I was twelve years old in 1978, which means Vermont has been mine for nearly half a century. I grew up here. I left, as the young do, to wander the country. And in 1998 I came home — married, a chef-school graduate, and certain I'd returned to the best-kept secret in America. I'm still certain, and so are roughly 650,000 other people, give or take a few skiers. That, in one sentence, is both the blessing and the problem.

For most of those years, the price of a Vermont house was set in Vermont. You walked a property outside Waterbury, you knew what it was worth, you shook a hand. The supply line ran from the lumberyard in town to the framing crew up the road. Local market, local money, local math.

No longer. Today the price of a Vermont house is set in Beijing, where the appliances are stamped; in Ottawa, where the lumber is milled; and in Washington, where the tariffs are written. And this time, we have the receipts.

Where the Tariff Lands

Earlier this year, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago did the quiet, thankless work that politicians rarely bother with: they followed the tariff payments from the port to the product. They compared the industries that absorbed tariff costs against the industries that didn't, month by month, across the ten months the 2025 tariffs were in force. They wanted to know where the money actually came out.

The answer tells a clear story. The industries hit hardest were manufacturers — fifteen of the eighteen most exposed industries were manufacturing. And within manufacturing, the sharpest hits were the things a house is made of. Electrical appliances, equipment, and components absorbed an input-cost jump of nearly 3 percent. Furniture and related products came close to 2.5 percent. Construction itself ran about 1.5 percent. Meanwhile utilities, insurance, and rental services — the parts of the economy that run on regulation and paper — were barely touched.

The tariff didn't land on widgets. It landed on shelter: the exact industries that put a roof over someone's head.

The Jobs That Were Supposed to Show Up

Here was the promise, and you've heard it plenty of times: tariffs protect American industry. They keep jobs here. They pay for themselves in wages saved and factories saved.

The Chicago Fed tested that promise against the data and found no short-run employment bump in the protected industries. No wave of gains for the proponents to celebrate, and no wave of losses for the critics to fear — just higher costs, passed along as higher prices. And when the Cato Institute looked at the same period from another angle, the picture got harder to defend: the manufacturing sectors growing fastest, like computers, electronics, and aerospace, were among the least exposed to tariffs at all. The industries we're best at growing never needed this help, and the industries getting the help aren't growing. We got the costs. We haven't gotten the jobs the costs were supposed to buy.

The Builders Pay First

Now let's bring this home, because builders are where the tariff stops being a policy and becomes a price tag.

Building materials have risen about 40 percent since the end of 2020 — far more than overall inflation. According to the National Association of Home Builders, whose surveys track this every month, 72.9 percent of builders reported that their material costs went up over the past year, with a median increase of 6.7 percent and roughly one in five seeing increases of 10 to 15 percent. The builders estimate the tariffs alone add about $10,900 to the cost of a typical new home. And $10,900 is not a one-time fee. Rolled into a thirty-year mortgage at today's rates, it works out to roughly $70 a month — around $25,000 by the time the loan is paid off. That's the tariff, with interest.

Lumber deserves its own paragraph, because it sits at the heart of every frame in this state. Canada supplies roughly 85 percent of our softwood lumber imports and about a quarter of everything we build with. Between new duties on Canadian lumber and the added surcharges, the effective price of Canadian framing lumber rose about 45 percent. Steel and aluminum carry a 50 percent tariff. Kitchen cabinets and furniture, 25 percent. We taxed the frame of the American house and then wondered why houses got expensive.

There's another layer to this that matters deeply in Vermont. The pain is not shared equally among builders. Builders who started five or fewer homes last year saw their material costs rise a median of 9.1 percent. Builders with a hundred or more starts: 1.8 percent. The big companies can stockpile lumber before the next tariff announcement, sign twelve-month supply contracts that lock in today's prices, and lean on suppliers who will wait for next year's increase. The small builder can't do any of that. The small builder buys this week's lumber at this week's price, with this week's tariff already baked into it.

What That Means in Vermont

Vermont has none of the big national production builders. There is no big-box homebuilder of the Green Mountains. Nearly all of our housing is built by small local crews, custom shops, and family outfits — two people and a saw, in a lot of cases. Our builders are the 9.1 percent cohort. They are exactly the people the tariff squeezes hardest, and they are exactly the people Vermont is counting on to close a housing shortage currently estimated at 24,000 to 36,000 homes by 2029.

You can already see the hesitation in the market. Land sales across Northwest and Central Vermont fell nearly 30 percent in the first half of 2026, as buyers weighed construction costs and contractor availability against what they could build for. Multi-family sales fell 18 percent. Land is where the future of housing begins, and when land sales freeze, the shortage compounds in slow motion.

And then there's the irony that should embarrass Washington a little. Vermont is a forest state. We log, we mill, we make maple; trees are what we do. And still, a quarter of the lumber holding up American houses comes from Canada — because U.S. sawmill production has been essentially flat for two years. Milling takes years to expand, and permitting takes years to clear, and houses do not wait. So right now we are paying 45 percent more to frame a wall with the cheapest, most abundant framing resource on earth sitting in our own backyards. Somewhere in Washington, a policy stands ready to be correct. In a lumberyard in Washington County, the price is already here.

Who Ends Up Paying

In real estate we talk about the all-in cost of a house — not the list price, but the number that actually clears at the table. The tariff shows up in that number, one way or another, on a state where the median home price already sits near $412,000 and where our region's median is still about 62 percent higher than it was in 2020.

What I find hardest to accept is who carries it. Vermont is an unusually equity-rich state — more than 87 percent of mortgaged Vermont homeowners have serious equity, among the highest rates in the country. The people who already own are mostly insulated from all of this. The tariff is paid by the first-time buyer stretching for a first door. It's paid by the renter, whose landlord passes the multifamily costs along. It's paid by the young family waiting for a home that won't get built because a small builder's margin evaporated. Since 2001, Vermont's median home price has risen about 148 percent while median household income has risen about 72 percent. Every extra $10,900 widens the gap that is already Vermont's central economic story — and it lands on the people we most want to keep here.

What We Do About It

None of this is to pretend Vermont controls the international trade winds. We vote, but we do not set trade policy, and the price of wood, wire, and windows is set in a global market where the Green Mountains hold exactly zero votes. What the Fed's research gives us is something almost as useful: a clear line from a decision in Washington to a kitchen in Waterbury, with dates and dollars attached. National and global conditions have always brushed Vermont. Now they land here.

It's worth remembering, too, that Vermont's local market is not standing still. Inventory is up 11.7 percent year over year. Homes are sitting a median of 91 days. Sellers are averaging 96.3 cents on the dollar, and the share of homes selling above list has fallen from nearly 20 percent to 13.7 percent. This is the first market since before the pandemic where a buyer can actually negotiate. But a market with about 2.9 months of supply — a balanced market needs four to six — is still a market where the shortage, not the tariff, has the last word.

So what should happen? I'll give you my honest list. Exempt building materials from tariffs — a tax on shelter is a tax on the price of entry to a decent life, and it's about the most regressive tax we have. Ramp up domestic mills, including Vermont's, so the tariff stops standing in for a real production policy. And treat Vermont's next 24,000 to 36,000 homes as the infrastructure they are — permitted, funded, and built with the urgency the shortage deserves.

I've spent most of my life watching people find their way to this state, and I've never once seen them stop. Vermont's part of this we can do ourselves: permit the land, fund the builds, clear the roadblocks. Washington's part is smaller and simpler — stop taxing the roof over our heads. Give Vermont builders a fair price on a stud, and I promise you, they'll do the rest. They always have.