Two legislative committees got a metaphorical bucket of cold water dumped over their heads today by people who are trying, and largely failing, to deal with Vermont’s crisis of homelessness. And then a pair of just plain ordinary folks took the stage and tossed an equally metaphorical grenade into the room with their real-life experiences of homelessness and the frustrations of dealing with social service bureaucracy.
Guys like Bryan Plant, pictured above, are rarely featured in legislative hearings, and that’s a damn shame. He’s smart, articulate, and his input is crucial. The absence of voices like his makes for myopic policymaking, with no attention to how the system affects those on the receiving end.
Plant and Rebecca Duprey were the two witnesses labeled as “Lived Experience” on the docket for today’s joint hearing of House Human Services and Senate Health & Welfare. The two committees were examining the implementation of Act 81, the extension of the motel voucher program hastily negotiated at the end of June by legislative leadership and the Scott administration.
Plant and Duprey told stories of encountering barrier after barrier: “a mountain of paperwork,” much of it incomprehensible and repetitive, an unresponsive bureaucracy, poor to nonexistent coordination between government programs, constant turnover among case workers (Plant was assigned to 11 different “service coordinators” in three years, so you can imagine how coordinated his services were). It all added up to, in Duprey’s words, a system of “inexcusable cruelty” to people in the direst of circumstances. “You have no idea how damaging this is to people,” Plant told the committees.
The topper: Plant and Duprey are two of the rare success stories of Act 81. Unlike the vast majority of voucher clients, they have managed to find good housing. They struggled their way through a system that seems more designed to frustrate its clients than to help them regain their footing in life.
Duprey, who entered homelessness as a survivor of domestic violence, has become housing advocate Brenda Siegel’s right hand in the latter’s furious effort to make up for the abundant shortcomings of Act 81 as implemented by the administration. Siegel shared stories of those who haven’t been as fortunate as Duprey and Plant: A mother of three evicted for withholding rent after her landlord turned off the heat and is now losing her voucher eligibility, a significantly disabled man who’s being exited today of whom Siegel said “I don’t know how he will survive,” another man who just had open heart surgery and is being kicked out of his motel. “People with disabilities are being left to fend for themselves,” Siegel concluded.
Time for the obligatory reminder that Gov. Phil Scott constantly professes his devotion to protecting the most vulnerable. Sure.
The Act 81 experience, Siegel noted, has also been “incredibly difficult for providers” including state personnel struggling to implement a law that was enacted in a hurry at the very last moment.
All this and much more came after testimony that we aren’t in the middle of a homelessness crisis — we’re just in the beginning stages of a situation that’s in danger of getting much worse. Sue Minter, executive director of Capstone Community Services, said her agency had “fielded 3,598 calls from Vermonters seeking support in finding safe, secure housing” in its three-county service area between July 2022 and June 2023, and had managed to help about 2,000 of those.
And then came the July floods, which instantly triggered a “squeeze on supply with a rapid increase in demand.”
Mary Cohen, head of the Housing Trust of Rutland County, estimated that by the end of 2024, “we will need 2,007 units” of affordable housing, and “we’re on track to get 84 on line” during that time.
That’s just Rutland County, folks.
There was more, much more, but you get the picture. We are already in a humanitarian crisis and it’s likely to get worse before it gets any better. Are our policymakers up to the challenge? I’m skeptical. But after today’s exposure to “lived experience,” they can no longer credibly hide behind excuses of ignorance or blithely accept administration assurances that it’s all under control.
What’s clear is that we need an urgent, all-hands-on-deck effort to boost our stock of shelter and affordable housing. And we need a thorough reinvention of an assistance system that too often engenders, in Bryan Plant’s words, “fear, stress, and anxiety” among those it is allegedly trying to help.
The Vermont Political Observer. 
“fear, stress, and anxiety”
That, of course, is its purpose as we live in a nation that thinks of those victimized by our economic and social policies of favoring billionaires and Wall Street as moochers and parasites.
John, There are those who are glad that you write of what you write, if for no other reason, no one else in Vermont is willing to do so, but frankly, Vermonters just don’t give a flying purple flaming fuck. Why do you persist? What compels you? Why do you care? What do you hope to achieve with such a complacent, complicit, culpable, blind, vacant, self-serving, virtue-signaling Vermont audience? And given those proven attributes of stupid-proud Vermonters, why fucking bother? Life is short Brah, save your web hosting expenses, your research and writing labor and instead, put it to the wife, make her happy and in the end you’ll both live longer be much happier.
It’s warming to know so many people reading your blog see through the Vermont bullshit. I disagree that you should stop blogging Vermont’s dirty, filthy laundry. I think you should amp it.
As for solving the housing problem…it’s not going to happen. The state sold out by manufacturing the housing crisis so it could turn Vermont into Jersey. In ten years time sprawl will be everywhere, traffic horrible, housing costs skyhigh, the landscape looking like another auto hellscape from nowhereville but the Dems constituency will be rolling in dough and rank and file vermonters screwed permanently….you can never retrieve what American developers wreck.
Short term…one of the easiest solutions is to follow nyc example and ban abnbs not occupied by homeowners and severely limit the numbers of units they rent.
This, of course, will never happen because the affluent white liberal yuppies who own them won’t allow it. There motto has always been ‘more for me is less for you’.