Lawmakers preview bill to map and prioritize ‘workforce housing zones’ near job centers

Rebecca Holcomb, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Kate Lally of the House Transportation Committee presented H.253, a bill that would create a mapping-driven process to identify ‘‘workforce housing zones’’ centered on local job concentrations.

The pair told the House Committee on General & Housing that the idea is to “develop housing near jobs” to concentrate demand where municipal infrastructure for transportation, wastewater and water already exists, reduce vehicle miles traveled and slow sprawl. “To develop housing near jobs gives you an opportunity to concentrate housing where it's needed most,” Holcomb said.

The bill would ask state agencies to map census tracts by job counts and draw concentric targeting radii as a starting point: about 5 miles around tracts with roughly 7,200 jobs, 4 miles for tracts with 5,000–7,200 jobs, and about 3.5 miles for tracts with smaller job counts, then allow local plans to refine those shapes to avoid constrained lands. The presenters said overlapping circles would help prioritize where housing demand and job access intersect.

Lally said the approach builds on last year’s land use reforms and aims to create “a kind of faster on ramp” for communities that already have job growth to acquire essential infrastructure support. She emphasized that the mapping is intended as a tool to identify likely high-pressure areas and to inform how the state and municipalities prioritize funding for wastewater and other capital projects.

Committee members and other representatives responded with questions about which agencies would produce the maps and whether existing state capabilities could be used. Holcomb said the Agency of Commerce and Community Development had discussed VCGI (Vermont Center for Geographic Information) and that VCGI could produce heat‑map style outputs; she also said regional planning commissions and local officials had been consulted.

The presentation noted that the bill is one among several approaches to increasing housing supply and that modular housing work had been addressed elsewhere. Committee members raised the possibility of referring elements of H.253 to the House Committee on Environment because of overlap with stormwater and other environmental plans; presenters said they were open to committee coordination and further data-driven refinement.

No formal vote or committee action on H.253 is recorded in the transcript; the bill was presented for committee review and discussion.

The discussion touched repeatedly on transportation and equitable access: presenters and members said concentrating housing near employers could reduce long commutes for lower-income workers and help transit viability in more places.

The committee scheduled additional related work and asked staff to consider how mapping and interagency coordination could be shaped over the coming months to inform next-year deliberations.