Well, another press conference today about our ongoing, self-inflicted homelessness crisis. This one featured Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak (above), who gave us the title for this post, along with a crew of The Usual Suspects including Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont (left, above), Falko Schilling of the ACLU of Vermont (right, above) right, Frank Knaack of the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, and Julie Bond of the Good Samaritan Haven.

They made the familiar plea: Hundreds upon hundreds of vulnerable Vermonters are being exited from the General Assistance voucher program, while available shelters and support services are at or beyond capacity. You can find more comprehensive reports on the presser elsewhere; I’d like to emphasize a few key points.

First, the situation was already critical even before cuts in the voucher program began taking their toll on September 15. It has gotten worse since then, and will continue to get worse for at least the next two weeks as recipients hit their maximum stays. The pain has only just begun. And all of those affected have been classed as vulnerable. There are no able-bodied freeloaders here.

Second, the speakers emphasized their desire to move beyond the blame game. “We must set aside our political and policy differences,” Siegel said, in order to craft a humane resolution to the crisis.

Third, there is one and only one person who can get this ball rolling: Gov. Phil Scott.

With the Legislature in adjournment until January, said Knaack, “only the governor has the authority right now.” Speakers called on Scott to do three things: Declare a state of emergency, call the Legislature into special session to fix the voucher program, and direct the Agency of Human Services to identify all available resources that can be used to keep people from being unsheltered.

The raw numbers: Roughly 250 households were unsheltered on September 15, when an 1,100-room cap on the voucher program took effect. At the time, there were about 1,350 households in the program. Hundreds more have been unsheltered starting on September 19, as recipients reached an 80-night cap on vouchers for each household. What Siegel called “a pretty steady stream of people being exited” will continue until October 11. By then, according to state figures, 1,059 households will have lost their housing. If you apply the usual multiplier of 1.6 persons per household, more than 1,600 vulnerable people will have been unsheltered before mid-October if nothing is done.

And there are no resources to meet the demand. Shelters are full. Helping agencies are stretched beyond the max. The state is tacitly exploiting the dedication of those agencies and housing advocates, who feel compelled to do all they can — and more — to help. Bond spoke of an “undue and unethical burden” on shelter providers, who are “experiencing moral injury by seeing people put at risk… We are the ones trying to prevent people from dying outside.”

Siegel spoke of spending every waking hour trying to help people being exited from the motels, including some who are severely disabled. “We have a client who is completely bedridden” and faces unsheltering on Saturday. “I have no idea what I can do with him. I begged for help,” and got none. She told of spending her own money to help a severely disabled child because ““knowing a child cannot survive without help is the same as killing them.”

If only the governor and his officials felt the tiniest fraction of the same moral imperative.

Sorry, those are my words, not theirs. They are ready to set all of that aside if only the Scott administration will work alongside them. “We are your partners, governor,” said Siegel, who at this time two years ago was trying to defeat Scott as the Democratic gubernatorial nominee.

As Montpelier City Manager Bill Fraser noted last week, if this many Vermonters were displaced by a natural disaster, the state would immediately take action. Do our most vulnerable deserve anything less?