How a Number Becomes Policy: The Circular Logic Behind Vermont’s Housing Targets

The Vermont Futures Project didn’t invent the 40,000 figure. They inherited it. What Kevin Chu’s response reveals about how planning assumptions travel.

A number doesn’t become policy on its own. It needs institutions to carry it.

Vermont’s housing mandate rests on a figure that traveled from one organization to the next without anyone returning to the original assumption. Kevin Chu, Executive Director of the Vermont Futures Project, is the first person inside that ecosystem to explain on the record how it happened.

What the Vermont Futures Project Built

The Vermont Futures Project’s Economic Action Plan includes a chart showing Vermont needs 36,000 primary homes by 2029 — and that Vermont’s current permit rate of approximately 2,500 per year needs to triple to close the gap. The plan is built around a central workforce gap analysis that identified a significant long-term labor shortage driven by demographic trends. From that analysis, Vermont Futures Project developed a long-term population target: 802,000 Vermonters.

Vermont's current population is approximately 647,000. Getting to 802,000 would require a 24 percent population increase — growth Vermont has never sustained at anything close to that pace over any comparable period. The housing target flows from the population target. The population target flows from the workforce gap. And the housing numbers, Chu acknowledged, were drawn from the same VHFA projection that anchored Act 181's land use framework — a law since partially repealed, though the housing targets it embedded remain in place.

Vermont Futures Project’s own published population chart makes the assumption underneath that target explicit. A trendline drawn from Vermont’s 1960–2000 growth era — when the state grew from 389,881 to 608,827, driven by the back-to-the-land movement, ski industry expansion, and lifestyle migration specific to that period — is projected forward to 802,000. The chart labels Vermont’s slower growth since 2000 as “historical outliers, not the norm.” That framing is doing significant work: it treats a mid-century growth era as the baseline and the last two decades of demographic reality as the deviation. The housing need flows from the population target. The population target flows from the trendline. The trendline was drawn from 1960.

Caption: Vermont Futures Project published population chart. Gray and red columns are historic census data. Blue column is 2023 ACS estimate. Green columns represent future growth needed to close the projected workforce gap. Chart: Vermont Futures Project · Source: U.S. Census Bureau.

Understanding the vision requires understanding who built it. Vermont Futures Project is a 501(c)(3) whose founding partner is the Vermont Chamber of Commerce. Its largest funders include Ski Vermont, UVM Health Network, Rutland Regional Medical Center, and Casella. Its development and construction sector funders include O’Brien Brothers — whose CEO sits on the Vermont Futures Project board — along with PC Construction, Pomerleau Real Estate, ReArch, and Jay Peak. The donor list is public on their website (accessed June 1, 2026; the page metadata indicates it was last updated March 2025, unchanged from before this series contacted Vermont Futures Project). No conservation organizations, land trusts, agricultural organizations, or rural landowner groups appear on the donor list. The one rural-focused donor — Vermont Council on Rural Development — gives at the $2,500–$4,999 level. Northwest Regional Planning Commission, a body responsible for implementing the regional housing targets Vermont Futures Project helped generate, appears as a donor at the lowest giving level. These are not hidden interests. They are disclosed ones. But they are worth naming: the vision of an 802,000-person Vermont is being funded primarily by the industries that would most directly benefit from that growth — healthcare systems facing workforce shortages, ski resorts needing workers, construction and real estate firms needing demand. The rural landowners and small-town residents whose land and communities are most directly shaped by the policy built on that vision are not in the donor list.

The Economic Action Plan is a separate document, produced by a separate organization, with its own analytical framework. When it incorporated the VHFA housing figures, it appeared — to any reader — to represent independent validation of those numbers. A second institution had looked at Vermont’s housing need and arrived at the same place.

Chu’s response clarifies what that convergence actually was.

What Kevin Said

I asked Chu three specific questions: whether Vermont Futures Project independently evaluated the VHFA methodology before adopting it; whether the IRS migration data showing the pandemic reversal was available during development; and whether the upper scenario remains the appropriate planning basis given what the post-pandemic data shows.

His answers were direct.

On the IRS data: “The latest IRS migration data you referenced had not yet been released during much of the research and development process for the Economic Action Plan.” That is a documented gap — not a criticism of Vermont Futures Project, but an acknowledgment that the plan was built without the data that most clearly documents the reversal.

On the methodology: Vermont Futures Project reviewed the VHFA figures and discussed them directly with VHFA and DHCD during development. They understood them as a range of scenarios. They chose the upper range because — and this is the key passage — “the scale/pace aligned with our analysis.”

Read that carefully. Vermont Futures Project didn’t independently validate the 40,000 figure. They found that it matched what their own workforce analysis had already produced. The scale fit. So they included it.

Vermont Futures Project’s own published workforce chart makes the data window visible. Sourced to the Vermont Department of Labor and based on data available as of 2024 Q1, the chart shows net migration contributing +1,350 workers annually — calculated as a rolling average combining pre- and post-pandemic figures. The IRS data released March 2026 shows that by 2022–2023, net household migration had already gone negative. A rolling average absorbs a reversal rather than reflecting it. The workforce gap model was finalized before the data that most clearly documents that reversal was available.

Caption: Vermont Futures Project Workforce Supply and Demand chart. Net migration shown as +1,350, calculated as a rolling average combining pre- and post-pandemic data. Estimated gap based on data available as of 2024 Q1. Chart: Vermont Futures Project · Source: VT Dept. of Labor.

What Vermont Futures Project reviewed was not a settled methodology. As documented in Vermont's Moving Target, VHFA's own April 2023 legislative presentation flagged two of the projection's five components with question marks — "Is this really needed?" and "Exceptional growth?" — before the figure was embedded in statute. The scale aligned with Vermont Futures Project's analysis. The questions stayed on the slide.

That is not a methodological failure. It is a description of how planning documents are built — organizations review available data, find figures that align with their analysis, and incorporate them. But it is not independent validation. It is convergence. And convergence looks, from the outside, identical to confirmation.

On the question this series asked most directly — whether the upper scenario remains the appropriate planning basis given the post-pandemic reversal — Chu offered something more instructive than a direct answer. Had the IRS migration data been available during development, he wrote, “the calculated gap would have been larger meaning the aspirational target might have been even higher.” The model is structured around employer workforce demand. Slower population arrival means a larger gap to close. No demographic data, it appears, can produce a smaller target — because the target was never derived from population trends. It was derived from what employers say they need. The model is structured around employer workforce demand. Slower population arrival means a larger gap to close. No demographic data, it appears, can produce a smaller target — because the target was never derived from population trends. It was derived from what employers say they need. It does not ask whether the workers who would fill those jobs can afford to live in the state being built to attract them.

Chu also shared four charts documenting Vermont's demographic shift — including data showing Vermont has over 30,000 fewer residents aged 25 to 49 than it did in 2000, and that the 65-and-older population has doubled in the same period. Those charts are real and the demographic pressure they describe is real. This series has never argued otherwise. The question is not whether Vermont faces a workforce challenge. It is whether the specific housing targets built on top of that challenge are calibrated to the evidence — and whether the solution being proposed addresses the right problem. The institutional record this series has reviewed does not appear to contain a single public document asking whether Vermont's workforce shortage is primarily a housing supply problem or a cost problem — whether the workers Vermont needs can afford to live here on the wages the jobs that need filling actually pay.

Chu also pointed to polling data as evidence of public support for the vision. The poll was paid for by Vermont Futures Project. It showed 60.2 percent of Vermonters support growing the state's population to strengthen its workforce, up from 48.7 percent in 2022. No geographic breakdown was published showing how rural and urban Vermonters answered differently.

On the aspirational framing, Chu was clear: “The Economic Action Plan is an aspirational planning framework… This is different than a prediction or a projection of where Vermont’s economy is headed under current trends.” And then, the line that deserves to be read twice:

Kevin Chu, Executive Director, Vermont Futures Project

That is a legitimate philosophical position. It is also a description of a choice — a choice to plan toward a desired future rather than from a documented present. That choice is worth naming explicitly, because it shapes everything downstream.

The Circulation Problem

This series is not arguing that Vermont has no housing challenges. The affordability pressure is real. The workforce shortfalls are real. The flood-damaged homes are real. What this series has documented, piece by piece, is something narrower: that the specific number driving Vermont's land use architecture — 40,000 homes, distributed as regional targets to every town in the state — was chosen from two available options, and the choice has never been publicly revisited in light of the data that contradicted it. The institutional record does not appear to ask whether the workers Vermont needs to fill those shortfalls can afford to live here on the wages the open positions actually pay.

Kevin Chu’s response is the clearest description this series has produced of how that number traveled. VHFA produced a range. The upper end entered planning documents. Vermont Futures Project reviewed the methodology, found the scale consistent with their own analysis, and included it. Act 181 embedded regional targets derived from the same figure. Each citation made the number look more settled than it was.

Nobody did anything wrong. The number traveled because it was useful, it was published, and it aligned with a genuine concern about Vermont’s future. That is how institutional momentum works. It does not require bad actors. It requires only that each organization trust the last organization’s work without returning to the original assumption.

The original assumption — that pandemic-era household growth of 1.4 percent annually would continue — is the one the IRS data has since contradicted. That data was not available when the Economic Action Plan was developed. It is available now. The targets it generated are still in place.

The Conversation Worth Having

Kevin Chu, Executive Director, Vermont Futures Project
Written response to this series, May 2026

That is exactly right. Vermont faces a genuine long-term demographic challenge — an aging population, deaths exceeding births, workforce shortfalls that are real and documented. The question this series has asked from the beginning is not whether Vermont should plan for its future. It is whether the specific numbers driving that planning are calibrated to what the evidence shows, or to what the pandemic briefly suggested.

Kevin Chu engaged with that question honestly. The answer he gave — that the data gap existed, that the convergence was found rather than independently derived, that the plan is aspirational rather than predictive — is important public record. The question the institutional record did not ask is not his to answer alone.

Vermont is making 30-year land use decisions. The numbers underneath those decisions should be able to withstand the same scrutiny Kevin Chu welcomed. So far, in the public record, that scrutiny has not been applied by the institutions that distributed those numbers as settled fact.

That gap is now documented.

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Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit.

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