I’d like to offer a different view to the ongoing debate regarding the proposed apartment building on Route 7. I grew up in Florida, not far from where last week’s Addison Independent travel column rightly noted how towns like mine have been transformed. Gated communities, car dealerships, and shopping centers have swallowed the orange groves and tomato fields of my childhood. That loss is real. And it’s part of why I chose to live in Vermont. The last thing I want is to Floridafy the place I decided to put down roots.

In the five short years I’ve been here, I’ve grappled personally with the red tape that has helped lead to stifled development and exacerbate a homelessness crisis I couldn’t have imagined when I first set my mind on moving to Vermont nearly a decade ago. In 2022, my husband and I undertook a major renovation to bring a dilapidated mold-infested home back to life and convert it into an affordable housing duplex. Labor shortages (ironically compounded by the housing crisis), ballooning material cost, and miles of red tape turned what should have been a year-long project into a nearly three-year ordeal that not only robbed us of our sanity, but kept families from moving into safe housing they desperately needed.

The finished units sat vacant for months, while two families experiencing homelessness — eight people in total including five children — remained in limbo, waiting for a system burdened by its own process. I had to explain to these families, keys in hand, that they couldn’t move in because we needed more signatures, another inspection from another agency, a final stamp of approval and then another. After three years, the human cost of all of the bureaucratic delays was real and right in front of me.

The proposed apartment building on Route 7 might not be ideal, but it is a serious response to a real crisis. It’s central to downtown, accessible to public transit, and won’t be subject to Act 250 — the very thing that makes so many other locations financially impossible to develop. That’s why it’s happening here.

I’m not advocating for soulless cookie cutter architecture, unsafe housing, or poorly designed traffic patterns. We should absolutely push for buildings that preserve the integrity and identity of our small towns, but to what cost? I hope the design continues to get refined and the builders find a way to bring rents down. But more than that, I hope we can reject aesthetic purity and say yes to more homes even when their location, style, or “green space” isn’t postcard-perfect.

Try telling the nurse commuting 45 minutes to work, or the single mother spending her ninth month in a hotel with five children, that they need to keep waiting because the apartment they could call home doesn’t have enough tree cover. It’s time to move beyond simply preserving community and start taking meaningful steps to build it.

Erica Langston

Shoreham