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.

The four-year trend is almost unbelievable. The PIT reports for 2016 through 2020 showed relatively stable numbers, in the 1,100 to 1,300 range. In 2020 it was 1,110. (The count is conducted during the last ten days of January, so the 2020 figures predate the pandemic.) There was no count in 2021 because Covid.

And then.

2022: 2,780.

2023: 3,295.

Almost three times as many as in 2020.

Now, the big jump from 2020 to 2022 can reasonably be laid at the feet of the pandemic. But the rise from last year to this year? That’s a stretch.

The report’s authors put the blame on the 2022 end of other pandemic-era policies: a rental assistance program and a moratorium on evictions. Beneath all of that is our desperate shortage of rental properties — vacancy rates between 0.5% and 3% — which allows landlords to raise the rent and be choosier about tenants. A vacancy rate between 5% and 8% is considered a healthy balance in market forces.

The “good” news in the January PIT count was that 3,158 of Vermont’s homeless population had some kind of shelter. Only 137 were unsheltered. The lion’s share of that shelter was in the motel voucher program.

And now we’re cutting that lifeline. Absent further action by the Scott administration or the Legislature, those two numbers will be essentially flipped by the end of July. We’ll go from dozens unsheltered to literally thousands.

Look at the chart prepared by VTDigger data reporter Erin Petenko for Digger’s piece on the PIT report. See that long blue bar at the right with the bit of orange on top?

That bit of orange got dramatically bigger on June 1, when roughly 700 people were evicted from motels. It would now take up about one-fourth of the column.

On July 29, the column will be almost entirely orange — representing the fact that we will providing shelter for only a small fraction of our homeless population.

The chart also shows at a glance that we are entering unknown territory. The PIT counts began in 2014, and until last week Vermont had never had more than 163 unsheltered residents. As of June 1, that number was in the high triple digits. Let’s say 800. And we’re about to unshelter hundreds more on July 1 and another couple thousand on July 29.

We haven’t experienced anything like this. We have no idea how it will reverberate through our society and economy. And we’ve never before condemned anywhere near this many people to a nightly battle for survival.

At some point, one would hope that all the stories we’ve heard from the unhoused and all these horrible statistics would pierce the coldest bureaucratic heart. So far, that hasn’t happened. We live in hope that it will.