On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer, the topic of how to make this little pocket of Northeast Vermont more economically viable is a topic that comes up often.
I'm starting to form an opinion that we shouldn't try to compete, at any level, with larger job centers. We lost a huge (per capita, it was never large in total dollar values) number of manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. That's not coming back. Perhaps there's a niche for us, and other rural communities in creating a great place for people to live and work remotely. Funding co-working spaces and high speed internet is a lot easier than getting a manufacturer to move in given that we have a tiny labor market.
Bigger issues for getting any population growth is our perverse tax and housing regulations. Not going to go into them in depth here but we have a water protection act that adds 10-20% to any construction project near water and wetlands even if the area already has a lot of development. Besides making things more expensive, it also encourages sprawl since many communities are built near water but it's cheaper to build in the hills surrounding them away from wetlands. One of the only ways to make a real estate investment pay off up here is to buy a plot, subdivide into 3 acre lots, put in a road and electricity and sell housing lots. The hassle of dealing with Act 250 doesn't make it worth it to do the actual development and so you don't see it. The only developments in my area are either 40 years old or the aforementioned building lots.
We also have an aging and decrepit housing stock and the tax structure for capital gains strongly penalizes flipping houses which is an accelerator on updating housing inventory. Instead, housing investment, like many places, is solely in short term rental or buy and hold/rent.