The Scott administration has published its monthly report on the GA emergency housing program (as mandated by the Legislature), and it’s nothing but bad news.

The report is downloadable (look for “Pandemic-Era Housing Reporting – October”) from the website of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, which will take up the report at its meeting on Tuesday, November 7. I suspect we’ll be in for more earnest expressions of concern, sad head-shaking, and fresh statements of determination to find answers.

The numbers tell a story of stasis. Barely any discernible progress in creating new housing or shelter, only the slightest dent in the number of people staying in state-paid motel rooms, and only a relative handful who managed to find alternative housing in October. This, despite an evident push by administration officials to move people out of the prgram, as reflected in the continuing efforts by former gubernatorial candidate and housing advocate Brenda Siegel, who just received the ACLU of Vermont’s David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award. Her Twitter feed continues to feature stories of people who are obviously and painfully needy, but who are nonetheless losing their eligibility for motel vouchers.

As a reminder, 1,283 households qualified for the last-minute voucher extension approved by the Legislature and governor. The extension came with some strict conditions: Clients must pay 30% of their income toward the cost of motel rooms, they can be evicted at any time by motel management for misbehavior, and they lose their eligibility if they reject an offer of housing of any sort, from homes to apartments to congregate shelters.

As of the end of September, 874 households remained in the program. One month later, that number stands at 815. The decline is markedly slow, given the rules of the program and the administration’s efforts to reduce the clientele. (Those 815 households include a total of 1,518 individuals including children.)

So that’s a drop of 59 households in a month. Of that number, only 20 are known to have transitioned to some kind of alternative housing.

Twenty!

Less than one per day.

That’s pathetic. And it tells you exactly how deep and intractable our housing crisis is. There are no easy answers. The search for solutions is still coming up empty.

Another 32 left the program without notifying the state, so we don’t know where they’ve gone. From July 1 to late October, only 146 households had moved to alternative housing — and 223 had left the program without explanation.

We’re doing a better job of losing track of people than we are of finding them places to live.

Further down in the report, you find an update on “New Projects” related to housing and shelter. Well, it’s an update, but there’s nothing new in October. No new projects, as far as I can tell.

One other thing. The enabling legislation tasked the administration with negotiating lower nightly rates for voucher-funded lodging. In October, the administration made precisely zero progress on that front. The nightly rate at the end of September was $133. It still is.

Meanwhile, hundreds of the unhoused have fallen off the radar, their destinations unknown. The rest live in a state of perpetual uncertainty. They could lose their eligibility at any time for a number of reasons.

At last month’s Joint Fiscal hearing, lawmakers and administration officials expressed concern about whether they could end the program as scheduled, by next April. To judge by this latest report, they should be transitioning from “concern” to “panic.”