Please join Addison County Community Trust (ACCT) and Evernorth

Wednesday, October 26 at 1:30 p.m.
to celebrate the start of construction at
Firehouse Apartments!

We’ll gather across the road in the Bristol Fire Department’s community room.
​When complete, 20 newly-constructed affordable apartments will be open to families in Bristol.
Thanks, and we hope to see you there!

Recent legislative changes at the state level have aimed to ease restrictions on Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) development in Vermont. ADUs are gaining interest from local groups seeking to increase the supply of affordable housing in their communities. With their capacity for affordable housing development and management, Affordable Housing Trusts like Addison County Community Trust (ACCT) are potentially poised to help in this effort.

This report is the second in the series of reports produced by ACCT's Privilege and Poverty intern, Ella Jones from Middlebury College. Ella explored various program models to determine the feasibility of ACCT creating a similar program in Addison County. Through her research and interviews with various program officials, she determined that in the current construction environment, the amount of support ACCT would need to provide, both for up-front costs and ongoing property management, makes ADU development unlikely to be an effective tool for stimulating affordable housing development.

While our exploration of this topic did not yield promising results for ACCT, there are several avenues that Addison County might consider moving forward:

• Employer partnerships to address the workforce housing crisis;
• Targeted outreach to homeowners with the potential to convert existing finished spaces (such as walk-out basements) to ADUs, as these conversions are the most economically feasible and therefore most likely to come to fruition.
  
• Incentives to existing ADU owners who use them as short-term rentals (STR) to convert them to long-term rentals at affordable rates.
  

To learn more, read Ella's full report or our Executive Summary.

Thanks to Middlebury College student Ella Jones, who interned with ACCT this summer through the Privilege and Poverty Program, ACCT has new resources to offer for helping residents in our mobile home parks upgrade their homes.

According to an analysis conducted by Ella, more than 10% of homes in ACCT parks likely pre-date the HUD Code for Manufactured Housing which was created in 1976. Moreover, nearly two-thirds are likely to pre-date important updates that occurred in 1994. All told, over 200 homes in ACCT parks are likely to be in need of replacement.

In 2022, the legislature increased funding for a Champlain Housing Trust program that provides a "silent second" mortgage--essentially a grant--for mobile home replacements. In order to better help residents take advantage of this program, Ella created this Guide for Mobile Home Replacement. The graphic below provides an overview for residents to help determine whether replacement might be an affordable option for them.

Ella also wrote a final report for ACCT to help us better understand the challenges and opportunities pertaining to mobile home replacement in our parks. A summary of the report is available here.

Ella helped ACCT with a host of projects, touching on issues related to upgrading the state's old manufactured housing stock, increasing the supply of affordable housing through Accessory Dwelling Units, and identifying barriers to creating child care near affordable housing. We are so thankful to have had her on the ACCT Team this summer and look forward to continuing to share and build on the valuable work she did during her time here.