Later this month, the Burlington City Council is expected to consider a zoning change that would open the door for hundreds of homes to be built where they’re currently prohibited. The area in question, a largely undeveloped section of the South End off Pine Street, includes some of the few open tracts left in the city.
If the proposal is approved, 14 pieces of land that are now zoned for light manufacturing and industrial use would become part of a new “South End Innovation District,” allowing developers to transform empty parking lots into apartment buildings, green spaces and pedestrian pathways.
With a rental vacancy rate of less than 1 percent, Burlington desperately needs housing, and rezoning could help address the deficit. But even during a housing crisis, the innovation district has its critics who fear that future buildings will be too tall. The opposition isn’t organized, and the neighbors’ concerns may not derail the proposal, but they have precipitated debate — about height, density and location — that’s all too familiar when it comes to building in Vermont.
“The only way we’re going to turn this around is if we build a lot more homes, and there’s no way to make those homes invisible.” Mayor Miro Weinberger
Mayor Miro Weinberger, who championed the zoning change as part of a 10-point housing plan, sees only one way to settle it.
“If we are serious about addressing this housing crisis … you’re gonna have to see the housing,” the mayor said. “The only way we’re going to turn this around is if we build a lot more homes, and there’s no way to make those homes invisible.”
The innovation district is Weinberger’s second attempt to add housing to the South End. He abandoned his first try, in 2015, after intense backlash from artists who worried that their studios would be converted into apartments.
The new proposal covers just 81 acres of the South End’s 285-acre light manufacturing district. All the parcels are on the west side of Pine Street and south of the artists’ enclave. They include the Hula campus on Lakeside Avenue, a nearby six-acre parking lot that’s owned by Hula developer Russ Scully and a city-owned parcel on Sears Lane. Running nearby will be the Champlain Parkway, a long-planned route to connect the South End with downtown that is now under construction.
The housing crunch has only worsened since the last rezoning attempt. In 2015, Chittenden County’s rental vacancy rate was 3 percent, according to data provided by the city. Seven years later, that number dropped to 0.6 percent. A pandemic buying spree — and in Burlington, a long-overdue citywide reappraisal — has driven up both home prices and rents.
Weinberger’s citywide housing plan calls for building 1,250 units by the end of 2026; some 750 are already under construction. Nearly all of them are spread across two major developments: the downtown CityPlace project and Cambrian Rise in the New North End. Another building, the five-story “CityWest” under construction on South Champlain Street, boasts of lake-view living. And 49 units at “the Nest,” on Pine near Bank Street, are built and leased, according to the developer.
City planners estimate that around 1,000 additional apartments could be built in the proposed innovation district. The regs call for a walkable neighborhood of energy-efficient buildings that could be up to eight stories tall in the central part of the district; structures would be limited to four or six stories the closer they are to the lake or to Pine Street.
“We dealt with height at CityPlace. Here we are talking about it again.” Russ Scully
Scully already has a vision for his slice of the district. He approached the city about the zoning change two years ago in hopes of developing a 600-unit apartment building, anchored by shops, restaurants and a childcare center, on his large parking lot. What Scully calls a “21st-century version of a factory town” would provide much-needed housing for employees at Hula, a tech incubator and coworking space on the lakefront. He also hopes that a transit center, perhaps located on the city’s Sears Lane property, could someday offer bus and rail service to commuters coming off the Champlain Parkway.
At a recent social hour at Hula to discuss the rezoning, business owners said the housing shortage is a barrier to employee recruitment. Bill Calfee, founder of e-commerce startup Myti, said his employees live in Williston, Montpelier and Waterbury because they can’t find places in Burlington. “That’s why [it would be great] if we can have workforce housing close to here,” Calfee said.
Scully opened the session by acknowledging the controversy over building height. He told the two dozen attendees that he’s not surprised height is an issue in Burlington, where, not long ago, opponents fought against the two 14-story towers planned at CityPlace. Subsequent delays left a gaping pit not far from Church Street. The project, now under construction, has been scaled down to 10 stories.
“We dealt with height at CityPlace,” Scully said. “Here we are talking about it again.”
Jason Van Driesche is one of the people talking. A South End resident with a background in urban planning, Van Driesche said he supports housing in the district but thinks shorter buildings would be more appropriate. He’s circulated renderings of five- and eight-story structures, asking his neighbors to consider how large they appear in relation to people on the sidewalk. “What would it feel like to walk along each building?” he posited in one email missive. The tactics are similar to those used by CityPlace opponents, who warned that the towers would cast shadows and block views.
Van Driesche also takes issue with how the proposed regs treat buildings’ bulk compared to the size of the lot they sit on. The proposal uses a calculation called “floor-area ratio” that says the taller a building, the less space it can take up on a lot. The remainder of the lot could be green space.
“That’s like a row of teeth with a bunch of the teeth missing,” Van Driesche said. “We’re not going to get the continuous wall of buildings that’s the classic, pedestrian-oriented downtown streetscape.”
Burlington Planning Director Meagan Tuttle says that’s by design. At public meetings, residents told officials they didn’t want buildings that were too crowded together or too far apart, she said.
“We’re trying to aim for something in the middle,” Tuttle added. “[We didn’t want] the outcome to be a neighborhood where all the buildings are uniformly taking up as much space as possible and they’re all the same height.”
Colin Larsen and Jak Tiano attended several rezoning meetings as members of Vermonters for People-Oriented Places, a grassroots group that advocates for affordable housing and robust public transportation. Both men had originally pushed for even denser development in the innovation district but have since come around to the city’s proposal.
Preserving open space, Larsen said, could mitigate the “urban heat island” effect in Burlington, which is, on average, 7 degrees warmer than rural areas of Vermont, according to a 2021 study by nonprofit news organization Climate Central. Scientists say reducing tracts of pavement and building green roofs can help to cool hot places. Larsen thinks the innovation district could be a starting place.
“We have the opportunity to, from the ground up, build the kind of district that we want for the future,” Larsen said.
Neither he nor Tiano has qualms about taller buildings. The city has produced its own mock-ups that show sight lines from various landmarks. An eight-story, 85-foot-tall building, for example, would be shorter than the chimney atop the Innovation Center on Lakeside Avenue, the drawings show.
Cherry Lane resident Sean Foley argues that such a building would still block views of Lake Champlain from Calahan Park, a hillside hub with a baseball diamond, playground and community garden. Foley’s family has lived near the park for 60 years.
“In the wintertime, spring and fall, there’s this gorgeous view of the mountain and lakes, and now they’re going to put eight-story buildings down there,” Foley said. “It just seems a little overkill.”
John Caulo, a development consultant for Hula, has no patience for Foley’s argument or others about heights. Limiting buildings to fewer than eight stories could eliminate 150 to 200 apartments, Caulo estimated. Caulo, who lives in the Lakeside neighborhood, said if people really want to see Lake Champlain, they don’t go to Calahan Park.
“To either the people in the community or the city council members that may feel that way, maybe it’s time to call bullshit,” he said.
At least one city councilor is in Caulo’s corner. Councilor Ben Traverse (D-Ward 5) lives in the South End and chairs the Ordinance Committee, which will debate the rezoning effort at its June 12 meeting. The committee will then send the proposal to the full council, which could decide to tweak the language before making it final — or even scrap it entirely.
Traverse, one of four councilors on the committee, said he planned to vote yes.
“Are we building a workable, vibrant neighborhood that folks are going to want to live in?” Traverse asked. “If that’s the test, I think we have a really great proposal on the table.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Upper Limits? | Concerns about building height reemerge with proposal to allow housing in Burlington’s South End”
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2023.
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