Last Quarter: Spring 2023 Vermont Housing News

Josh Oakley in the St. Johnsbury church he recently purchased Credit: Anne Wallace Allen

Mass Appeal

A Northeast Kingdom entrepreneur hopes to set up a mass timber manufacturing facility to help solve the region’s housing crisis.

Josh Oakley, who lives in Waterford, is working with local economic development officials to find factory space where he can make building components such as beams, posts and panels from the engineered wood product. Proponents say the relatively lightweight pieces can be transported and assembled at a lower cost — financial and environmental — than the traditional steel and wood that they replace. The product itself uses local forest materials and sequesters carbon dioxide.

Mass timber is more commonly used in large buildings, but Oakley said the conditions in heavily forested northern New England are right for experimenting with other forms of housing. He noted that offering year-round factory-based construction jobs might make it easier to attract a workforce to the rural area. The rising cost of conventional building materials and the severity of Vermont’s housing crisis make the use of this new technology more feasible than in the past, Oakley said.

“We have this housing crisis. We have a labor crisis. And we have a forest economy crisis,” Oakley said. “We are talking about things now that we weren’t talking about two or three years ago.”

Oakley has purchased a derelict church building in St. Johnsbury where he plans to build apartments using mass timber as part of a demonstration project. Ultimately, he’d like to use mass timber to construct single-family homes in Vermont.

Mass timber is known to builders on the West Coast, but it’s still an emerging technology on this side of the country. Many of the region’s mass timber buildings are found at educational institutions, such as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Boston has a mass timber accelerator program that helps developers with technical assistance and grants as an incentive to use the product.

“The use of mass timber for housing is kind of like the next wave that is coming,” said Jennifer Shakun, bioeconomy initiative director at New England Forestry Foundation. “As people are learning to build with this stuff, costs are coming down.”

Shakun said one of the most popular mass timber products, cross-laminated timber, isn’t made anywhere in northern New England, and many people are looking for ways to manufacture it. East Coast developers who use mass timber typically buy the product from the West Coast or Europe; Oakley plans to buy the initial products he’ll use from Chicago.

An addition at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury using mass timber technology Credit: Anne Wallace Allen

St. Johnsbury’s Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium is using mass timber for a science annex that’s now under construction. The material fits into the museum’s mission of environmental stewardship, executive director Adam Kane said. It’s also something of an experiment.

“You need institutions to be able to take a little bit of risk,” Kane said. “That makes it easier for those who come next.”

St. Johnsbury assistant town manager Joe Kasprzak, who is trying to help Oakley find a manufacturing space in town, said Oakley’s ideas are gaining local attention.

“There are people who are really energized and understand the problem he is trying to solve,” Kasprzak said.

Builder Talk

“I love creating something that is useful and compact.” Emily Koons

Emily Koons has always had an affinity for van life. When she was working at a camp for adults with autism in Colorado, she lived in someone else’s van for months. The lifestyle suited her, but the van didn’t meet her own high standards.

So she worked with her dad, who restores and refurbishes classic wooden boats, to outfit a van. With a lifelong love of math and problem solving, Koons found the work a perfect fit.

Emily Koons in a van she recently retrofitted Credit: Courtesy of Ozzie Vans

When she and her partner put down roots in Vermont last year, she turned her skills into a business, retrofitting vehicles for others to take on the road. Through her company, Ozzie Vans, Koons installs custom cabinetry, appliances and furniture into the tiny interiors that roll into her shop. She’s now putting the finishing touches on a 17-foot Dodge Ram cargo van with 100 square feet of space inside.

“Nothing is square; it is not like trying to outfit a room,” Koons, 27, said. “There are a lot of curves and contours to account for.”

She has several projects lined up at her workshop, located inside a horse barn near her Westford home. While Koons has started thinking about bringing on some help, she’s also committed to keeping the business small.

“Living a minimalistic lifestyle allows you to understand how much space you really need to thrive,” she said.

Million-Dollar Market

A four-bedroom home on 10 acres in Essex listed at $1.3 million Credit: Courtesy

At a listing price of $1.3 million, 32 Sleepy Hollow Road in Essex, a four-bedroom house on 10 acres, illustrates a new trend in Vermont: the proliferation of homes valued at $1 million or more.

Last July, at the peak of the market, there were more than 200 such homes listed in Vermont, with many in the eight figures. In February, there were 145, including a seven-bedroom house in Woodstock for $18 million and a two-bedroom house on 239 acres in Stowe for $17.5 million.

These high-end homes move slowly; many have been on the market for several months. Twenty homes costing a million dollars or more sold in February.

Vermont home prices have been climbing for the past few years, and they’re now well out of reach for most of the state’s wage earners. High construction and land prices are hindering efforts to build more housing.

The median home price in Vermont climbed 15 percent in 2022, to $310,000. Nationally, home prices have risen 33 percent in the past five years, according to realtor.com. In Vermont, they’ve risen 50 percent in that time.

Dig It!

The University of Vermont Extension’s Master Gardener program and some of its partners will offer a Garden Soil Health Day, including free soil lead screenings for home gardeners, on Saturday, May 13, 1 to 4 p.m., at the UVM Horticulture Research & Education Center in South Burlington. Bring a soil sample and get tips on soil health and fertility. Learn more at uvm.edu/extension.