I was in Vermont last summer for the first time in years. We attended an opera festival in Brattleboro, a truly depressing town, down on its heels. While we didn’t see Burlington, we did see lots of beautiful scenery and some very quaint little villages.
Funny enough, one of my wife’s Miami friends just relocated to a beautiful mountainside property in an exclusive community: over 10,000 sq. ft. in a house built for the novelist John Irving: it even had a wrestling room! (Irving was a competitive wrestler.)
Vermont has really turned into the state that is either the rich liberal retirees or poor people doing blue collar jobs. Which many are seasonal. Like working at a big ski area. Or cleaning up after leaf peepers.
All the bed & breakfast inns are owned by some guy & his wife who used to work on Wall Street. They used to trade stocks & bonds. Now they make pancakes. the still subscribe to the Times.
Then there are the dairy farmers. Which there are still a lot. They are all the conservatives that are now outnumbered by the former hippie liberals(like Bernie). On their dairy barns they have signs that say TAKE BACK VERMONT. The good thing also is that the Amish are moving in and buying up dairy farms.
Keep in mind, that Vermont has more cows than people.
It is a very rural low population state.
The problem is that rich liberals keep retiring there too.
Unfortunately, the same thing keeps happening in NH. During covid we got a lot of people from NY, CT & NJ. We always get Massholes moving up here.
Which has made a fixer upper house $400-500K.
Any decent house in the area is $600+.
It has turned us inot a Purple State.