Housing Assist: A Randolph glove maker makes a detour into workforce housing
Vermont Glove owner Sam Hooper employs 12 people to stitch goatskin at his factory in Randolph, but the workers often have trouble finding a place to live. Last year, Hooper decided to help and began to look for a building he could transform into apartments.
He settled on Windover House, a former inn that had been used as an assisted-living facility for 32 years before going on the market in 2021. The structure, built in 1807 as a private home, had 10,000 square feet of enclosed space and a huge porch.
“I had zero housing development experience,” said Hooper, 29, who paid $675,000 for the Randolph inn and four acres. “It was kind of daunting.”
But he did have some knowledge gleaned from renovating his renewable-energy-powered factory, also in an old building, and he had access to capital through family and the bank that was financing his business. Hooper saw potential in the inn to address his workers’ needs as well as the greater local housing supply.
“Vermont Glove needed housing, and the community needed housing,” said Hooper, who bought the century-old glove company in 2018. It was also important to him that the construction be sustainable.
“Taking an existing building and bringing it up to energy code and efficiency, from the climate activism side, felt good,” he said
Hooper finished work on his nine new apartments in May. Rent starts at $1,000 per month for a studio. Most apartments have one or two bedrooms; there’s also a three-bedroom and a four-bedroom. Five Vermont Glove employees live in three of the apartments, and the others are rented to traveling nurses, students at Vermont Law & Graduate School, a teacher and others, Hooper said.
He worked with public entities such as Efficiency Vermont and 3E Thermal, which help property owners make energy-efficiency improvements, to learn how best to weatherize and heat the old inn. Without major upgrades, he said, the building would have cost $40,000 per year to heat. Last winter, it cost $6,500.
“This building had zero insulation in it,” Hooper said, “and it had a dinosaur of a boiler.”
He installed a wood-pellet system in the basement and spray-foamed the basement and attics. The work cost about $1 million, which Hooper borrowed from the bank and his parents.
In return for benefiting from weatherization rebates, he must rent the apartments at rates affordable to local workers. The most he can charge for a studio, for example, is $1,067. Hooper noted that he had planned to keep rents low, anyway.
He’s learned a lot from renovating Windover House. Though he’s now deeply in debt, Hooper believes he’s created a road map of sorts for others who might want to undertake a similar project — and for himself if he decides to repurpose another building as apartments. Family money helps, he admitted, but public financing programs are available.
“You do have to be creative,” Hooper said.
To grow Vermont Glove — and be able to draw a salary — Hooper will eventually need to hire more employees. That will be easier if he can help them find a place to live.
“Now we’ll have a mechanism to do that,” he said.
Tool Kit Time
Large affordable housing developments are sprouting up in Vermont’s urban areas, but the pace of home building is much slower in small villages and towns.
To speed things up, Vermont officials have created a tool kit dubbed Homes for All. Its aim is to bring concepts such as design, planning, infrastructure and investment within reach of mom-and-pop developers who want to add a home or two to their town or village.
Starting out in real estate investment can be scary, said Amy Tomasso, a planning coordinator at the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Mistakes are expensive, and many of the small developers for whom the tool kit was created are also homeowners who want to preserve the rural look of their neighborhoods.
“This will be really useful to someone who cares about the housing crisis but doesn’t know where to start.” Amy Tomasso
That’s a goal of the state and of many rural residents, too; public concern about altering Vermont’s character put the kibosh on some legislative changes proposed earlier this year that would have made it easier for developers to build.
Homes for All is creating a workbook and other guidance to help would-be builders navigate the thicket of rules and incentives they’ll encounter in the process.
“This will be really useful to someone who cares about the housing crisis but doesn’t know where to start,” Tomasso said.
Greener Grass
Chemical lawn products have fallen sharply out of favor in recent years, and homeowners are looking for more sustainable ways to keeps their grass emerald green.
Yet lawns remain deeply loved as places to play, relax and gaze at the results of one’s gardening efforts. In an effort to make these foundational acres of green more sustainable, a group of entrepreneurs has created Dairy Dirt, a lawn product made from the fiber that’s separated in the manure-digesting process on dairy farms.
Finding a use for cow by-products is helpful to farmers, and it helps divert dairy farm waste from the water supply — an important goal in Vermont. The four founders, who live in Connecticut and Vermont, say their odor-free lawn product also serves as a sustainable soil ingredient that helps lawns thrive.
“Lawns aren’t inherently bad, but if you’re dumping a ton of Miracle-Gro and spraying with herbicides and pesticides, how do you get away from that?” said cofounder Brendan O’Brien, an ecologist with a master’s degree in nutrient recycling. “We’re here to make the existing food system and landscape more sustainable.”
The product is sold at four garden stores in Connecticut, where O’Brien said lawn care is serious business.
“People display their lawns and get into growing really nice grass,” O’Brien said. “There are TikTok people who focus on lawns.”
The partners are planning to ramp up production in the coming year and hope to start selling Dairy Dirt in Vermont in summer 2024. Right now, they’re enrolled in LaunchVT, a Burlington-based incubator program designed to grow small, local businesses.
Nail It!
Want to start a home project with confidence and know-how? Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield is offering a two-day course in carpentry fundamentals on July 29 and 30. Students will learn key vocabulary, get comfortable using basic hand tools and complete a small project, such as a chicken coop. Beginners are welcome. Learn more at yestermorrow.org.
By the Numbers
$372,000: The median sale price of a single-family home in Vermont in April, according to the Vermont Association of Realtors. That’s down 3.2 percent over April 2022.
$606,750: The median sale price of a single-family home in Chittenden County in April. That’s up 10 percent from April 2022.
5: The median number of days a home stayed on the market in Chittenden County in April. That’s about the same as in April 2022.
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Nest — Summer 2023
This article appears in Nest — Summer 2023.
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