A big thank you to Key Bank who is a platinum sponsor for the 2016 Vermont Statewide Housing Conference.

Unique features of rural housing require flexible national policies and financing programs, explains Executive Director Sarah Carpenter in her recent article for Rural Voices, a journal of the Housing Assistance Council.

Carpenter provides numerous examples of how the small-scale nature and sparce dispersion of the population in Vermont creates special challenges for financing owner and rental housing given recent trends toward more standardization of national mortgage finance practices. 

The median income among Vermont households increased in 2015 to $56,990, according to US Census Bureau estimates released this week. The last time this indicator increased for Vermont was 2011.

Improvements in household income in 2015 were experienced nationwide and reported earlier this week by the Census Bureau.

Poverty rate estimates also decreased in Vermont and the U.S. for 2015. Vermont's estimated poverty rate decreased to 10.2% in 2015, with an estimated 61,000 Vermonters below the poverty line. Twenty-five percent of Vermonters living in poor households are children.

On October 1, 2016, the Fair Market Rents in every Vermont county will go up.  Fair Market Rents are intended to represent the dollar amount below which 40 percent of the standard-quality rental housing units in an ar