Vermont is facing a serious housing crisis. Rental vacancy rates are 3.5% statewide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and a recent study done by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency found by 2030 the state needs between 24,000 and 36,000 new housing units.
Part of the problem is that Vermont isn’t building homes fast enough.
In East Montpelier, modular home manufacturer Huntington Homes uses factory line construction methods to speed up the process.
The company ships modules and assembles the home on site. Huntington Homes can build a house in 96 hours – and set it on a foundation in four. That’s a lot faster than the traditional length of time it takes to build a house, a timeline which is often exacerbated by a lack of skilled labor in the state.
Co-owner Jason Webster said the housing market changed significantly after the 2008 recession and it hasn’t fully recovered despite high demand.
In 2007, Huntington Homes built 140 houses. Two years later, in 2009, the company built 27.
"...we haven’t done a good enough job of encouraging people into the trades.”Jason Webster
“The bottom fell out,” Webster said. “Everybody kind of retooled. A lot of builders left the market. And then as things slowly built back up, the building capacity just wasn’t there anymore, and we haven’t done a good enough job of encouraging people into the trades.”
State officials, including the Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott, have grappled with how to boost home building capacity and create more jobs in the trades.
Adding more tradespeople isn’t going to happen overnight. Although Huntington Homes can build faster and with less labor than a traditional build, Webster said companies like his aren’t going to be able to significantly change the industry without a major shift in thinking from both the client and the banks financing the construction.
“One of the issues that we have is anybody that needs to borrow money, which is all normal people, that the banks have a little bit too much control over what the product has to be to conform to their lending requirements,” he said. “So we get it all the time where people, they only want to build a two-bedroom house, that's all they have need for, is two bedrooms … but the lending rules are based on appraised values of what's selling of existing homes in the market.”
Webster said the United States has a lot of catching up to do in regards to construction methods before it can meet the demands of the market.
Until then, he said Huntington Homes is focusing on improving how they build their homes to be ready for the future.
“We are looking at building out an entire house in a computer in a model that will then export a file to an automatic saw that will cut all the pieces, print them as to where they go,” Webster said. “Our focus is more on the efficiency side than it is to kind of revolutionize or change what the product is.”
