Today is, for those who celebrate, Homelessness Awareness Day at the Statehouse. Among the scheduled festivities: A joint hearing of the House General/Housing and House Human Services Committees, with a roster of witnesses that included not one, not two, but three people with what the agenda terms the “lived experience” of being unhoused. (One of the three, Bryan Plant, is seen above after he testified before a legislative hearing last fall.)

With these kinds of events, the proof is in the pudding. It’s what happens after The Special Day that counts. If this is an opportunity to get lawmakers in their feelings by briefly opening the door to Real People, then it’s worthless. If they actually listen to the testimony and do something about it, then it’s all good.

And we’re gonna find out in a hurry, as House Human Services is about to issue its memo to House Appropriations about what to do with emergency housing in the rest of the fiscal year. Human Services was supposed to release its memo last week. It did not. On Tuesday, it approved a memo that excluded emergency housing from its consideration of the Agency of Human Services’ budget request for the remainder of FY24. As of this moment, we’re still waiting to see what the committee will do about housing.

They seem intent on extending the motel voucher program through June instead of approving the Scott administration’s shambolic request for $4 million to provide shelter for a fraction of those currently getting vouchers. But given the repeated delays, I’m guessing they’re having trouble putting together a solid plan and providing the necessary funding. If they fall short, today’s testimony will unfortunately fall into the “tokenism” category.

And even of Human Services steps up strong, the fight won’t be over. Its recommendation will go to House Appropriations, and they’ll be dealing with every other committee’s Budget Adjustment Act requests. And if a decent emergency housing plan passes Approps and the full House, then it goes to the Senate, and who knows what the senior chamber has in mind.

So, a long way to go. But there’s more reason to be hopeful right now than there was last week, when Scott administration officials were insisting that any additional funding for shelter would divert money and attention away from the broader housing crisis and, you know, too bad if you’re homeless right now. (They seem to not be resisting an expansion of assistance through June, likely because there’s a limit to how heartless they want to be seen to have been.)

As for today’s extravaganza, it painted a picture of a system that’s struggling and often failing to help the unhoused. It’s quite a mess: underfunded, so understaffed that some of the available resources aren’t deployed, inadequate to meet the scope of the housing crisis in America, and utterly confounding for those it’s meant to help.

“It’s painful to summarize my experience,” said Rhubes Gould, one of the three formerly unhoused. He talked of living through “dangerous and difficult situations all the time,” and being treated “like we shouldn’t exist.”

Plant covered much of the same ground as he did previously. but it bears repeating. This is an obviously intelligent guy who did his best and often failed to keep up with the system, thanks in no small part to being assigned to 11 different service advocates in three years. The “fear, stress, panic, anxiety” of dealing with paperwork, rules and regulations are so heavy, on top of the burden of being, you know, unhoused and all. “You have no idea how this damages people.”

John Medeiros, a 62-year-old military veteran talked of his struggles with ADHD and severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and the “miracle” of being able to live in a subsidized apartment. “The money spent on me has been well spent,” he said.

You’d hope that “lived experience” testimony would become a standard part of Legislative activity. Recipients of social service programs have experience with the system, a hard-won perspective that can’t be gotten anywhere else.

The committees also heard from people with another kind of “lived experience” — dealing with the consequences of our housing crisis. “Some say that ‘the homeless have always been with us,’ but it’s not true,” said Gus Seelig of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. Back in the 70s, he said, real estate was cheap and housing affordable. He talked of housing costs rising much faster than incomes since then, due in part to affluent folks buying second homes and the booming market in short-term rentals.Since 2020, he said, affordable housing has been built “on a scale never seen before, but it’s not nearly enough.”

Ken Russell of the Montpelier-based Another Way, a nonprofit that helps people dealing with homelessness and mental illness, talked of living on the front lines of the crisis. “It can be heart-rending, it can be beautiful,” he said. “We’re dealing with people in existential crisis, staring into the abyss.” I don’t think that was a subtle reference to DCF Commissioner Chris Winters’ “There’s going to be a cliff at some point” remark, but it should have been.

Jess Graff of Franklin-Grand Isle Community Action rattled off some stunning figures on unhoused and unsheltered folk in her jurisdiction, and then added “All the numbers are undercounts” that “only include those who have chosen to engage in the system.”

You could have come away from the hearing full of despair at ever being able to comprehensively address homelessness in Vermont. Or you could have been uplifted by the dedication of those trying to help, and the resourcefulness, courage and smarts of those who have stared into the abyss and kept on persevering.

You could be spurred to action by the fact that, as Seelig said, the costs of dealing with the consequences of homelessness are far greater than the costs of giving them places to live and the support services they need.

Or you could be motivated by the simple human imperative laid out by Plant as he closed his testimony: After the hearing, he said, “I get to go home. You get to go home. There are a lot of people who still can’t go home.”