I don’t know what we expected when we ended the motel voucher program and failed to address the opioid crisis with appropriate urgency, but this is what we should have expected.

The above photo of City Hall Park, posted on SeeClickFix, is disturbing to say the least. Some have responded on Twitter with laments about the decline of Paula Routly’s “beautiful burg” and strident calls to Do Something.

By now, I’m sure that Something Has Been Done. But when you have the sheer quantity of human misery now present in Burlington, you’re only playing a grim game of Whac-A-Mole. Unless you hire enough police to have a cop on every corner 24/7, this is going to happen. Or get worse.

I’ve been criticized by some for seeing the city’s current crime fetish as excessive. I still do, but as I say every time I write this, I don’t mean to imply that there are no legitimate concerns. There are. But the city’s problems have little to do with policing or criminal justice policies. Short of hiring enough police to put a uniform on every corner 24/7, you’re going to deal with the inevitable consequences of the Queen City’s twin crises: homelessness and substance use. The race for the Democratic mayoral nomination is all about housing and public safety, but honestly, the problems are too big for a city to address on its own. Even if Burlington did go completely cop-crazy, the best they could do is export the problem beyond the city limits.

And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The state, having already evicted hundreds and hundreds of people from the motel voucher program, is steadily dialing down the program. There’s a desperate scramble to create 1,500 new shelter beds, the need identified by Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families.

That’s 1,500 new spaces by April 1, when the voucher program is scheduled to expire completely.

(One of these days I’m going to go back and revisit the smug assurances we got last winter from the Scott administration and the Legislature about how we could end the voucher program without consequence. They all deserve to have their faces rubbed in it.)

And now, today’s issue of Seven Days brings us a devastating account of a rising tide of evictions in Chittenden County, focusing on County Sheriff Dan Gamelin, the guy tasked with delivering the bad news to renters:

Gamelin summed up the situation in one word: “bad.” Vermont property owners are on pace to file more than 1,900 eviction cases in 2023, at least 200 more than in pre-pandemic years. The spike has been most pronounced in Chittenden County.

Every working day, Gamelin and his deputies are knocking on at least one tenant’s door, either to warn them that time is running out or that they have to go.

It seems certain that this is only going to get worse. A pandemic-era rental assistance program expired last summer, but the need didn’t go away. Seven Days reports that Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority, told lawmakers last spring that 73,000 renting households in Vermont would likely confront “unbearable” rents after the program ended. There are just way too many people living on the edge, especially when the rental market is completely out of whack.

Our Leaders are talking about a fresh effort to boost the housing supply, but that’s going to take years to come to fruition. We already have the second-highest rate of homelessness in the country. The way things are going, we stand a good chance of overtaking California for first place.

Our Brave Little State is becoming a human misery factory. Are we okay with that?