> (3) The Agency shall award grants under the Program on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to available funding, as follows: (A) not more than $125,000.00 in calendar year 2019...
With such a small budget, it seems like the actual intent may have been to allocate up to $125K to generate advertising about their state.
> Vermont has budgeted grants for about 100 new remote workers in the first three years of the program and about 20 additional workers per year for every year after.
Vermont lost 10,000 working-age residents over the past five years.[1] This plan will (in theory) recover just ~1% of that.
Maybe they're monitoring reactions to this announcement before they put more money into the program? Otherwise I don't see how this is supposed to make any difference to their problem.
With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore, and agriculture in a slow death spiral, Vermont is trying to embrace it's potential as a bedroom community for NYC and Boston.
Burlington is a cool little city and the countryside is beautiful as well. If they can use a small program like this to stimulate some cadre of "pioneers", they'll get alot of value, and perhaps some improved outlooks for underutilized former IBM people.
> With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore
I'm not sure where you are coming up with that. In fact many places in the NE have have multiple top 10 all time snowfalls in the last 10 years.
Climate change is expected to increase the precipitation in New England, particularly in the winter and the temperature increase can result in more snow due to the increased ability of the air to hold moisture. In general we'll probably have better skiing for the next few decades at which point snow _may_ start to be replaced with rain, depending on how high the temp goes where you happen to be.
That is a really weird paper, basically they are assuming that the 98-99 season is representative of some abstract season in the 2040-2069 time period which is at best a questionable assumption. But even with the questionability they are showing a 8-10day decrease sometime in 2040-2069?
I think they also leave out major changes in snowmaking. The mountains I visit have lost a lot of access to snowmaking due to regulations limiting their water use and changes to what bacterium are used for nucleation.
The temperature swings are in some cases actually a benefit for season longevity. What you often want is a good dumping early in the season and then some rain / wet snow followed by a freeze to build a good hard base for later in the season.
I live in Upstate NY. We get snowfall, but after the storm blows out, it gets warm. This January/February, I cleared my roof of snow wearing shorts, and the temp was around 65-70.
I don't totally understand the figure. What is determining the number of data points taken? It looks like the density of readings in the NW is much higher than in the NE.
Snowfall data at ski resorts isn't reliable because they make snow, and the incentive is to lie toward favorable amounts for marketing purposes. In Colorado a few years ago a number of resorts were caught blatantly fabricating snowfall amounts and then they combated this with variations on snow stake cams published on their web site.
Anyway, there are quite a few NOAA SNOTEL sites all over that have reliable data and for sure snow pack is on a decline, and there's also USDA NRCS who use that data and publish agricultural specific interpretations of it. Further, due to budget constraints, some of these data may stop being tracked and produced altogether.
By that data Vermont has slightly increased rates of snowfall over the last 70 years. This paper also references studies that predict Vermont will see an increase of snow over the next few decades as well: https://www.northeastern.edu/climatereview/?p=282
The big resorts make their own snow so it's not like things are completely dead. But there is the subconscious thing for visitors nearby where if there's no snow in NYC or Boston they forget that there is always snow on the major mountains here.
>"With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore, and agriculture in a slow death spiral,..."
Can you elaborate on the slow death spiral of agriculture part? Are you talking about the effects of globalization factory farms or something else specific to Vermont/Northesat?
I know Hoboken has one or two at least, but I'm North Bergen so closer to Edgewater than Hoboken!
I can actually (and have) walked to Edgewater.
I was definitely not being completely honest, but there is an insane number of people in Hudson county, it's surprising there aren't offices for corworking spaces. But I guess because of the demographics and most people absolutely not being in tech is the answer.
As we are talking about living and working in Vermont on a technology focused news aggregation site, I would call that a success.
Part of the reasoning given in the article is to shore up the "rapidly sinking tax base" of the state and it reminds me that we don't have a good example of governments that both grow and shrink based on the economic activity of the state. That is something that could really help areas remain stable for longer periods of time I expect.
Yes, the Strong Towns organization has a unique perspective on this. They make a convincing argument that local governments in the U.S. are trapped in a "growth Ponzi scheme." [1] Without continuous growth, most of them will never cover their liabilities. Strong Towns also provides interesting insights on how to avoid and correct this pattern.
I like the Strong Towns ideas, I wish they could present them in a less activist sort of way sometimes. It is perhaps the author's of the various article's history that leaks through but often times when reading their stuff I feel like I'm being talked down to and I think that blunts their otherwise useful information.
To be honest, most "anti-tax" people are fine with the theory, but don't trust that it will be well managed and, more importantly, preserved for lean times. Too often surpluses are immediately funneled to special projects that we could have been better off without.
The "pro-tax" people in my area are also generally against this sort of thing, because they want nothing more than to take more money and spend it on special constituencies.
For example, my state passed a sales tax that was sold to us as a way to better preserve our parks, wild lands and cultural heritage. About 19% has gone to the DNR, which means less actually went to the stated cause. The rest is being funneled to art projects that are poorly received and utilized.
Mind you, this is in a state that's very pro-taxation, and otherwise very liberal.
So are most pro-tax people, they're just pro-tax-everyone-else. Our governor is filthy rich, campaigned on raising the taxes on the one percent, and yet none of the taxes he wanted would have affected his trust fund income. What a surprise.
It seems the more pertinent correlation is to resource-rich states, which makes sense as most are non-renewable, and if on state land, should benefit all the citizens.
The reason for this historically is that throughout human history the main problem for societies has been to devise systems and governments that allow you to grow as fast as possible. Famine, War, Diseases or any Natural Disasters had the potential to wipe out your community or Kingdom, so throughout history you see this mad dash at settling lands, growing communities etc.
That has changed in the past 100 years, especially in the New World. You no longer have to worry about your towns being burned down by an invading army (not in the developed world at least). The systems and thinking that we have in place for governing have just never dealt with this problem before.
I do hope that it changes in the near future as we see the inevitable decline in many, many rural communities in the US and the hyper-growth of urban conglomerates. It would be nice if Governments could plan for a gradual decline in the population and ensure that basic city services would survive the decline by investing judiciously, rather than try to reverse the trend with expensive gimmicks to attract people that lose money, make the communities financially insolvent and basically increase their misery.
Likely a pilot program, the cost of administering the program provably exceeds the 125k itself.
I've just received my Danish startup visa. It may seem that every European country is trying to hand these out like candy, but my batch was capped at 50 visas.
It makes sense to start these types programmes out small and observe the ramifications. Cash-for-clunkers is a good example of a large scale program going wrong, where massive funds were allocated to buy back unused cars.
Northern Ireland had a no-cap for renewable heating, no one bother to ask for money for years until ppl close to the DUP figured how to exploit it and extract a billion pound or something.
Starting with a small sum makes sense, and for every remote worker they attract there might be a spouse, very likely children and suddenly you have two jobs generated on top for free.
For many, this won't even begin to offset the increase in income and property taxes from this notoriously high-tax state. Individual or business, you're likely to pay more.
>>The income tax has a top rate of 8.95%. This ranks as the sixth-highest in the U.S., although it only applies to taxpayers making over $413,350 per year. Meanwhile, total state and local sales taxes range from 6% to 7%.
>>There are five income brackets. The highest marginal rate is 8.95% on any income over $388,350. That's on top of federal income taxes.
>>Businesses pay an effective property tax rate of 5.27%, the third highest in the country.
>>At 6%, sales taxes are also on the high side. Meanwhile, those businesses that pay corporate taxes get hit with an 8.5% rate for any profit made above $25,000.
Some societies think that it is wise to spend on some things such as education (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...). Others think that lowering taxes at whatever cost is better. The former fits with my thinking, which is why I like it here.
And yet the neighboring state of New Hampshire, which has some of the lowest taxes in the country (0% sales tax, 0% state income tax), beats Vermont handily in SAT scores.
What does Vermont have to show for its higher spending? Why do you see higher spending as an automatically good thing if it doesn't have any evidence of having a beneficial effect?
I would be very careful about touting NH's approach. We fund schools entirely on property taxes, so rich towns have good schools and poor towns do not. I'd guess part of the disparity is that in NH's poorer towns kids aren't even taking the SATs.
Not paying taxes is cool but the annual discussion of "Which completely normal public service will we forgo or curtail this year?" isn't so awesome.
First of all, well done NH. As a Vermont resident I am happy when any Northern New England state does well.
The table you link to shows Vermont coming in #12 in SAT scores, and I'll accept that for it is. Other sites (e.g. US News and World Report) typically ranks us in the top ten for our educational system. It is not unheard of for us to be ranked #1:
My point is, I do not understand how you can be so fixated on NH finishing six places ahead of VT and not actually asking the bigger question of "How do two small rural states even begin to compete?" Let alone trying to decipher why New England consistently does so well overall with Massachusetts and Connecticut ranked #1 and #2.
Vermont is a high tax state, fine. I more than get my money's worth. As someone that goes to Town Meeting Day and looks through the budget every year I know that I head home secure that my dollars are being well spent. Meeting my kid's teachers at school I know they are getting a very solid education and heading off to university next year.
Possibly because until recently NH had all high schoolers take the SATs to be used in statewide assessments. It would follow teachers would then spend classroom time preparing their students for it.
> notoriously high-tax state
Some societies think that it is wise to spend on some things such as education (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...). Others think that lowering taxes at whatever cost is better. The former fits with my thinking, which is why I like it here.
It's a little more nuanced than that, and not necessarily an either/or as you have described it. More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient, third-party spender and believe the money could be better spent more wisely elsewhere. While Vermont does rank high in K-12 (4th), it is ranked 36th in higher education. Vermont is also the 2nd least populated state in the country, so it remains to be seen how scale will impact the education system there.
"More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient, third-party spender and believe the money could be better spent more wisely elsewhere."
People say that, but then they privatize functions of government, and if they're lucky, they end up with the same level of service. And then now there's a middleman involved who needs to get profit, meaning wages and service get cut.
> More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient [...] spender
The government is made up of people. In my experience, it isn't the funding amount that correlates with inefficiencies, it's the distance from accountability that does.
So one can reduce the taxes all one likes, a 30% wasteful department is still going to waste 30%. I'd rather target the inefficiencies themselves.
It depends heavily on how the money is spent, Illinois spends half the education budget on funding pensions alone [1].
89% of all education budget increases went straight to pension funding, with only 11% to the classroom. They already spend far more than other midwest states, with outcomes that lag behind Montana, Minnesota, and other frugal states.
So while I agree that education spending is critical to our future, money alone is not the magic wand.
Just spending money on education is meaningless unless it is used wisely. This is a common political tactic to talk about how much a politician authorized or increased spending on a program that is important to his or her constituents but it says nothing about the results. President Obama started the military down the path toward "smarter, not more expensive" weapons programs. That thinking should be expanded into everything.
On top of the taxes, housing is pretty bad too. You can be a reclusive hermit in southern / central VT on the cheap, but the closer you get to Burlington / Essex Jct the more expensive it gets. This is in part caused by the size of the University of Vermont - high demand for housing, small area. Many buildings have too many units crammed into them for the same reason. Not nearly as bad as the valley, but another reason not to pick this state for remote work...
This is one of the issues that this plan will run up into.
Normally someone may work remotely in a more rural place for cheap housing, but some of the housing in Vermont isn't that cheap.
Burlington has some of the same housing issues that other cities in the county have. I would imagine the vast majority of people who would consider doing this plan would want to live near Burlington. Well, that means Burlington would need to address housing supply and affordability too.
I’m currently looking for a 3 bedroom apartment or a house to rent in Santa Barbara, and see nothing below $3K/mo. In fact anything decent is $3.5k or more. I work remotely, now looking for a cheaper place to live.
I love living in Vermont. People are friendly, nature is preserved, the mountains are gorgeous, and there are an abundance of small communities/groups you can join based on your interests (produce co-op, hiking, fishing, skiing, meditation, 3D printing, etc). The music scene is colorful and varied if you are into that. In general, things move slower and people are kinder (I come from Boston). Great place to lead a nice quiet introverted life among the trees or immerse yourself in local activities.
As for rent, a nice 3BR goes for around 2-3k/mo in Burlington and gets substantially cheaper the farther south you look. It's not the cheapest nor most expensive state to live in, but the price:quality of life ratio is excellent.
Prices are not quite that high, even in our most expensive place, Burlington, which has great schools, is on a lake and has a great community. You can find places over 3k a month, but they are really nice places. I'd say you can find a decent 3-bedroom for 2k and up. (Most of the rentals for the state can be found on craigslist: https://vermont.craigslist.org/)
But let me tell you about Montpelier, the smallest state capitol in the country and the only one without a McDonald's. I think it is the best small community in the world, however this is coming from someone who has not lived many places. Near Montpelier things are a little cheaper (depending on how near) and if you go out 15 minutes drive or more prices begin dropping drastically. Montpelier has at least one of everything you need: Mexican place, one sushi restaurant, one pharmacy, one grocery store, one co-op, etc. It does not have much for shopping, which is true of all of central Vermont but there is a Walmart in neighboring Berlin.
If you want somewhere close to cool community events but super-cheap look into Barre, which is Montpelier's sister community--but it's that sister who has had a bit of a 'failure to launch' and everyone suspects is doing drugs. Houses are dirt cheap in Barre and it is 15-minutes drive to cool things in Montpelier. And while there are more 'bad elements' in Barre, it also has a ton of really cool people not on drugs, raising families and I believe things are starting to happen there.
Both Montpelier and Burlington are great for liberal-minded, community-oriented persons, Montpelier being a bit more into it. Burlington seems to be mostly made up of out-of-staters and can seem quiet transient as they come and go, where more people seem to stick around longer in Montpelier. If you are like this and live in Barre you will have to seek out your kind, but there are plenty there.
Vermont is great if you love the idea of hiking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, of owning a few acres with your own woods on them. Vermonters, especially rural Vermonters, pride themselves on minding their own business and letting everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren't bothering anyone else too much. Also we just legalized growing a few pot plants at home for your own recreational use, if you're into that.
Is New England drug epidemic really as bad as the media leads one to believe? I mean, in Santa Barbara, a lot of people smoke weed, but it's rare to hear about anyone doing heroin or meth.
It doesn't seem like it's supposed to offset taxes, but rather to ease the financial burden of moving.
There are more reasons other than taxation to consider moving. When I moved countries, I didn't even consider taxation when I moved. I make enough money that I'm comfortable, a couple of grand here and there isn't going to upset me. When I moved, it was for lifestyle reasons, which I think is the only sensible reason to move. If you're moving to Vermont to work remotely as an attempt at saving/earning more money, you're going to have a miserable time.
High yes but 8.95% is the marginal rate for incomes over 413,350/yr. The median income (according to recent census data) is 57k/yr. On a 100k you would pay something like 5% to Vermont.
I moved to Vermont to work remotely in DC without the $10K incentive. That was some 12 years ago. My quality of life and that of my family is vastly improved. I wouldn't have moved to New Hampshire, though I can see it from where I'm standing in Vermont.
The point isn't to get everyone to move, but to motivate some people who otherwise like what Vermont has to offer but are on the edge. If you are more on the European democratic socialist end of the spectrum of preferences and you plan to live in the US, Vermont will probably suit you. If you're on the right-to-workers end, you'd probably prefer someplace else.
From DC. DC has its advantages: free museums, good mass transit by US standards, lots of federal money being spent locally, a diverse ethnic mix with accompanying cultural and culinary diversity. The cost of real estate is astronomical, though. The schools generally suck unless you can swing something plush like Sidwell Friends.
I've lived in other places as well, always moving for school, employment, or, when I was younger, someone else's school or employment. I found that I could telecommute, though, and so we moved to a place we wanted to be for its own sake.
The things I like about Vermont: the climate, the culture, the natural and built environment. And frankly I like living in a place where I don't have to apologize for the cruel, exploitative history or the short-sighted or selfish political decisions of the populace. It's beautiful. There's a lot of art. My kids' school has great teachers, great facilities, and a lot of options. I have family who moved to the area, so that helps. The food is good. I walk into town to work. I can walk out my back door with my kids and hike to the top of a hill and have a beautiful view. I can take the bus home in the evening if the weather is bad. (I don't telecommute anymore, though I can work from home when I please.) We were living in a basement in DC. Now we have a house beside a brook.
Not to mention, moving all the stuff in my house in 2015 cost a little over $30K. $10K is a nice gesture, but it wouldn't cover a whole household... 1-2 bedroom apartment maybe. That said, it's a beautiful state and if you want to work remotely and do a lot of skiing/hiking/etc then it could be a nice offset.
Under the new federal tax law there is a $10k limit on how much state tax may be deducted from your income for the purpose of calculating federal taxes, and by opting in to this deduction you opt out of your "standard" deduction which is $12k for an individual or $24k for a married couple.
Under some circumstances it may still make sense to take the up-to-$10k deduction, because it may be combined with other deductions which will add up to more than the standard deduction, but for someone paying much less than $10k in state taxes it is probably more advantageous to simply take the standard deduction, and for someone paying much more than $10k the deduction may only represent a small portion of their state taxes.
> It's really weird seeing the US get scared of a 8% tax. Those taxes are services after all.
Not necessarily. Illinois spends roughly half its budget on pensions. In New York, where I don't need a car and can offload much of what I'd hire a lawyer for onto regulators, I get a decent bang for my buck. (Though we still have horrendous waste.)
> The more cynical view is that this was done on purpose to harm blue states that tend to have higher state income taxes
this could very well be true, but it does seem unfair in the first place to be able to deduct state income tax. it's great that some states have decided to increase their income taxes to offer more services to their citizens, but why should tax payers in other states have to subsidize them without receiving any benefit?
In general, wealthy higher-tax states subsidize the poorer, lower-tax states.
The argument for the deduction, which has always existed, is to prevent people from being double taxed. A higher-tax state may tax its citizens to pay for infrastructure or services, whereas a low-tax state relies on the federal government to pay for the same stuff. There are tons of people in poverty in a lot of southern lower-tax states. Who do you think pays for all of the government services these people need?
The tax plan was specifically designed to harm blue states and to make residents of blue states pay and even higher, even less balanced share of tax receipts in the country.
I would say this is triple taxation. Looking at how "double taxation" is used to refer to taxing at both corporate and individual level of public company profits, this is an additional burden on top of a two level system. Imagine getting taxed on the amount of taxes paid by a company you own shares of. State and federal levels are "double" in the first place.
Triple is a little hyperbolic, as you could probably best describe it with a number between 2 and 3 depending on the tax rate.
The cynic would argue that those same states also tend to pay into the federal government disproportionately. "Why should we be subsidising states like Alabama (who can't even be bothered to educate their populations) without receiving any benefit?"
While I benefited from that deduction, it never seemed fair that that the rest of the country had to kick in a tiny bit extra to give upper middle and above taxpayers a break.
Nobody subsidizes many blue states, which in fact subsidize many poorer states (as Texas does as well).
I'm not sure how I feel about the concept, but one rationalization is that if a basic need, like road funding, is suitably taken care of at the state level by high state income taxes, then the state needs less federal funding. It's sort of a usage qualifier I guess.
not exactly, only about 15 states pay more federal tax than they receive back, and they're not all the ones you would expect. [0]
still, this is a valid point. the net flow of cash is certainly an important thing to consider, but i do think it is worth making the distinction between federal and state taxes. i happen to live in a (very blue) state that receives more federal dollars than we pay in taxes. if i lived in a creditor state, i would certainly not be thrilled with the situation, but i would accept that the tax is raised (at least ostensibly) for the national interest and may not be spent evenly among the states. state taxes, on the other hand, are raised exclusively for the benefit of that state. we can argue about how to allocate federal dollars most fairly, but i really feel that state taxes should not be directly subsidized by citizens of other states.
One practical concern is that it's a lot easier for a state to implement something like single-payer health care if they can pay for it through state taxes that are exempt from federal taxes.
Otherwise, they're competing with employer-provided health insurance, which is already tax-exempt. That gives employer-provided insurance a huge artificial advantage and makes single-payer a lot more expensive in comparison.
Why should you pay federal taxes on state taxes? Consider that it's long been a complaint that it's "double taxation" to pay individual taxes on dividends which already got taxed at the corporate level. Imagine if, on top of that, you got taxed on the quantity that was paid in corporate taxes, that you didn't even receive. I imagine quite a lot of outrage if liberals proposed that, because it goes even beyond what is already an intuitively unfair situation to a lot of people.
You can deduct it but that doesn’t reduce federal taxes by that amount. If you’re in the 25% federal tax bracket, being able to deduct that 8% state tax effectively turns it into 6% additional tax which is still a lot if you weren’t paying it before.
Edit: others pointed out that this deduction is now capped, which I didn’t realize.
Vermont legislature is clueless if it thinks this or anything else other than a major overhaul of tax system and modernization of the infrastructure would bring people to Vermont.
I spent a few weeks recently bumming around the state.
1) Contrary to what Vermonters may think, real estate in Vermont is expensive. Not NYC or SF expensive but none the less very expensive unless it is in a totally need to be burned and rebuilt state.
2) Property taxes are ridiculous. Every time I look at a property I compare its property taxes to property taxes of comparable properties in other areas. Vermont loses to New York! It also loses to New Hampshire. Let this sink in - NH makes most of its revenue from property taxes and property taxes there are still smaller.
3) I put about 800 miles on my car in Vermont. One of the things I really pay attention to is overhead cables. Guess what? Outside what Vermont considers "major cities" cable break out and fiber break out boxes are nearly non-existent. Sat dishes everywhere sort of confirm the point. Internet connections in both random AirBNBs and regular BnBs sucked. Not the Amtrak level bad but close ( after I was done with Vermont I went to New Hampshire. Cable fiber boxes where everywhere and every place I was in had a very decent internet connectivity )
4) Going out costs major $$. New York/Philadelphia level $$. For definitely not New York/Philadelphia level of variety or convenience.
To be fair, there's areas in NY with their own city or county property taxes on top of it. Westchester has, last I looked, the highest property taxes in the country.
I've lived in Burlington, VT for the last two years, having moved from a large city.
The brain drain is real. I am leaving the state soon because I simply cannot relate to people and culture up here. (Note, this is for people who are < 35. There are a lot more >35 year olds up here with families who I never met). There's an inverse bell curve of age distribution.
I've discovered slightly above average intelligent people up here think they are much smarter than they are, due to the people/coworkers they are surrounded by. I've only met three highly intelligent people in my two years here. Two of them are also leaving within a year.
It's a shame, because Burlington is easily the most beautiful city I have lived in. Bike trails boarder the lake and outdoor recreation are all within an hour's drive.
The produce up here is the best I've had (like wow, can't go back good). The restaurant cuisines up here are diverse and plentiful (although the quality is lacking for some reason). Everything is so green up here. The weather is usually great.
It's a place to retire and maybe raise family, if you can handle the snow. Otherwise, if you're a younger adult with drive and ambition, you will not enjoy your stay.
I moved 5-6 years ago and admit it's easy for your ambition to be outsized there. I moved to Boston and realized I wasn't all that ambitious after all. I wanted to move back to VT for the outdoors - however, I moved to the Mountain West and realized it has much more outdoors and much more of a tech economy, so I never moved back.
Bonus: While we have all the winter mountain sports here at their highest levels, there's also 300 days of sunshine and much higher average winter temperatures where I now live! Good luck breaking single digit temps (F) in the worst winter months in Northern VT.
Wow, I can very much relate to this. I moved to VT 5 years ago, and I just haven't been able to put my finger on why there's a disparity between my social life here vs. my former city.
Many people simply talk much slower, drone on, and are not socially aware of when a conversation becomes one-sided. I'm used to fast talking, quick-witted New Jersey style conversations. At work I'm often engulfed with these 5 minute lectures about random garbage that I don't particularly care for.
I was raised in Vermont, and moved away to the Philly area for college, and stayed here because the job opportunities are so much greater in East coast metro areas.
Vermont is very insecure about its ability to "hold on" to its young people. Probably for a good reason, because the majority of young persons who remain in the state after high school are the ones who only graduate from high school.
I'm interested to see how this scheme works for the state. I'd assume their goal is to bring college-educated young persons to the state.
I think it's great remote work is starting to catch on. I think it could help revitalize a lot of the rural areas just outside of major metro footprints.
I am also born and raised New England, NH and ME could also benefit from this type of program (although Portland seems to be more up and coming). There's a lot of really good reasons to escape the Boston bubble, but unfortunately companies are holding tight to brick and mortar operations in the 'hip' downtown neighborhoods.
In my experience, proportionally, more smart young people who have the skills for tech work prefer living in cities with other like minded people. So if you want to hire them, you have to be there otherwise someone else will employ them.
Then have the office in the city and allow remote work as an option, best of both?
I've done both, a lot for those smart young people you mention, often lack hobbies, and those ones are extremely boring. I'd rather remote in from a mountain town where I can ski, mountain bike and hike than suffer year round with decreased QoL of a city.
Or they choose different careers because they don't want to live in the city with a bunch of people who think nothing like them.
A good chunk of the EEs where I went to school were doing it instead of CS because there were fewer CS options that didn't involve moving to a culturally incompatible city.
edit: The clock strikes lunchtime in SV and suddenly everything I posted today gets down-voted. It kind of illustrates my point about culture compatibility.
I’m using the sky high rents and unrelenting demand in popular cities around the world as a data point. Also, being physically close to other intelligent people offers network effects that, while I don’t have a study to prove it with, just kind of makes sense to me. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Vermont is a wonderful natural bucolic place to live.
Unfortunately, I discovered the hard way that the problem they are trying to solve is likely far more intractable than that program.
I co-founded a software/networking biz in VT some years ago. We really thought it was great, loved the lifestyle -- e.g., literally step out the door at lunch for a run or mtn bike in the woods, or walking meetings in the fields or woods -- just awesome!
We thought it'd be easy to convince others to come up and grow with us.
Wrong.
Ultimately had to move to north of Boston, then grew & sold.
I really wish more people would 'get it', but it just didn't work that way. Seeing that socialization seems paradoxically more city-oriented now despite far better connectivity tech, I'm even less optimistic now about it.
I really hope I'm wrong and they can kickstart a tech-in-the-woods common lifestyle... and at least with this program, a few dozen people will enjoy some great years there!
People are attracted to that lifestyle, unfortunately Vermont is missing a few pieces of the puzzle. Tons of people are moving to Denver and the surrounding cities where you get access to nature with the upside of still being close to major city.
Try one of the towns along the southern Connecticut River valley. You're a couple of hours from Boston. You can take the train the NYC. You have urban/college town amenities and culture if you want it. You can walk to nature if you want it. The schools are good. The traffic is good.
CT is experiencing a similar flight of taxpayers (particularly milliennials). Companies that have been there for decades are leaving for other states. Hartford is on life support and verging on bankruptcy.
CT is not the place for starting a modern tech company.
> Vermont has budgeted grants for about 100 new remote workers in the first three years of the program and about 20 additional workers per year for every year after
So only 33 people will access this opportunity for next year. And we have to assume these will be very young people who intend to stay there and repopulate the state?
Edit: On the article: COL is similar to Boston in Brattleboro (for the nice lifestyle that we expect as devs) but in different areas. You need a car for any real transportation and while rents and house prices are less other things are more (internet, heat, etc). There are 3-4 cafes not hundreds. There is a surprising amount of art and theater events and you discover that folks do some amazing things here in the woods. e.g. Parts for the Mars Rovers were made 100ft from my desk. My kids can take circus classes from former Circ du Soleil leads down the street. As a kid I took ski jumping lessons a mile from here from a Olympic medalist. And folks have weird job histories. The woman who runs the stables where my daughter takes horse back riding lessons was a developer on HP-UX in the early days
Sigh... That is just absurd. Our company is domiciled here but nearly all our income comes from outside the state so we provide the same economic benefit. Even if the state wouldn't pay moving expenses I'm sure we would for the right candidates.
Having grown up in the Northwest and lived on the West Coast my whole life, I think my expectations of how beautiful the Northeast would be was a bit skewed by media/popular culture.
I really enjoyed my first trip to to Boston/Portland/Acadia, but TBH, the more rural areas felt a lot more like a Disneyland version of nature curated for tourists from the "big city". It didn't live up to the hype, which I think is targeted at people who have lived in the hyper-dense-and-flat Boston/DC/NYC area and nowhere else.
I'm really not trying to dump on the area, it was quite nice, I'm just saying no more so than most rural places I'm used to. Of the whole trip, frankly, Portland was my favorite. It felt "just right" in terms of size and culture.
> Vermont has the best East coast skiing. I’d put it in the bottom quartile of West coast skiing.
Yep. I learned to snowboard on the east coast and when I came out west, I was amazed at how much "better" I was overnight. I really am better now, but it doesn't hurt to have good snow.
Reading through these comments, especially about Burlington reminds me that everything is relative.
Coming from a relatively rural area, Burlington appears to be thriving, tech savvy and a wonderful place for a young person. I went to school there in the late 90's and just recently visited with my kids and was blown away by the growth outside the city downtown. My wife and I both were intrigued at the idea of living there and wondered if the town/city could support our small business.
However, reading comments from those used to Boston, San Fran or even those who have lived IN Burlington paints a very different picture.
I think if you're coming from a rural area, Burlington is a massive upgrade. However don't expect big-city tech infrastructure or any sort of comparable startup scene if your benchmark are the East/West tech hubs.
$10,000 is less than what Silicon Valley firms will cover just for relocation. I guess if you're thinking of doing it anyway, it could push you over the edge. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Outside of SV, $10K doesn't cover what Microsoft paid to move us to Redmond...20 years ago. Apples, and oranges, and other fruits in our comparison, I realize. Point is, unless one were planning on moving there anyway, $10K doesn't go a long way toward offsetting the expense of picking up and moving across the country, or even just up the road from Boston.
It’s not going to make anyone move to a cabin in the woods. But if you have already decided to move to a cabin in the woods, it might make you pick Vermont over New Hampshire.
Whether $10k can sway you says nothing whatsoever about your wisdom. It is one factor in a multitude. Some people will like Vermont enough for other reasons that this is sufficient motivation. Other people will never have thought about it and this offer will make them start to do so. Some of these will fall into the first camp.
Even if your only consideration is your income, tax rates are a very small part of this. If you pay no local taxes but have to hire someone to clear the snow and blowdowns off your road, you're still out that money. If you have no town water or sewer, you have to pay someone to provide and maintain those services. Very few people consider only tax burden when choosing where to live. If that were so, people would be flocking to Kansas instead of San Francisco.
The larger point, though, is that some people will be closer to the decision boundary and $10k will move the boundary far enough to put them over.
Kansas is a world away from San Francisco (geographically and socially), New Hampshire shares a border.
New Hampshire still has municipal services despite much lower taxes. Of course, it varies but for someone making over $120k a year (many people in tech) the income tax is a huge lifetime burden that can likely eclipse any out-of-pocket differences.
I have lived in VT my entire adult life, and worked in tech/design. Ever couple of years I sit down and end up doing a comparison to see what it would be like to live in say the Bay area or Seattle. It usually comes out the same. I work remotely and know a bunch of other people who do it as well. It's totally doable (though bandwidth penetration to rural area's still sucks and is highly variable.). If you like Vermont, and can handle long winters it's great place to live, work and play.
This is great. I was really excited until I realized that you have to be a US citizen. I'd be happy to skip the $10,000 if I could get a work permit or a green card.
Lots of hills and low population density. I bet it is hard to get good internet in Vermont. Universal access to broadband would matter more than anything else.
Vermontel is rolling out gigabit fiber to all of vermont. I already have it in my seriously rural house in southern vt. It's faster and cheaper than any residential internet I have had in NYC.
It can be but its much better then it was 5 years ago even in smaller towns. My office is on fiber. My house has 50 mbit cable that is quite reliable and never over subscribed. Friends that live several miles out dirt roads have either satellite, dsl, or, increasingly often, LTE or Wifi-based service. LTE/Wifi/Cable and fiber all have plenty > 25Mbit options (up to 1GB most of the time) and even DSL and satellite do fine for NetFlix etc.
It's easy if you live quite close to:
Burlington, Rutland, Barre, Montpelier, Winooski, St. Albans
and otherwise a matter of luck.
Those are the top six cities by population, and the top two put together are about the same as my suburb of Boston. St. Albans is about 30 minutes from Burlington and an hour and a bit from Montreal; you can get access to culture and technology, but you'll need to drive.
There's certainly quite a few other areas with decent internet, at least if you are in the main "town" area. Bennington, WRJ + Norwich come to mind as other examples I can think of.
But yes, if you are in a random small town or rural area the odds aren't great for decent internet. (For that matter, that even applies to cell phone service, lots of dead zones in VT).
I was at someone's house/trailer a few weeks ago and he had satellite internet. I have no idea what the upload speeds are like, but we spent most of the time watching YouTube videos and it was at least as good as my DSL at home (I live about 10 miles outside town).
This is interesting. I'm hearing more and more examples of cities are pulling out more and more stops to attract people. Maybe I was just ignorant about them before.
Homesteading is an old American tradition dating back to the old land rush.
Even today, there are places in America (and elsewhere) that will give you land or money if you promise to build a house on it, or turn it into a farm, or stay there for x number of years, what have you.
There are also states that will pay for your education if you provide services. I had a friend whose MS in nursing was completely paid for by the state in exchange for agreeing to work at a clinic in a low-income neighborhood for 2 years.
She loved the work, the state got a motivated Nurse. Win-win.
If you are looking for warmer I would suggest Carrollton, GA, Montgomery, AL or Chattanooga, TN. AL has the second lowest property taxes in the USA and while not 2015 Detroit cheap it does have 2018 Detroit cheap housing prices.
I've heard good things about Chattanooga due to their municipal gigabit, have been meaning to check it out.
I was really surprised by how nice AL was too last time I drove through it. All that said, if I go back south, it will be hard to not pick NC. Asheville doesn't have much industry for tech, but it's exactly the kind of culture (hippies, artists, bluegrass, great food) and weather I've been missing. Cost of living is high by NC standards, but not for remote workers. Definitely more appealing than Vermont for most folks who don't need to be near Boston or NYC.
I'm a University of Vermont alum, and worked there for several years after college.
The IT (and "professional") economy is quite weak. There's a couple bigger web companies, however I know at least one of the biggest off-shores development.
Otherwise, a lot of the professional economy is just satellite of the tourism industry.
I read recently the superintendent of Burlington schools (Burlington being the big city in Vermont where the university is located) was traveling to China to help recruit high school students.
It's a beautiful, mostly rural place - but it's not surprising these initiatives are being taken.
I've been waiting to see programs like this pop up for a while. Remote workers are an economic dream for whatever region they end up in. They bring in large amounts of money from outside the area, spend it locally, pay local taxes, leave local jobs available for other residents, and generally put less strain on the local infrastructure since they're not commuting.
It's basically a win from every angle, and I'm surprised more cities and states don't already have programs like this one.
Remote workers are the golden goose for local governments. Working from home means they aren't commuting, so no increased peak demands on roads or transit. And they are all 20-somethings who don't need healthcare nor have school-age children. Like crypto-mining, remote workers sit quietly in their rooms. Feed them electricity and internet and they generate tax dollars. It's all a myth. Such people do not exist.
Hi I’m interested, I work for USDA I can work at any of the agencies possibly remote, I’m fully bilingual I have a MPA. My email ariettearana@yahoo.com
honestly $10000 is not a lot of money these days to make someone move to a different state. Make it $50,000-100,000 in tax credits and people will consider. They have to be more aggressive with their offer in order to have any decent amount of response.
People seem to be taking for granted that this is a good thing. In the short term of course attracting highly paid people is a good thing. In the longer term it's only a benefit if you're the kind of person who looks at Boston and thinks it's a good, highly functional society.
Most of northern new England looks at Boston/MA and sees high cost of living, government that micromanages individuals and lots of crime. Having lived in various places in MA (including Boston) as well as NH, VT and ME I'm inclined to agree. Boston has jobs and nothing else.
Ask people who grew up in NH, VT, ME what kind of people make the place worse and they won't say baby boomers with backwards beliefs, blacks, or bigots, they'll say "Massholes."
Just from living among and talking to people in ME/VT/NH states you'll quickly get the sense that it's not the material difference that make them like the place but the cultural ones. Many people choose to live in ME, NH and VT specifically because they do not have the same busybody, sort of socialist culture (cut me some slack, it's a nebulous and hard to pin down difference) as MA.
Trying to be culturally like Boston will be the death of these states. Seriously, they're biggest industry is tourism and part of the selling point is culture and image. Part of the "branding" of northern New England is that it's a land of freedom compared to MA. You can buy beer at the grocery store, light off fireworks without cops showing up and park a project car on your lawn without your neighbors trying to get the town to bend an obscure and irreverent by law to harass you. Whether these differences are material or not doesn't matter, they're part of the branding. If people wanted to go vacation in the woods and wanted to do it in MA they could head west on I-90. If people wanted to go to the beach and do it in MA they could do it on the south-coast or cape cod.
I could go on and on and on about how to the people in NH/VT/ME the culture is more important than the money, sure they want money too but you'd be hard pressed to find someone from one of those states that thinks any amount of money or economic development is worth letting the place turn into MA.
Yes I know that a lot of you might not be able to relate to this sentiment at all but encouraging people from MA to move to NH/VT/ME is a very thorny subject for most people in NH/VT/ME
I get that ~30-something people per year isn't much but it's the sentiment of "we should be like Boston because money" (which is a prerequisite to "we should be an attractive place for people with money from Boston to relocate) is dangerous (yes I know there's nothing stopping people who are from northern New England but suffering through living in MA because that's where the jobs are from taking advantage of this program). I think the focus should be on retaining talent, not importing it.
To all the people mentioning that the CoL in Vermont is fairly high for how rural it is, well you can thank NY for that. Upstate NY and VT have their CoL inflated by all the NYC money that wants to have a vacation home or retire away from the problem. Pretty much any "tourist" destination that an upper middle class couple with kids can drive to for a weekend will have this issue. Look at housing land prices in ME and driving time to Boston for example.
Vermont won't be like Boston because of a dozen remote workers. The University does much more to "Jersey" or "Masshole" Vermont, and that doesn't even do much.
>The University does much more to "Jersey" or "Masshole" Vermont, and that doesn't even do much.
Agreed about the impact of 30 people being negligible (and some of them will probably be people who are from VT and want to move back but need a little extra incentive to kick off the process)
That said, the fact that they're looking to import talent instead of retain local talent is what annoys me. There's plenty of STEM grads who don't want to leave northern New England but feel forced to in order to make money.
"That said, the fact that they're looking to import talent instead of retain local talent is what annoys me. There's plenty of STEM grads who don't want to leave northern New England but feel forced to in order to make money."
Totally - I always felt frustrated and even shocked there wasn't any organized/concerted effort to do so!
Northern New England will have to get its heroin problem under control before it will be appealing to the “remote programmer moving to rural area for peace and quiet and lower cost of living.”
I don't think drug problems have really hindered the gentrification of SF or NYC. And we are talking way bigger quantities and associated violence than jobless rednecks in rural Vermont.
It's not the only reason, but that's one of the reasons why I won't move to SF.
There are a lot of reasons why I won't move to a lot of places. Mainly, they're money-related, but it's a big world, and it often pays to be somewhat selective regarding the location issues that concern you most.
> (3) The Agency shall award grants under the Program on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to available funding, as follows: (A) not more than $125,000.00 in calendar year 2019...
With such a small budget, it seems like the actual intent may have been to allocate up to $125K to generate advertising about their state.
https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Documents/2018/Docs/B...