A graph in the town of Vienna’s fiscal year 2024 mid-year financial report illustrates a bracing reality: Despite the recent addition of several multi-family developments, housing in the town is getting much more expensive and lower-cost options are proportionately dwindling.
In 2020, 5.3 percent of residential properties in the town were assessed for less than $400,000 and another 1.5 percent for between $400,000 and $500,000.
In 2024, those figures still stand at 5 and 1 percent, respectively, but the percentages of housing in higher-assessed categories have increased in ascending proportions compared with value.
One middle category, consisting of residential properties assessed at between $500,000 and $600,000, has shrunken considerably over the past five years. While such properties constituted 26.5 percent of the town’s inventory in 2020, that figure has gone done markedly in each successive year, ending with just 3.5 percent in 2024.
Those lower categories increasingly are being supplanted by much more expensive housing. Housing in the $600,000-$700,000 range in 2020 accounted for 26.6 percent of the inventory, but just 14.5 percent this year.
Moving up a notch, the $700,000-$800,000 category has nearly doubled from 12.9 percent of the total in 2020 to 21.6 percent this year. The broader range of $800,000-$1 million was 9.7 percent of Vienna’s housing in 2020, but 23 percent in 2024. Higher-end housing in the $1 million-$1.99 million range was 17.3 percent of the inventory in 2020, but now stands at 30 percent. In the figurative “nosebleed” category of $2 million and above, only 0.2 percent of Vienna’s housing qualified in 2020, but it’s 1.4 percent now.
A couple of Vienna’s 4,400 residential properties now are worth more than $3 million, said Marion Serfass, the town’s finance director.
