Climate refugees with money choose Vermont

A January 2022 piece in the online news site Seven Days VT featured stories of people called "climate change refugees" - those who had lived in other US communities but who left due to changing weather and living conditions and chose Vermont. The story is part of a series about the housing crisis in the state called Locked Out. Since 2020, the housing market in Vermont has changed drastically. Everyone seems to know someone who was offered a job and couldn't take it because they couldn't find a place to live. Everyone seems to know someone whose rent just keeps going up and up and they don't know what to do. Everyone seems to know of "zombie  houses" that are second (or third) homes that wealthy out-of-staters only use for a few weekends each year. And everyone seems to have met people who moved to the state because they loved the climate here and were getting burned out or heated out of their home state.Prior to COVID, there was plenty of real estate available in Vermont to buy, though the rental market was tight across the state. Residential properties with 20-100 acres would stay on the market for several months and often sell below asking price. The housing stock in the state is old and in need of repair. People have smaller families and don't need or want a big old farmhouse. Zoning and environmental restrictions (the notorious Act 250 which basically blocks all commercial development in the state) make it hard to change a big farmhouse into a bunch of apartments.Enter people who were either rich-rich or house-rich from other parts of the country with better housing markets than Vermont had pre-COVID. They swooped in, often buying with cash, and local people were priced out.Many of the relocaters are retired, though some have young children - the younger families are either able to live without working (trust fundees) or work remotely, if they managed to find a Vermont home with internet.In 2020, there were 1,000 more homes bought by out-of-state buyers compared to 2019 and the median price of a home rose 32% to $325,000, putting homeownership out of grasp for most local people. The median household income in the state is $67,674 and only $37,903 per capita.Vermont is a small state - the population is under 650,000 - so relatively small changes can make a big impact. You can read the whole Seven Days article, including more specifics about the people interviewed, here.