BTV student housing enters mayor's debate

After growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, University of Vermont senior Jacob Schneider was ready for urban living.

He's happy to reside in the heart of Burlington, where the downtown is small but offers many of the lifestyle options associated with a larger urban core. He has no car but can walk, ride a bus or bicycle to almost anywhere he needs to go, including campus.

Restaurants, movies, groceries, shopping and parks are just out the front door of his apartment on Pine Street between Cherry and Pearl streets.

"Being downtown offers me the diversity of what the city has to offer," said Schneider, who moved off campus this year after three years in the residence halls. "It kind of suits me as an individual."

Now, lifestyle choices like Schneider's have become an active part of the mayoral campaign.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, the incumbent Democrat, wants to see more housing for students in the heart of downtown. He thinks new apartments that target some of the estimated 3,000 college students who already are living off campus would be a good part of the mix — for example, in housing proposed as part of the $200 million expansion and redevelopment of the Burlington Town Center mall on Church Street.

Steve Goodkind, the Progressive who is challenging Weinberger, thinks it's a bad idea to encourage more student housing smack downtown. He'd prefer downtown housing that targets permanent residents of Burlington and worries that concentrations of students living downtown could bring a more rowdy atmosphere to the urban core.

And while both candidates talk about wanting UVM and Champlain College to build more units on campus, Goodkind emphasizes this more than the incumbent mayor and takes a more conservative stance on development in general.

"The recurring, underlying theme coming from City Hall is that Burlington is for sale and that this ... will solve many of our problems," Goodkind wrote in a campaign statement. "This approach is a threat to the affordability of our city, our open spaces and its quality of life for our residents."

Weinberger strongly denies that Burlington "is for sale" and said his administration is focused on securing the best possible outcome for the people of Burlington when it comes to development.

"We do want to see progress," Weinberger said. "We want to see investment in the downtown, on the waterfront, on the Pine Street corridor. We do think, and we've been quite clear, that we think we need additional housing that is ... consistent with Burlington's existing character."

The right address

Student housing is a perennial issue. For decades, city officials and UVM administrators have debated the matter, with city leaders often pressing the university to build more units on campus and bring students out of historic homes that originally were designed for single-family living.

But many students like living four, five or six to a house on the streets between downtown and campus. Often it's the first time they have lived independently, and the allure is strong to set up their own temporary home, complete with India-print fabric wall hangings for curtains and curbside freebies for furniture.

Landlords easily can charge $650 per bedroom and during the past three or four decades have purchased many of the old Victorians, Colonials and Federal-style homes on streets between downtown and the UVM hilltop campus, especially north of Main Street.

As the concentration of students increased in recent decades, so did complaints from families living near students about out-of-control parties spilling onto the streets at all hours, cars parked on lawns and beer bottles littering the sidewalks. In response, Burlington beefed up code enforcement and put zoning in place in portions of the urban core designed to tamp down on the number of student renters who could jam into a house.

These measures have helped address some of the problems, but challenges continue, many of which are documented in the housing section of PlanBTV, the master plan for the waterfront and downtown:

•Only 12 percent of the homes in Burlington's downtown and waterfront are owner-occupied, possibly hurting stability and neighborhood cohesion.

•The average market rent in Burlington is $1,250 per month, an amount that strains the budget for many renters and means others can't live in the city at all without public subsidies.

•The rental vacancy rate in Burlington is a low 1.2 percent, according to 2010 figures.

•61 percent of Burlington renters pay at least 30 percent of their income for their rent.

Young people who move to Burlington from other places notice the high rents.

University of Vermont graduate student Andrew Reagan came to Burlington after graduating from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

"It was a bit of a sticker shock," Reagan said.

He'd like to see more housing built downtown and hopes it would be affordable. Right now he lives in the North End and rides his bicycle to campus, even in the winter, partly because the rents are less expensive than in the core of the city, especially for a place with space to have a dog.

"For students and grad students in particular who are paying their own rent, it is difficult on a graduate assistantship to pay rent to live downtown. ... If you are a teaching assistant, you make $15,000, $16,000 a year," Reagan said. "At 30 percent of income for affordable housing, that's really tough."

Reagan wants to see more housing in general in Burlington: "Downtown, you know, anywhere."

UVM requires most students to live in campus housing their freshmen and sophomore years. Many move off campus in their third year, including Khalil Lee, a junior from Washington, D.C.

He moved to a rental on Pearl Street.

"I just wanted to be more integrated with the Burlington community, make it kind of feel like home," Lee said. "This is my home for the next two years, and it has been for the past two years. It could become a permanent home after college."

He grew up in an urban neighborhood, so for him the idea of building downtown housing for students seems to make sense, as long as the buildings are well-designed, and the broader community is in favor, said Lee, who serves on his Ward 8 Neighborhood Planning Assembly.

"I say economically it would be wise to have students downtown right in the center of where the money is," he said. "In terms of, like, infrastructure and how that looks to the overall scenery of Burlington, I know a lot of the residents like the classic look, so building a bunch of big, clunky buildings downtown wouldn't really behoove anyone."

Would more students want to live right downtown?

Ali Wood, a 19-year-old first-year UVM student from Florida who is living in a dorm this year, probably wouldn't. She'd want to live closer to campus. But she predicts other students would live downtown: "I know a lot of people who probably would be interested in that."

Housing options

Progressive mayoral candidate Goodkind would like to see UVM build more units and take steps to make campus more appealing to students so they would less eager to move out of the residence halls. Perhaps the way the dorms are managed could be improved, he said, to create an environment that young adults enjoy.

His emphasis is to focus on mixed income, mixed use, "medium scale" housing projects. The bulk of public resources should be used for creating "permanently affordable" housing for future generations of Burlingtonians, according to Goodkind's housing platform.

And while Weinberger, the Democratic mayor, has said Burlington needs more market-rate housing, Goodkind is wary of any suggestion that market-rate housing would "trickle down" and ease demand for affordable housing.

Goodkind says he would emphasize job creation and better wages, and in that way put good housing more in reach for city residents.

Weinberger's theory is that new housing downtown could help get students out of homes that might revert back to affordable family housing if there were more capacity in the market.

He supports the Champlain College proposal to build 115 units at 194 St. Paul St., which has been approved by the city but is being appealed by neighbors in state Environmental Court.

Weinberger also likes the idea of having some of the 250 new apartments envisioned as part of the Burlington Town Center mall proposal be for students.

Burlington has a long-term, chronic challenge when it comes to students and housing, he said.

"We have about 3,000 students, undergraduate students, living off campus in Burlington. They are concentrated in the historic neighborhoods near the university. The way those students are housed today creates a number of challenges," Weinberger said.

There are certain streets where the balance between long-term residents and students is "out of whack," he said, "and there are conflicts between those two populations, which have different lifestyles."

Meanwhile, competition for housing means landlords can make quite a bit of money without necessarily maintaining their properties well, the mayor added.

"Our traditional solutions to this have been to kind of beat up on the university and get them to house more people on campus and to really beef up our code-enforcement efforts and make them stronger," Weinberger said.

Weinberger said he would not back away from code enforcement or from pushing for new units on campus but indicated it's time for new thinking.

There are limits to how much the UVM can encourage students to live on campus when many students want to live in other areas of the city, and there are limits to how much UVM can afford to build, even with partners, he said.

Weinberger said he was open to a modest number of carefully chosen sites downtown as places that could accommodate housing designed for students. The key is not to disrupt the balance of various people living downtown now.

"We're aware there are cities out there, they have added too many student units in their downtown, and it really changed the character of their downtown," Weinberger said.

Downtown living anyone?

Some say downtown Burlington needs more housing for everyone, not just students.

Although there are recent developments — the Stratos condos on St. Paul Street, the Westlake Condos on Cherry Street — Burlington still needs more units, said David White, city director of planning and zoning.

The current pace of development will not get Burlington to a healthier housing vacancy rate any time soon, he said.

"It's just not enough, and there's not enough diversity of housing. A lot of the housing that we have created is senior housing or subsidized housing, kind of protected housing of one kind of another, or high end housing," White said. "There's not much of what some people would refer to as affordable, market-rate or workforce housing."

A 2013 zoning change could make housing construction downtown easier, White said. With Weinberger's support, the city eliminated a requirement that no more than 50 percent of the gross floor of any new downtown development could be housing.

The rule, designed to reserve space for office and commercial, contributed to Burlington's being "underhoused," supporters of the change said.

The proposed form-based zoning downtown also could make it easier for infill development that meets strict design standards to take place, White said.

The Planning Commission is studying form-based code and holding public meetings. If the commission reaches consensus, members could send a proposal to the City Council for consideration this spring.

"Our hope would be if everything goes well, it's something that would be adopted in the late spring or early summer of 2015," White said.

Critics of the plan worry it will fast-track development and give residents fewer levers to affect the process.

Meanwhile, students and others make their way around the city and in out of their residences.

People like student Jacob Schneider need no encouragement to live downtown. To his way of thinking, it might make sense for Burlington to promote student housing in his neighborhood.

The plus for students, he said: "It gets you involved in the community more and what Burlington has to offer, as opposed to being stuck on campus."

Contact Molly Walsh at 660-1874 or mwalsh@burlingtonfreepress.com Follow Molly on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mokawa.