Well, this explains a lot.

The 2023 Vermont Point-in-Time Report of Those Experiencing Homelessness is out, and it shows an explosion in homelessness over the last four years, including an 18.5% increase from last year — and a 36% hike from 2022 in unhoused families with children.

The latter figure is bitterly ironic considering the Democratic Legislature’s laser focus on helping children this session. Too bad that while they were funding child care programs and universal school meals, they couldn’t be bothered to keep roofs over unhoused children’s heads. (They could still reverse course during the upcoming veto session, which would be nice.)

The PIT Report also makes the Scott administration look even worse, which is quite the accomplishment. The numbers make clear that homelessness was exploding even as Scott was bound and determined to kill the motel voucher program that provides shelter for 80% of Vermont’s unhoused. Well, it did until last week, when the state evicted some 700 voucher clients.

The numbers also shine an unforgiving light on the administration’s failure to make any transition plan whatsoever for ending the voucher program humanely. They had to know this was happening, and yet they did nothing. It was “a crisis outrunning the state’s response,” in the words of Dartmouth College policy fellow Anne Sosin, who spent the 2023 legislative session desperately trying to get state officials and lawmakers to acknowledge the obvious.

The continuing rise in homelessness also belies Scott’s argument that the program was a response to Covid-19 and now that the pandemic is “over,” the program has to end. Problem is, even as the pandemic was waning, homelessness kept on rising dramatically. The real problem was a massive imbalance in real estate markets. There was never a policy adjustment to that change in reality.

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