordability. It deserves reform that recognizes why homes become expensive in the first place.

When rules are unclear, approvals are slow, and construction is treated as a political favor, the price is paid by families, workers, renters, and communities trying to keep their next generation from leaving.

Sophia Delaney’s bill correctly recognizes that permitting matters. That is the important concession buried inside the legislation.

But the durable answer is not to make government the indispensable middleman in every housing decision. The answer is to remove needless barriers, establish clear rules, protect local accountability without sanctifying obstruction, and let a competitive market build.

Affordable housing cannot be built on a foundation of permanent political permission.

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