Start with something that sounds like a riddle and isn’t.
Vermont’s population has grown barely at all over the past decade, and in the most recent count it slipped. And over those same ten years, Vermont needed roughly 22,000 more homes than it had.
Those 22,000 homes wouldn’t have housed a single new Vermonter. They’d have housed the ones already here.
Here’s how that works. A couple divorces, and one house becomes two. The kids finish school and get apartments of their own. Nobody moved to Vermont in either story, and nobody was born — but the number of separate households went up, and every household needs somewhere to live.
Ten years of that adds up. The Vermont Housing Finance Agency put the number at about 22,000 homes between 2015 and 2024, from Vermonters spreading out alone. Those figures got a good airing this week from Vermont Public and VTDigger, and they come — as ours do — from VHFA’s published analysis and the state’s own housing records.
Now the part that matters. Over that same decade, Vermont didn’t build that many.
What Vermont actually built
The best count of new homes is building permits — the approval a town gives before construction starts. Not every permit becomes a house, but it’s the number the state and the Census Bureau both use, and it’s one of the counts Vermont tracks its housing targets against.
Vermont’s permits, from the Census Bureau’s annual state records:
2015 — 1,998 homes
2016 — 1,771
2017 — 1,749
2018 — 2,080
2022 — 2,403
2023 — 2,456
2024 — 2,654
Those seven years come to 15,111. For 2019, 2020 and 2021, the Census Bureau’s monthly count puts the three years together at about 5,400 homes. That monthly count runs a little low against the annual one most years, so call the decade somewhere between 20,500 and 21,500.
Against a need of 22,000 — for the Vermonters already living here.
So Vermont spent ten years building, and had nothing left over. Not one home for anyone moving in. Not one for replacing a house that burned or flooded or fell down. Not one for the Vermonters sleeping in motels. Every home Vermont built for a decade was absorbed by the growth in its own number of households, and the state finished the decade a little further behind than it started.
Why that number can’t explain the shortage
There is less to the shrinking-household explanation than it sounds, and it’s worth being plain about why.
The number of homes a state needs is its population divided by the number of people in the average home. So “Vermont’s households got smaller” and “Vermont has more households” are the same fact said two ways. That’s arithmetic, and it’s worth knowing. But arithmetic about need can’t explain a shortage, because a need only becomes a shortage when nobody builds for it.
Some of that shrinking is the shortage itself, turning up in the statistics. Someone living alone in a four-bedroom farmhouse counts as a one-person household in a big house. That person isn’t spreading out. They’re stuck, because nothing smaller exists to move into. Build the small homes and they move, the farmhouse holds a family again, and the number changes. Don’t build them, and Vermont books that person as proof its households are shrinking.
Not all of it works that way. Vermont really is aging, kids really do leave home and start households of their own, and those are real homes needed for real reasons. But no part of it tells you why the homes weren’t built.
Maine has the same problem and builds more
Vermonters spreading into smaller households is not a Vermont story. It’s happening across the country, it’s driven mostly by an aging population, and no policy any governor could sign would reverse it. Vermont has more residents over 55 than it did a decade ago and will have more still through 2045. That’s a fact to build around, not a problem to solve.
VHFA says it plainly: Vermont has the second-smallest average household size of any state, after Maine.
So compare Vermont with the two states most like it. All three figures come from the Census Bureau — average household size, homes permitted in 2025, and population:
Maine — 2.26 people per home, 6,979 homes permitted, 4.93 homes for every 1,000 people living there
Vermont — 2.28 people per home, 2,294 homes permitted, 3.56 homes per 1,000 people
New Hampshire — 2.44 people per home, 5,030 homes permitted, 3.55 homes per 1,000 people
Maine is the one to look at. Maine’s households are smaller than Vermont’s. Maine’s median age is 44.8 years, the highest of any state. And Maine has more vacation homes, as a share of everything standing, than any state in the country. Every pressure Vermont points to, Maine has more of.
Maine builds about 39% more homes per person.
That is not to say Maine has solved anything. Maine has its own shortage, its own priced-out young people, its own arguments at its own town meetings. The point is narrower and harder to argue with: two states under the same demographic pressure are building at very different rates, which means the demographics aren’t what set the rate. Something else does, and that something is a choice.
New Hampshire runs the other way and is worth saying plainly. New Hampshire’s households are bigger, so its demographic pressure is lighter — and it builds at exactly Vermont’s rate. The typical New Hampshire home is worth $402,500. In Vermont it’s $316,600. Build slowly enough and the squeeze arrives regardless.
Smaller households explain why Vermont needs more homes. They don’t explain why Vermont doesn’t have them.
The targets Vermont wrote for itself
Vermont has already decided how many homes it needs. The Legislature required the state to set targets, and the state set them:
41,000 new homes by 2030 — about 8,200 a year.
172,000 new homes by 2050 — about 7,000 a year.
2,294 homes — what Vermont actually permitted last year.
That’s 28% of the pace. The state’s own housing dashboard says the same thing: Vermont is building 27% of what it says it needs.
For scale, the busiest year in Vermont’s modern building record was 1988, at about 4,800 homes. Vermont’s 2030 target asks for roughly 70% more than that — every year, for five straight years. And the trend runs backward: on the Census Bureau’s monthly record, Vermont permitted about a quarter fewer homes a year in 2015-2024 than in 1995-2005, back when nobody described Vermont as having a housing crisis.
None of that means the state simply refused. Building costs have risen, and Vermont’s permitting rules are their own long argument. But the shortfall is the shortfall.
The homes nobody counts
One more thing gets left out of every household number above: they describe year-round homes only.
About 15% of the homes standing in Vermont are seasonal, occasional-use or vacation homes — the second-highest share in the country, behind Maine, with New Hampshire third. Those three states have held the top three spots since the Census started counting in 1940.
On top of that, VHFA found 16,000 whole Vermont homes listed as short-term rentals between September 2024 and September 2025 — about 43,000 bedrooms, or roughly one in every 22 homes in the state.
That doesn’t make vacation homes the villain. A ski condo in Dover was never going to be a starter home in St. Johnsbury. But it does mean Vermont’s usable housing is smaller than Vermont’s housing, and the state’s targets were written knowing it.
What this looks like from a kitchen table
VHFA counts about 187,000 Vermont households of one or two people — and about 138,000 homes with one or two bedrooms. Roughly 49,000 small households more than there are small homes. Houses with three or more bedrooms make up 59% of everything Vermonters live in.
So the retired couple in the four-bedroom farmhouse, who’d rather have something they can heat and shovel, go looking. There’s nothing smaller they can afford — and with an old mortgage at 3%, moving means trading it for today’s rate and paying more for less house. They stay.
The young family that would buy that farmhouse can’t, because the couple is still in it. They stay where they are too, in something too small, and put off the second kid.
Neither one is being unreasonable. There just aren’t enough homes for anybody to move into, so nobody moves.
Vermont can’t stop its households from getting smaller. That’s aging, and it’s coming either way. What Vermont can do is build — and for ten years, everything it built went to standing in place.
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