Vermont is famous for its scenic landscape. Rolling soft green hills sprinkled with grass-fed cows; empty two-lane highways revealing endless mountain vistas; and notably, no billboards. The rest of New England has succumbed to strip malls, chain restaurants, and the placelessness associated with capitalist architecture, its landscape repurposed to serve corporate profit. Yet somehow, Vermont has remained miraculously untouched—but at what cost?
The state’s natural beauty is not entirely natural: it is legislated. Following a slew of urban development in the 1960s, Vermont enacted Act 250—a strict land-use law deliberately crafted to preserve Vermont’s character. Although intended to bolster sustainable development, the law has been criticized for doing more than just that. Act 250 established a framework for Vermont citizens to uphold a political philosophy that prioritizes aesthetics and environmental preservation over affordability. The state’s economy has thus become one of exclusion, where affordable housing is seen as a threat rather than a solution. Vermont’s modern housing crisis must be understood as a direct result of Act 250’s legacy.
Securing an Act 250 permit can be a long and costly process. The Act requires large development projects to file a permit and undergo review by one of the nine District Environmental Commissions. After evaluating the project based on various categories of impact such as water, air, traffic, and aesthetics, the commission then chooses to grant or deny the permit. Crucially, Act 250 also allows the commission to hold a public forum, granting neighbors the chance to voice concerns about a given project. In practice, the fees and paperwork pile up, delaying the supply of high-need housing developments.
Understanding Act 250’s strict process requires looking back to a time when unchecked development began to threaten Vermont’s landscape and identity. In the years leading up to its passage in 1970, the state underwent a period of rapid transformation. From the 1950s to the mid 1960s, Interstate 91 leapt north like a crack in dry earth, connecting Vermont with Boston and New York City. International Business Machines (IBM) began bulldozing pines to clear space for a new facility in Essex Junction. Ski mountain after ski mountain scraped hillsides to clear paths for tourist skiers. It was as if a new Vermont had sprung up after a century without change, leaving many Vermonters fearful of what was to come.
In response, gubernatorial hopeful Deane Davis emerged on the political scene, a lifelong Vermonter who capitalized on outsider fears. In a 1968 campaign speech, he stressed the need for a system of ‘selective planning,’ which would “bring in the desirable and screen out the undesirable.” In other words, Davis wanted the government to decide which development projects—and which types of people they brought in—were deemed “worthy” of reshaping Vermont’s natural landscape. He warned that if no action was taken, we would be “let[ting] the outsider buy up our property, line our highways with fried-chicken shacks, inundate our cities with the smoke and smog of cement factories, and drive the good life of Vermont into the pages of history.” Thus, Act 250 was born.
It is no surprise, then, that a bill designed to keep the “undesirable” out has evolved into a powerful mechanism of exclusion. The bill has faced criticism in recent years for exacerbating the state’s housing crisis. High demand and lagging supply have caused home prices to skyrocket. The median home price in Vermont increased from roughly $220,000 in February, 2020 to over $400,000 in January, 2025. To keep up with rising demand, Vermont is likely to need an additional 41,000 homes by 2030. This averages out to about 8,000 new houses per year. Yet, in 2022, the state permitted the construction of only 2,302 new homes. Act 250’s complex and lengthy permitting process further discourages developers from building high-density housing and instead incentivizes the creation of single-family homes. Newly-appointed Act 250 Board Chair, Janet Hurley, explains that the lengthy permitting burden “made housing development that’s affordable much more difficult to achieve for so many years.”
Supporters of Act 250 argue that Vermont’s environment and distinctive rural character must be preserved, and that the Act is the only way to achieve this. Vermont’s lieutenant governor and other advocates have highlighted the law’s role in preventing overdevelopment and ensuring economic growth does not come at the cost of Vermont’s ecological balance nor to the disadvantage of neighbors in the community. However, the Act’s provision allowing for a public forum to gather neighbors’ input has created a streamlined outlet for the Not in My Backyard movement (NIMBY). Homeowners in Vermont communities repeatedly mobilize to stall the construction of everything from high-density apartment complexes to wind turbines.
Indeed, there are still many who believe that any shrinking of Act 250 poses a detriment to Vermont’s character. “We are becoming morticians dressing up the corpse of our beautiful state,” wrote Bruce Post, a former environmental historian and congressional aide. Post argues that, given the heightened climate crisis, our government should be moving to strengthen environmental protection laws—not weakening them in the name of striking “balance” with economic growth. And yet, looking at a state that has cultivated the conditions for a housing-shortage, affordability crisis, and wage stagnation, it becomes clear that in an effort to strike a balance, Vermont has prioritized neither and sacrificed both.
Vermont can pursue both housing and environmental goals through programs like Efficiency Vermont’s High Performance Building Program, which helps reduce energy use on new buildings by up to 20 percent. The company has also saved Vermonters over $2.8 billion since 1999 through various energy efficiency programs. Rather than blocking high-density housing entirely, the state could strengthen its environmental goals by actively supporting sustainable developments through streamlined permitting, green design standards, and renewable energy incentives.
While Act 250 was intended to protect Vermont’s landscape and way of life, its legacy has become a double-edged sword—preserving what was at the cost of what could be. Today, it stands as a legal weapon for the NIMBY movement, enabling affluent communities to block needed housing under the guise of environmentalism. Legislators must admit that Act 250 has outlived its purpose. If Vermont wants to be a place for all rather than a retreat for the wealthy, it must repeal or radically reform the law. It is time for Vermonters to recognize the problematic undertones of their aversion to housing development projects. A state where only the wealthy can afford to live is not a state preserved, but a state lost.