The pace of news continues at breakneck speed on our developing and self-inflicted dehousing crisis. This installment’s title is courtesy of Barre Mayor John Hemmerick, whose city is desperately trying to plan for the first installment of The Great Dehousing, which is now only a couple of days away.

In central Vermont, two charities have combined to raise over $15,000 (the goal is $20K; chip in here if you can) for tents and sleeping bags and such to distribute to the soon-to-be-unsheltered. The city of Montpelier is looking into a possible winter shelter at the city’s Recreation Center, and Barre is hoping to offer shelter at the Barre Auditorium. The problem there is not so much setting it up, as staffing it. The city doesn’t have the means, and local shelter operators are already doing everything they can.

Both cities are discussing the seemingly inevitable encampments that will follow Our Great Leaders’ decision to end the motel voucher program that provides shelter to 80% of Vermont’s unhoused. Mayor Hemmerick offered this comment to The Bridge:

It is a sad day in America and Vermont when tiny municipal governments must look to … informal settlement and slum management policies to do the unthinkable in the wealthiest nation on earth: sanction substandard encampments and living conditions.

Slum management, folks. That’s where we’re at in good old caring old Vermont.

House Speaker Jill Krowinski, whose effort to trick Gov. Phil Scott into signing the Legislature’s budget failed just as completely as you’d expect, followed up her first misadventure with another attempt, not to solve the problem, but to try to shift the blame to the Scott administration. She called on the governor to declare a state of emergency “to address the transition of those in motels and avoid mass homelessness in Vermont.”

Perhaps the lexicographers in the audience can tell me whether an “emergency” requires some element of surprise. In this case, the consequences of ending the voucher program were clear as day months ago, and Krowinski and her team opted to ignore the warning signs. If there’s an emergency, then she and her colleagues were complicit in creating the situation.

Meanwhile, Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson is out here trying to sell us that the end of the voucher program will be a good thing for the imminently unhoused.

The voucher program, she said, “was structured as an economic benefit, and was based on the general assistance housing program.” Because of that structure, “people in the hotels and motels are not getting the services that they need, and which are built into our other programs that are specifically designed to address homelessness.”

Note the third person: “was structured.” Curiously passive, from the head of the very agency that structured the program.

For the sake of argument, let’s allow that it may have made sense at the beginning of the pandemic to make the program its own thing and get the money out the door as quickly as possible. But eventually, as the pandemic wore on and homelessness remained widespread, don’t you eventually revisit your early decisions as time goes on?

Don’t you, in fact, realize that the federal dollars fueling the voucher program are going to go away sometime, so you’d damn well better find a way to connect clients with pathways out of homelessness?

Samuelson also complained about the program’s cost: an average of $145 per night. Whose fault is that? Motel owners have expressed willingness to negotiate substantially lower rates. The administration has either refused or failed to explore the idea. In fact, at his Friday press conference, the governor insisted that rooms were in short supply and that lowering the cost was impossible.

Well, either he’s criminally misinformed or he’s lying.

Point is, all the flaws Samuelson describes in the voucher program are the administration’s own fault. They weren’t mandated by the feds. They didn’t just happen. Samuelson’s agency was not an innocent bystander, but an active participant.

But let’s set aside all of that for a moment, and focus on the fundamental untruth at play here: The idea that homeless people will be better off without shelter.

I don’t care what kinds of services they will suddenly get, according to Samuelson. They won’t have roofs over their heads!

It’s a false dichotomy in any case. You could keep people sheltered while integrating them into support services and accelerating the production of alternative housing. Yes, it will cost more money.

But not really. As has been demonstrated over and over again, and as you can see in the frantic efforts underway in Barre and Montpeleir and many other communities around the state, The Great Unhousing will cost more than the voucher program ever has. It won’t come directly out of the state budget, but the costs are there and will be borne by municipalities and institutions across Vermont.

Within a handful of days, several hundred households will be evicted from their motel and hotel rooms. In the face of this not at all unexpected development, our leadership class has devolved into finger-pointing and a frenetic search for patchwork solutions. Their goal is not to provide shelter to voucher clients; their goal is to limit the PR disaster and try to make sure somebody else gets the blame. It’s a dismal spectacle, and I think that’s putting it kindly.