Dear Editor, I’m responding to Mickey Nowak’s recent letter to VTDigger, which in turn was a response to a commentary by John Bossange. There was a time when housing was both affordable and aesthetically appealing. People gathered to build a structure in town, whether it be a town hall, c hurch, covered bridge or house or barn for their neighbor, and despite primitive carpentry skills and lack of fancy tools, built some of Vermont’s most iconic structures that still stand proudly after two or three centuries. The inhabitants who moved in did so debt-free. Now buyers cannot afford a structure any bigger than a doghouse without shackling themselves to a 50-year mortgage. To me, the issue is not whether we can make housing aesthetically pleasing. We can, and should. The question is why it is no longer affordable. We do not have a housing crisis, or a housing shortage. We have what I call house hoarding. READ MORE During the Covid-19 pandemic, folks with the financial means to do so wanted out of cities where Covid was running rampant. Houses in Vermont sold sight-unseen for obscene prices. Many of these folks no longer live in Vermont, if they ever did, and their — often second — Vermont homes are now vacant, or serve as short-term rentals. I’ve heard of neighborhoods where many homes are vacant because of this. There is no shortage of housing. Just as with other forms of wealth, there is what I call a “mal-distribution” of housing. Solving that would be the quickest, most effective fix. All that said, there is no reason new housing cannot be affordable, energy efficient and aesthetically pleasing. These characteristics are not mutually exclusive. Steven Farnham Plainfield, Vt. Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont doesn’t have a housing shortage. It has a hoarding problem.. ...read more read less