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Homing in on Mad River Valley's housing needs |
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The Barre Montpelier Times Argus reports that "of all the issues facing the Mad River Valley, perhaps none is thornier than the rising cost of resort land and housing.
It impacts everyone, from ski area employees who can't find a place to live to couples who can't afford to buy a house and raise a family, to farmers who find it harder and harder to rent pastures in the area." Over the past eight years, Vermonters have seen the median price of a home rise nearly 54 percent, from $97,500 in 1996 to $150,000 in 2003. Wages, on the other hand, rose only 20 percent over this time period, according to the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign, a statewide coalition in Burlington that advocates for housing issues.
Figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition show 61 percent of workers in the state are employed in jobs with median wages below what the Coalition determines as Vermont's "housing wage:" $13.78 per hour. The group argues this is the threshold necessary to afford the rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment, based on spending only 30 percent of one's income on housing costs.
In valley towns, the situation is even worse. Some 73 percent of those employed in Waitsfield last year made below the "housing wage" for Washington County, $26,645 or $12.81 per hour. The average salary paid out in Warren last year was $19,559; in Fayston it was $21,176
Land costs inevitably follow the housing trends, and some farmers are being hard hit. Though the DeFreest family farm, the last working dairy operation in Warren, sits on about 1,000 acres, much of the land the family actually farms is rented from local owners. Over the past five or six years, says Marlene DeFreest, renting land in the area has gotten significantly harder.
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