Four Vermont towns—Jamaica, Londonderry, Weston and Winhall—are facing a housing crisis. Ski areas that help support the region’s economy and recreation have also created challenges for residents and workers to find housing.
“Up to 60% of existing housing is used for short-term vacation rentals, leading to near-zero vacancy rates for year-round rental or ownership opportunities,” said Elisabeth Infield, a professor of regional planning at UMass Amherst. Doubling down on the problem, heavy flooding devastated the region in 2024, resulting in the loss of homes and clear limits on where new housing can occur.
In fall of 2024, the Windham Regional Commission, the Center for Resilient Metro-Regions (CRM) at UMass Amherst, the Communities by Design Program at the Architects Foundation, and local stakeholders teamed up to find affordable housing solutions and help communities build resiliency to future flooding and other climatic threats. CRM Director Wayne Feiden and Professor Infield served as co-PIs on the project, assisted by UMass PhD Candidate Sara Nusair and UMass landscape architecture and regional planning students Grace Kirkpatrick, Nicole Krantz, and Amelia Lavallee. Together with four expert planners and architects from the Architects Foundation, the team developed a four-town housing needs assessment and led a three-day charrette with residents on September 24-26 in Londonderry, VT.
The “Homes for Us: Jamaica, Londonderry, Weston, & Winhall" final report, published last month, shares top lessons from the project and proposes a set of specific housing solutions to serve as a vision and tool for the towns moving forward.
The report found that residents, who participated in the charrette, expressed a particular need for housing that is affordable to moderate and low-income households. The existing gap can limit a town’s abilities to “keep older residents while also providing space for new families and the workforce that the region needs," explained Professor Infield.
While residents were supportive of development, they also stressed that it should not come at the expense of the existing community's character. At the same time, building affordable housing at a meaningful scale requires looking away from the region's tradition of single-family homes toward new, multi-family housing models. Considering this challenge, the team worked with partners in the region to explore sites that could provide affordable housing options and enhance community life. Through extensive site studies, they identified fifteen potential sites across all four towns, which included town-owned sites and vacant or underutilized properties.
Some of these sites were found in surprising areas: an elementary school that may be closing, town-owned land near town services, unused barns and outbuildings, mixed-use buildings in village centers, and even an old motel. Site visits also revealed how small-scale, multi-family housing has always been part of life in the region – “be it a farmhouse with multiple generations under one roof, or a large home in the village combining a number of households within a single structure,” states researchers in the report.
“Small towns can work together to find locally appropriate solutions that secure their own futures. All these discoveries demonstrate that towns often have land resources they might not have considered before for middle income and workforce housing," said Infield.
The site designs proposed in the “Homes for Us: Jamaica, Londonderry, Weston, & Winhall" final report reflect the powerful outcomes of coordinated community engagement. To read about these outcomes and more, visit https://www.resilientmetro.org/windham-regional-housing.html.
Potential Development Approach for Jamaica Village school site ("Homes for Us: Jamaica, Londonderry, Weston, & Winhall" final report, December 2024).