For most of the 50 years that Kathie Alyce has lived in her farmhouse along the Nasmith Brook in Marshfield, she's had 20 feet of lawn between her stone chimney and the granite-lined brook that flows along her property.

In the July 2023 flood, the gentle brook became a torrent that carved off about 10 feet of her side lawn. This year's flooding, on July 10 and 11, took another four feet and left a large hollow space under the remaining bed of grass.

"My yard is slowly being whittled away," Alyce said last week, standing on the bank of the now-sedate brook, peering through a cluster of soaked, pallid lilies at the cavern under her lawn.

The recent flooding, some of it catastrophic, has left many people homeless in central Vermont communities. At least 12 residents were abruptly displaced when a section of a Plainfield apartment building known as the Heartbreak Hotel fell into the Great Brook. Other homes in town were rendered uninhabitable or were swept away.

Alyce and others would like to find somewhere else to live before the next deluge. But the housing crisis that has dogged Vermont for years is making it difficult to find new arrangements.

With so many people displaced, the conversation in the Plainfield area frequently turns to the possibility of building homes at Goddard College, a small, alternative school that recently announced it is closing this summer. Its 200-acre campus, which includes several buildings, a wood-fired generating plant and a pre-World War II estate once called Greatwood, is connected to town water and sewer service and is within walking distance of Plainfield village.

Whether housing there is feasible — and could be affordable — remains an open question.

A nonprofit group called Cooperation Vermont has been trying to buy the campus for months, in hopes of running educational programs and putting an environmentally friendly, cooperatively run community there that includes new housing. The college's trustees opted to go with another buyer, however, signing a sales agreement in May. But that buyer backed out, and earlier this month, administrators again put out a call for bids.

Cooperation Vermont remains interested in the property. Local residents have started meeting on campus to talk about ways to work with the nonprofit to buy the property and build housing, said Jake McBride, 26, a former resident of the Heartbreak Hotel.

"There are a lot of empty buildings, and there's a lot of unhoused people; it seems pretty simple," McBride said. He declined to give details about the meetings, saying he didn't want to reveal a strategy that might help another buyer snap up the campus.

Well before this year's flood, many locals were pushing the college to choose a buyer who would build homes on the campus. When word spread in May that a local commercial development firm, Malone Properties, had signed a deal to purchase the property, some Plainfield residents protested. People wearing Bread and Puppet masks and beating drums paraded up the owner's driveway, demanding to know the plan for the campus.

In June, the Plainfield Selectboard agreed to ask the Attorney General's Office to investigate the proposed sale, claiming trustees might be engaged in illegal activity. Earlier this month, a group called Remake Goddard asked a Washington County judge to stop the sale, saying it might violate state law regarding nonprofit organizations. The developer did not return calls.

Remake Goddard wants to keep the school going in some form by acquiring and administering Goddard's academic programs. Yet another group, Save Goddard College, is trying to keep the college open and says on its website that it opposes the sale of the campus "to any entity."

Goddard's administration and trustees have released little information. In a letter to Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark earlier this month, an unnamed Goddard administrator said the $3.4 million listing price reflected an appraisal last year and would be used to pay off a $2 million mortgage. The rest of the money would go to employee severance and other closing costs such as legal and accounting fees, the letter said.

Goddard already has several tenants on campus, including a therapeutic program for grades 7-12 called Maplehill School and Farm, and the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. It rents dorm rooms to several workers at the nearby Cabot Creamery and now to some of the Plainfield residents displaced by the flooding.

It would take money and creativity to build on the property. Local construction costs are so high that there is very little market-rate housing being built outside Chittenden County. And it's unlikely a federally subsidized housing development would make sense at Goddard, said Angie Harbin, CEO of Downstreet Housing and Community Development, an affordable housing developer in Barre. Harbin said she spoke to Goddard president Dan Hocoy about the property over the winter.

Downstreet builds apartment buildings for low-income tenants using federal tax credits. That competitive program prioritizes projects that are close to public transportation and other amenities, Harbin said in an interview. Plainfield, a rural town with about 1,200 residents, has a health center and a small food co-op. Public transportation is scarce.

Downstreet sets aside 25 percent of its projects for people who were homeless, Harbin said — and they need access to services that aren't currently available in Plainfield. The historic buildings on the former estate would also complicate a Downstreet project.

"This is something I deeply love about Vermont — the historic preservation — but the regulations can be really frustrating, especially for affordable housing," Harbin said.

However, she said, the existing utility connections on campus might make it attractive to higher-end developers.

"I don't think there are any barriers to having housing there," she said. "The challenge is building any housing that is affordable."

Vermont has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and that's starkly apparent in central parts of the state, where many homes stand empty or need repairs. Decades without substantial home construction have contributed to today's shortage.

Washington County, home to Plainfield, had a rental vacancy rate of 3 percent in 2022, according to Vermont Housing Finance Agency — around the state average. VHFA said the median home price in the county this year is $329,000, close to the Vermont median of $340,000.

Plainfield has also seen a recent influx of new residents, many of them LGBTQ people who are drawn to the area's long history as a haven for alternative thinkers — a legacy of Goddard.

The housing crisis is creating new problems for some of those people, including McBride and Eli Barlow, who shared an apartment in the Heartbreak. The two and a third roommate weren't home when their place collapsed into the Great Brook, but they lost almost all of their possessions, including tools and other mementos that McBride had saved from his grandfather's estate.

Last Thursday night, Barlow and McBride sat in McBride's Mazda, which now serves as a mobile closet. The pair, who are staying with friends nearby, sorted through some donated clothes and talked about their options for finding a new place. McBride moved to Plainfield in 2020 from Hartford, Conn.

"Vermont is a safe haven," he said. "I moved here as a queer person because I knew it was a great place to be."

But the two said they can't afford any of the places that are available for rent or sale. McBride, who works as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ nonprofit, Out in the Open, has approached the owners of some local homes that are vacant, but he's discouraged by the prices.

"I don't have tons of cash sitting around," he said. "I can't just buy something and fix it up. I can't afford most of the mortgages around here."

Rose Hagan, 29, had only been living in Plainfield for four months when she lost her apartment in the Heartbreak. Hagan, who works as a carpenter for a company in Burlington, found another apartment to rent in North Montpelier, and she'd like to get back to Plainfield as soon as possible.

"I was looking for a quiet, rural town that has other queer people living there, and Plainfield was that spot," Hagan said. She thinks Goddard could present a solution.

"It seems crazy not to use it as a community space and housing," she said.

Alyce, too, has been looking at options but figures the flooding is hurting her chances.

"My home just lost more value," said Alyce, who has been shopping this summer for a new place to live with her best friend and a neighbor who is a real estate agent. Alyce makes ends meet by having a housemate and renting out a tent space along the brook. "I don't think I can even spend $200,000 on a home with whatever is left over from selling this one."

She graduated from Goddard in 1979 with a degree in business and psychology and also worked for the school briefly. She said she loved her experience there and is proud of the work she did as a Goddard student. But she's not sure she wants to live again in the type of communal setting proposed by the groups that are talking about buying the campus.

"I'm still a Goddard-ite, but I'm different from some of their dreams and hopes," Alyce said.

Instead, she's been looking at mobile homes.