The House General & Housing Committee got an earful this morning from the mild-mannered Paul Dragon, Executive Director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity which, although its name sounds like some kind of neo-centrist business-promoting outfit, is in fact one of the biggest providers of shelter and services to unhoused Vermonters.

He was speaking in support of H.132, the Homeless Bill of Rights, a piece of legislation that’s been kicking around House General for several years now. Despite the sponsorship and support of committee chair Rep. Tom Stevens, the HBOR has never managed to even make it out of committee. But he’s trying again, and bully for him.

Dragon brought prepared testimony about what he called the “unprecedented levels of homelessness in Vermont,” which I’m going to append to this post because it’s just absolutely brilliant on the current crisis, misconceptions about the homeless, and all the ways we’re failing to meet this moment. (You can watch his testimony here, starting at the three-minute mark.) But first, let’s establish his bona fides.

Dragon has served in multiple roles in the Vermont Agency of Human Services, and has also led the Healthcare for the Homeless Program in Burlington. In younger days he served with the Peace Corps in Mali. He described CVOEO’s operation of “10 distinct yet interconnected programs that provide emergency services like shelter, housing, food, and warmth as well as services to help people gain economic independence.”

It’s quite a lot, and yet the demand far outpaces his organization’s resources. “We have the second highest rate of homelessness in the country. In 2016 it was the second lowest,” Dragon said in response to committee questioning. “We were close to ending homelessness [in Vermont] in 2016.”

Now? “We have no framework now for homelessness,” Dragon said. “Where is our plan? How come every year, we come to this point where we’re like ‘What are we going to do in the winter? Where’s everybody going?’ We need a long-term, ongoing plan.”

From here on, I’ll let Dragon’s prepared remarks stand for themselves.

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Some people claim that the unsheltered are a threat to the community. Here is some data. At our Community Resource Center we support on average 120 people a day, many of whom are unsheltered, most unhoused and the rest are living on the margins. Two hundred forty-seven people using the CRC report being unsheltered. In the morning you will see guests lined up after a cold night out with some needing basic wound care, and some with chronic medical conditions including diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. We have an aging population of unsheltered individuals with 14% of the guests between the ages of 55 and 62 and 14% of the guests over the age of 62. Fifty-three percent of the guests have a disability which is likely underreported. Given this demographic, I think the threat is exactly the opposite and we are the threat to the unsheltered and to the community because we have failed to build a long-term, integrated, and holistic system to solve homelessness along with the legal and moral framework of H.132.

… Human rights are the heart of our civic life. Communities are ecosystems in which everything is connected; what happens in one part affects the whole part. The same with people; what happens to one person is bound to affect us all. If you ever saw a child looking at a person sleeping on the street for the first time, then you will know that homelessness is both cruel and unimaginable and not something that can be swept away. If we don’t pass H.132 then we don’t set the moral and ethical expectations for our children and for our communities. If we don’t pass H.132 then we don’t pass the human rights test for our state.

In my experience the cause of homelessness is due to the lack of housing and economic hardship, so I can’t understand why we punish people for living outside. Of course we must let unsheltered people move freely in public spaces in the same way others can. I think one short-term harm reduction measure is to create and encourage safe camping and parking sites on state-owned and town-owned land as well as land owned by religious institutions. Why would we keep moving a mother and child sleeping in a car from one place to another or move people with disabilities from one place to the next? I don’t think “out of sight and out of mind” has ever been an effective policy or practice. Established sites would alleviate some of this anxiety and pain and it would make outreach and services more effective.

When we pass this bill of rights, we will have greater protections for one of the most vulnerable populations in the United States. According to an in-depth study by the National Homeless Council, the prevalence of violence victimization in the homeless population has been estimated to range from 14% to 21% and approximately one-third report having witnessed a physical attack on another person who was homeless. This rate of violence is highly disparate when compared to the general population in which only 2% report experiencing a violent crime. According to the National Homeless Mortality Review, the estimate of 5,800 to 46,500 deaths among people experiencing homelessness per year highlights the vast and largely hidden scale of homeless deaths. The wide range is due to counties unable or unwilling to collect the information.

In Los Angeles in 2021, 85 homeless people were murdered in one year. In Kalise, Montana, the county commissioners wrote an open letter to there community last year, warning that providing shelter or resources to homeless people would “enable” them and entice more of them into the area. The letter unleashed a punishing public backlash, with reports that groups of young people were roaming through homeless encampments and tormenting those living there. Many of the unsheltered are longtime locals displaced by the skyrocketing housing costs caused by the nearness of ski resorts. Just like most people here are from, or have strong ties to, Vermont.

In Vermont a homeless bill of rights will establish a moral and ethical framework in our community. It will also say to the people doing this difficult and at times traumatic work, “Thank you for having our back. And now, as a state, we have yours.”