Now that we’re within shouting distance of adjournment, it is belatedly dawning on the Legislature that something terrible is about to happen. After months of studiously avoiding the implications of ending the motel voucher program this summer, many lawmakers have awakened as if from a deep slumber, looked around, and realized that the state is about to evict more than 2,000 people in one fell swoop. Well, two fell swoops, one at the end of May and the other at the end of June.

This afternoon, the House General & Housing Committee devoted an entire hour to some heartfelt wailing and gnashing of teeth. (The second hour of this two-hour hearing archived on YouTube.) Members got a statistical breakdown of the situation from Scott administration officials (downloadable from the committee’s “Documents” list) and then spent some time making statements like “This is awful. Isn’t there something we can do?”

It was not an inspiring performance. This committee has been involved in discussions about emergency housing and the voucher program. Two of its members helped devise a budget item that sunsetted the voucher program, and that item was then presented to the entire committee. There was testimony from people in the housing advocacy community who made clear the direness of the situation and who presented well-crafted, doable solutions. Members seemed to have absorbed little to nothing of those presentations.

The hour was basically a discussion involving members of House General and three figures from the Scott administration. The latter brought a slide presentation full of statistics about our current epidemic of homelessness, how many are housed under the voucher program, how many won’t be housed when the program ends, and some of the obstacles they face in keeping their lives together. There were also several very busy and confusing pages of flowcharts showing how the state plans to address the crisis — which does not include any additional housing, mind you. It was just as depressing as you might expect.

Let’s start with the above graph. The blue line shows a rise in homelessness that began during the Covid pandemic — but has only continued to worsen, even as the economic effects of the pandemic have waned. That blue line tells you that the numbers of unhoused have less to do with Covid than with the state’s dire shortage of housing. The blue line doesn’t track with the pandemic; it does track with Vermont’s red-hot housing market.

So, Gov. Phil Scott and lawmakers may insist the voucher program was created in response to Covid-19 and has to end now that the pandemic is “behind us,” but that link was long ago severed. In fact, the program is more urgently needed now than at the height of the pandemic.

The state’s official figures for the unhoused: 1,822 households in the voucher program, roughly 500 sheltered through other emergency programs, and “only” 150 currently unhoused. That figure is going to skyrocket if the voucher program ends as scheduled.

Administration officials offered a breakdown of eligibility categories. The most dismaying figure is 565. That’s the number of voucher households including at least one person with disabilities. Yep, most of them are headed for the streets. There are also 329 families with children and 82 households with members aged 60 or more.

The presentation included county-by-county breakdowns of the number of households who will be unsheltered. It’s very bad news for Rutland County, which has nearly 500 households in the voucher program. Also in line for a big bump in homelessness: Chittenden County with 381 households, Windham with 216, and Washington with 208. None of those counties have any available shelter capacity to speak of. Overall, roughly 1,800 households will lose eligibility, while only about 150 will still be in the program. And the eligibility criteria are, shall we say, dismaying. They were clearly written with cost considerations at front of mind and compassion barely registering.

Households will be eligible for up to 84 days in a motel if they’ve experienced fire, flood or natural disaster; death of a spouse or minor child; court-ordered eviction; or domestic violence. Those folks are gonna use up those 84 days in a hurry.

Others will see a 28-day limit on total motel time. They include people 65 or older, those receiving SSI or SSDI payments, families with children 6 years of age or younger, and people in the third trimester of pregnancy.

Need I point out that the elderly won’t get any younger and those with disabilities won’t get any less so after 28 days, or that the third trimester is more like 72 days?

After the presentation, lawmakers held a remarkably feeble “brainstorming” session, tossing around this or that idea for interim sheltering. None were especially practical or impactful. And it’s stunning that this is what they’re doing at this late date. It’s the kind of open-ended thinking that should have been done months ago in a room full of whiteboards.

Besides, if they’d bothered listening to housing advocates, they wouldn’t be fumbling around in the dark. They’d already have a solid menu of ideas that could be done quickly, cheaply, and/or most impactfully.

Instead, we got a bunch of hand-wringing. If only there was something we could do! Isn’t there anything we could do? I guess not. Isn’t it terrible? I feel awful about this.

Unmoored from real-world plans, this pity party went on for a while and then fizzled out. Near the end, committee members felt the need to acknowledge how hard the administration was working on this and how deeply committed state officials are. There was no reference to the administration’s culpability for the situation we’re in. Why no plans before now? Why just let the program go and go with inadequate investment in solutions? Why no transition plan besides simply evicting the vast majority of voucher clients?

In short, how the hell did we get here, who was responsible, and which heads ought to roll?

None of that. The meeting was far too polite for that.

I can’t say I came away from it with any optimism whatsoever. There was hand-wringing and mutual commiseration but no plans were made, no direction was even sketched out.

Our elected representatives sure do feel baaaaaaad about this. That and a buck-fifty will get you a cup of coffee.