Portions of an article by Art Woolf were scanned from the June 1, 2017 edition of The Burlington Free Press. Interesting to see where Fairfax sits. Those of you that have chosen to move here since 2010 certainly chose the right town to move to. Commuters to Burlington are very common now, while back in 1952 when I moved here, very few people like myself were commuting. We had a number of young women from Fairfax who grouped together to live in an apartment and on Monday mornings and Friday nights would catch a ride with somebody like me. Sometimes the car was pretty full, but everybody squeezed in for a very short and possibly uncomfortable ride to Burlington.
The population numbers tell us that people are not moving into the cities of Burlington and Winooski-or any other city in the state. But they also are no longer moving into the more rural areas of Vermont or of Chittenden County like people did in the growth years of the 1960s through the 1990s. Now the fastest growing areas around Burlington are the close-in suburbs including South Burlington, Essex, and Williston and also Milton, Fairfax, Georgia, and St. Albans Town.
Those areas are growing for two main reasons: First, they are close to where people work and commuting times are short. Time is money, and as people get wealthier, long commutes become more and more costly. That's why the fast growing towns are, in general, north of Burlington (Milton, Fairfax, Georgia, and St. Albans Town) with easy access to 1-89, and towns in northern Addison County are not growing.
