About us

VAHC people

Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition is staffed by one part-time coordinator and a full-time AmeriCorps*VISTA member.

Guidance comes, in part, from a five-member steering committee.

The Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition (VAHC) is Vermont's only statewide organization dedicated to ensuring that all Vermonters have decent, safe and affordable housing, particularly the state's low and moderate-income residents, elders, and people with disabilities.

Founded in 1985, the Coalition pursues its mission through five major activities:

  1. Advocacy with local, state and federal officials
  2. Outreach and coalition-building among broad interests in the field
  3. Training and workshops for housing professionals
  4. Community education and public relations
  5. Research on affordable housing issues and by serving as an information clearing house

The Coalition's 65-plus members represent most of Vermont's non-profit affordable housing developers, community land trusts, housing and homeless advocacy groups, public housing authorities, regional planners, funders, state agencies, and other organizations and individuals with an interest in affordable housing. Together, VAHC's members provide housing and services to tens of thousands of Vermonters.

Results

Throughout its history, the Coalition has played a central role in most of the important developments affecting housing policy in Vermont.

In the late 1980s and early-'90s, VAHC assisted in creating such landmark legislation as Vermont's Landlord-Tenant law; the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board; legislation enabling housing co-ops; and Act 252, the State's pioneering Mobile Home Park Law.

The Coalition was also instrumental in helping the state develop the long-standing principles of its housing policy, which emphasizes perpetual affordability of housing created with the use of public funds; targeting assistance to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged Vermonters; creation of a community based, non-profit delivery system; and mixed income housing.

Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign

Over the past eight years the Coalition and its members have worked in close collaboration with a network of other housing and low-income advocacy organizations to focus attention on the state's acute housing shortage, most recently as part of the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign.

These efforts have succeeded in raising awareness among state policy makers of the state's acute affordable housing shortage. As a result, during the late-1990's and the early years of the current decade, when the state enjoyed budget surpluses, the Vermont Legislature responded by:

  • Increasing funding for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board
  • Creating a state low income housing tax credit
  • Establishing state funding for homeless shelters and services
  • Reinstating a key homelessness prevention program
  • Increasing funding for assisted living

In more recent years of state fiscal constraint, housing funding has remained relatively level — and even increased in some years — while other areas of the state budget have seen cuts.

For more than 10 years the Coalition has also monitored federal housing policy, providing Vermont's Congressional delegation with feedback on the potential impacts of policy changes on low-income Vermonters.

New England Housing Network

In 1995, the housing community nationwide faced dramatic changes in federal housing policy, including funding cutbacks, program reforms, and the devolution of responsibilities to state agencies. To respond to this challenge, the VAHC joined with a broad coalition of housing and community development organizations to form the New England Housing Network, the country's first regional response to changes in federal housing and community development programs.

Serving as Vermont's lead agency for the Network, the Coalition has joined with partners from throughout the six-state New England region to work on joint research and public policy initiatives; co-sponsor 10 major regional conferences; and exert a significant impact on preserving key federal housing programs amid unprecedented budget-cutting pressures — pressures that have redoubled over the last year with the all-out assault on Section 8 and other federal programs.