This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
FAIRLEE – Not so long ago, Jonah Richard spent his days working for a white-collar consulting firm in New York City. Now, he fills his time bopping between construction sites in the corner of Vermont where he grew up.
On a crisp fall morning, 34-year-old Richard checked in with his crew. They were putting the finishing touches on six apartments carved out of an old barn behind a general store in Fairlee, which has been in Richard’s family since the 19th century and is now owned by his cousins. To fit a bonus apartment in the basement, Richard’s crew had lifted up the barn where his uncle used to run an antique shop.
“We jacked it up a little bit and then dug it out underneath, poured new foundation — and created extra living space,” Richard said, showing off the unit’s well-equipped kitchen and heat pump system.
This philosophy — trying to squeeze more housing into any possible nook and cranny in a building, and in a town — guides all of the projects that Richard takes on through his small construction company and development business.
“Everything we do is infill development. There’s no… sprawl and subdivisions,” he said. “Maximizing density is a lot of what we try and do.”
And maximizing density he’s doing. Through his dual enterprises — a small-scale development firm called Village Ventures, and two-year-old general contracting outfit Réal Hazen Construction — Richard’s teams have built nearly 20 homes and are in the planning stages for 45 more in Fairlee alone. The Upper Valley town, a summer tourism hub, has a year-round population of about 1,000 residents.
Richard’s work has grabbed the attention of state leaders who want to see more homebuilding concentrated in Vermont’s small towns and villages, where the odds can be stacked against developers: It often costs more to construct new homes than builders can expect to sell or rent them for, public funding streams that can fill that gap often prove complicated for small outfits to navigate, and a dearth of public infrastructure limits where housing can go.
Pair those issues with the community opposition that so often meets new housing projects, and more risk-averse souls would simply walk away. But Richard has surmounted many of those problems, and state officials are desperate to convince more people to follow his lead.
“We need and want a Jonah in every town,” said Alex Farrell, commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
How it started
Richard was raised in nearby Corinth, the son of a luthier and a stained-glass restorer. He eschewed his parents’ artist lifestyle and left home to earn an Ivy League chemical engineering degree. After he pivoted into management consulting in New York, he began to use some of his income to purchase fixer-uppers in Newark, N.J.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when his grandmother was looking to sell a vacant post office-turned-bank building in Fairlee’s village center, Richard saw an opportunity. He bought it for $100,000 and began dreaming up an eight-unit apartment building with retail on the ground floor. Some neighbors balked.
“There was some pushback — some pushback on the appearance of the building, some pushback on the density of the building,” said Chris Brimmer, Fairlee’s zoning administrator. But Richard managed to work through those reservations, Brimmer said; his personal roots in town likely helped gain trust with wary neighbors, too. “And holy cow, you know, within less than a year there was a three-story building on the site.”
Richard had minimal building know-how when this first Fairlee project kicked off. He waded through the permitting and financing and construction process, learning everything as he went. He showed up to the jobsite each day, apprenticing under a master carpenter he hired. His own sweat equity helped keep the cost of the project astoundingly low: around $170,000 per unit. State grants and energy-efficiency funds helped finance the project, along with Richard’s own investment and money from extended family. Rents range from about $1,000 to $1,600 for studios to one bedrooms.
Fairlee has loosened its zoning rules in recent years in an attempt to encourage more home construction, Brimmer said, and in 2019, town leaders set an ambitious target to add 100 housing units to the town within a decade. Like many rural towns, it struggled to retain staff because of its lack of housing options.
Richard had thought he’d finish the apartment project and then “flip that experience” into a development job back in New York. But something about it scratched an itch: He liked reviving the town where he’d spent so many childhood summers, and where he’d since watched shops shutter and home prices rise. Plus the work felt less transactional, more relational. Many of the people Richard worked with on the building he knew from growing up, and have remained his business partners. Together, they’ve put a sizable dent in Fairlee’s overall housing need.
“We’re lucky to have him here,” Brimmer said, of Richard. “I don’t think we would get this far along in meeting that goal if it were not for him having come back to town.”
How it’s going
All along, Richard has sought to teach others what he’s learned. When he began working on that first apartment building in Fairlee, he launched a newsletter, called Brick + Mortar, to document his progress. He’s taken on more and more ambitious developments since the first, like an affordable housing project financed by federal tax credits that’s currently in the planning stages and a 22-unit development with ground floor space for businesses that recently scored town approval.
But he has not shied away from sharing his foibles, either. Richard has catalogued his challenges building out septic systems in Fairlee, which lacks a town sewer. He’s written about the time he got hit with a surprisingly huge tax bill after accepting an affordable housing grant for rehabilitating an apartment building in nearby Bradford — “a cautionary tale” for other would-be small-scale developers, he wrote.
“He’s not thinking of it as competition,” said Farrell, the housing commissioner, of Richard’s ethos. “He’s trying to say — here’s what I’ve learned. Go benefit from my mistakes and my successes. That’s so cool.”
The newsletter isn’t the only way Richard has tried to prompt others to get into the building game. He gave input to state officials as they crafted a textbook for small-scale developers to use across the state, called the Homes for All toolkit. Officials are now gearing up to use that resource for a forthcoming training series, Farrell said.
“We think this could actually be something that has a snowball effect in spinning off more and more developers, more people doing this,” Farrell said.
That’s Richard’s ultimate hope, too. Sometimes he gets calls from people on the opposite side of Vermont asking if he’s interested in taking on a project they’re eyeing. Part of him is flattered, he said.
“But also … you need to develop your own network of developers there that can tackle those projects. And it all comes down to somebody … one, having the time, and two, being willing to take that risk,” Richard said. “The best person to do that is somebody in the community that knows it inside and out.”
There are many easier ways to make money in development than building in this corner of the Upper Valley, Richard said. But for now, that’s where he plans to stay — living on the top floor of that first apartment building he built in Fairlee.
