Last week the Montpelier City Council gave preliminary approval to a plan to place up to 36 FEMA mobile homes on a 136-acre parcel of land that the city purchased in 2022.
This could potentially house 36 families who lost their housing during flooding in July. Most of those households are people whose homes were flooded in Berlin and then condemned. There are more Vermonters displaced by flooding who need housing and the state is continuing to seek sites beyond Washington County.
Montpelier purchased the property, land and buildings, from the Elks Club for $2 million with an eye to creating municipal open space but also in hopes of providing land for affordable housing. To make the land work for the FEMA housing, FEMA will need to extend water and utility lines, which effectively has the federal agency undertaking the work that the city would need to take to develop housing on the site.
That’s good for the folks who lost their homes due to the July flooding and it’s good for the city’s effort to develop more affordable housing. Time is of the essence as fall and cooler temperatures roll in and the project needs permitting which state and local are working to expedite.
The 136-acre property also includes an events space that will be converted to a 15-20 bed emergency shelter this winter which will help ease pressure on the state’s limited emergency shelters and its somewhat dismantled motel voucher program.
These are incremental steps to address long-, short-term, temporary and emergency housing needs, to be sure. But at least they are steps in the right direction.
Perhaps there are more opportunities in Vermont for cities and towns to partner with FEMA in providing space for temporary FEMA housing that will result in what we’re seeing in Montpelier, i.e., the critical infrastructure (water, wastewater, utilities) to support long-term planned housing and the addition of critical emergency beds.
