Yesterday, Ryan Rush-Booth, a Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) borrower who lives in Stamford, VT, testified at the State House in support of doubling VHFA’s Down Payment Assistance program funding. Rush-Booth works in IT at Southwestern VT Medical Center. When they first moved to Vermont six years ago, Ryan, his wife, and their two young children moved in with family because they could not find affordable housing.

While living with parents, Ryan and his wife saved up enough money to try to buy a home, but could only afford a recent foreclosure that needed a tremendous amount of work. Because the family needed to dedicate much of their savings toward improving the home, the down payment assistance funding provided by VHFA was a critical factor. 

A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that lenders across the United States are denying conventional mortgage loan applications for African American and Latino applicants at higher rates than comparable White applicants.

Chittenden County has the biggest imbalance between its share of VT jobs and homes, according to recent VHFA analysis. Although 33% of the state's jobs are in Chittenden County, the state is home to only 28% of the state’s workers and only 25% of the state’s homes. This is likely caused in part by workers living in Franklin County, where the share of homes outnumbers the share of jobs, who commute to Chittenden County for work.

Washington County also has an imbalance similar to Chittenden’s, but on a much smaller scale.

The Vermont Resident Service Coordinators (VRSC) has an event coming up! in March, David O'Leary will be speaking about hoarding intervention techniques. David is a Housing Retention Specialist with the Burlington Housing Authority who specializes in hoarding and squalor cases. He joined BHA in 2015 after two years of domestic violence advocacy at STEPS to
End Domestic Violence (Formerly Women Helping Battered Women).