Category Archives: Housing

A Thoroughly Grim Outlook on Vermont’s Housing Crisis

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If the above image looks a little fuzzy, thank the limitations of the Legislature’s system for recording and livestreaming its hearings. But it reflects the situation we face on housing: Our public leaders seem small and indistinct when discussing the enormity of Vermont’s housing shortage, and their explication of the crisis was long on broad pronouncements and short on specifics.

The Scott administration’s A-team, pictured above, appeared before the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee and delivered a gloomy overview that has to rank as one of the most depressing events I’ve experienced in my 12-ish years following #vtpoli. Doesn’t quite top Peter Shumlin’s surrender on health care reform or his near defeat at the hands of Scott Milne, but it’s not far behind.

The big takeaway: The housing crisis is even worse than we thought. From top to bottom, end to end, from the most basic of living spaces to the most extravagant, we don’t have nearly enough. Oh, and the epidemic of unsheltered homelessness that Our Leaders assured us was all taken care of last winter? That’s going to get even worse before it has a hope of getting better. And the “getting better” is going to take years.

And the interim solution, if they can manage to pull it off, is a massive increase in emergency shelters, most likely of the congregate variety. That, for a population ill-suited for such arrangements.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

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We Still Can’t Wind Down the Motel Voucher Program

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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.

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Counting the Costs of Leadership Failure

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In one of his novels, Vermont’s own crime novelist Archer Mayor chose the well-kept, comfortable town of Middlebury as the scene of a Hollywood-style gun battle with the goodies and baddies firing away at each other as they drove through the center of town. Many years ago I interviewed him about the book, and he confessed to a certain sly pleasure at foisting his fictional violence on that tony, tweedy community.

Well, now the good folk of Middlebury are suddenly experiencing, if not volleys of hot lead, an uncharacteristic feeling of insecurity. And we can lay this directly at the feet of state leaders, executive and legislative, who have failed to come to grips with our crises of homelessness, substance use, and mental health.

Remember last winter when housing advocates predicted dire consequences if the state were to end its emergency motel voucher program, and warned that the short-term savings from killing the program would be far outweighed by the costs of dealing with the fallout?

Welcome to Middlebury, where unhoused folk are camping on public land. There have been incidents of vandalism. People feel unsafe. Merchants are installing cameras and exterior lights and worrying about lost business. Police are overextended. Helping agencies are struggling with too many cases and too few resources.

It all came to a head at the October 10 meeting of the town selectboard, viewable on YouTube and recounted quite skillfully by John Flowers of the Addison Independent in a story entitled “Local Merchants Rail Against Uptick in Downtown Crime.” And rail they surely did.

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“Lived Experience,” What a Concept

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Two legislative committees got a metaphorical bucket of cold water dumped over their heads today by people who are trying, and largely failing, to deal with Vermont’s crisis of homelessness. And then a pair of just plain ordinary folks took the stage and tossed an equally metaphorical grenade into the room with their real-life experiences of homelessness and the frustrations of dealing with social service bureaucracy.

Guys like Bryan Plant, pictured above, are rarely featured in legislative hearings, and that’s a damn shame. He’s smart, articulate, and his input is crucial. The absence of voices like his makes for myopic policymaking, with no attention to how the system affects those on the receiving end.

Plant and Rebecca Duprey were the two witnesses labeled as “Lived Experience” on the docket for today’s joint hearing of House Human Services and Senate Health & Welfare. The two committees were examining the implementation of Act 81, the extension of the motel voucher program hastily negotiated at the end of June by legislative leadership and the Scott administration.

Plant and Duprey told stories of encountering barrier after barrier: “a mountain of paperwork,” much of it incomprehensible and repetitive, an unresponsive bureaucracy, poor to nonexistent coordination between government programs, constant turnover among case workers (Plant was assigned to 11 different “service coordinators” in three years, so you can imagine how coordinated his services were). It all added up to, in Duprey’s words, a system of “inexcusable cruelty” to people in the direst of circumstances. “You have no idea how damaging this is to people,” Plant told the committees.

The topper: Plant and Duprey are two of the rare success stories of Act 81. Unlike the vast majority of voucher clients, they have managed to find good housing. They struggled their way through a system that seems more designed to frustrate its clients than to help them regain their footing in life.

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Pearl-Clutching in the Publisher’s Office

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It’s been a long, long time since Seven Days began its life as a scrappy alt-weekly in the grand tradition of the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix. Credit for sheer survival unlike those spiritual ancestors, but it’s safe to say that 7D is now the voice of comfortable Burlington, the Good Folk who habituate Leunig’s and the Flynn Center and love to amble undisturbed on Church Street and in Battery Park.

That’s my conclusion from co-founder Paula Routly’s latest Publisher’s Note, “Burlington Blues.” She’s far from alone in expressing dismay about crime, drugs and homelessness in the Queen City. But what’s missing in her column is the tiniest shred of compassion or empathy. She seems to be describing a plague or an infestation of vermin with no sense at all that there are living, struggling human beings on the other side of this equation.

Routly seems to expect that her “beautiful burg” will forever be a playground for the well-to-do, a clean, safe, secure landscape that can be enjoyed without a second thought. She doesn’t roll out the reactionary language of “lock ’em up” or call for the BPD to let loose a SWAT team, but she makes it clear that she just wishes The Unwashed would just go away, doesn’t matter where, somewhere, anywhere, and leave this “beautiful burg” to those who rightfully deserve it.

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Meh-ro

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Miro Weinberger announced today that he will not seek a fifth (three-year) term as mayor of Burlington. He has occupied the position for 12 years, the longest continuous tenure of any Queen City mayor, but the better part of his legacy may amount to nothing much more than occupancy. His record is mixed at best, and he wouldn’t have made it this far if not for the endemic divisiveness of Burlington’s left.

In each of his last two campaigns, he got less than 50% of the vote. Last time, in 2021, he polled just under 43% and won the race by a mere 129 votes. In both 2018 and 2021, multiple candidates running to his left split the majority of the vote, allowing Weinberger to win with mere pluralities.

Whatever you think of the achievements of his early years, it’s inarguable that the Progressives made a full comeback on his watch. The Progs held a majority on City Council for several years. It made his job more difficult to be sure, but he failed to build the city Democratic Party or enhance its allure to the voters.

Weinberger walked into his first victory, thanks to the troubled Bob Kiss years leaving a stain on the Progressive brand. At the time he was a fresh young face, widely considered a top Democratic contender for future statewide office. That never happened, and while he’s young enough to have a second political act, he’ll have to work his way back into the arena.

Well, that’s the politics. What about policy? On balance, his record is kind of lukewarm.

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In Which Our Betters Finally Realize We Have a Housing Crisis On Our Hands

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Note: This is a sequel to my previous post, reflecting the newly-released September figures for the motel voucher program and the official reaction to it all.

Some people could have predicted this as far back as January if not farther. But the Scott administration and the Legislature insisted throughout the winter and spring that everything would be just fine if we ended the emergency housing motel voucher program on schedule at the end of June.

They were wrong, of course, and they had to cobble together a last-minute extension that minimized the scale of the own-goal disaster. Those who were dumped from the program before June 30 were excluded, and new restrictions were imposed on the remaining clientele that seemed designed to encourage slash bully slash force them to leave the motels as quickly as possible.

Well, during today’s meeting of the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee, it became clear that administration and Legislature alike now know they have a real, sizeable, thorny problem on their hands, and that many a vulnerable Vermonter has paid a stiff price for their earlier choices. Shocker, I know.

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The Effort to End the Emergency Housing Program Only Shows How Badly It’s Needed

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The first official Scott administration report on the motel voucher program showed the urgency of our affordable housing shortage. Out of 1,250* households in the program on June 30, 174 had left the program by late July — but only 42 did so because they had managed to find housing. Most of the rest, 113 in all, simply disappeared from the program, destination unknown. Ditto the 31 households evicted for “misconduct” as defined by motel operators.

*In the second report, described below, that June 30 number somehow rose to 1,266 two months after the fact. Given the Scott administration’s track record, I have to assume this is another case of lax record keeping. Anyway, from now on I’ll use 1,266 as the June 30 number.

Well, the report for August* reveals more of the same. Total enrollment was down to 929 households as of 8/28. Of the departed, 110 disappeared, 20 were kicked out for misconduct, and 26 actually found housing.

*The administration “published” this report on September 6, but it went unnoticed at the time. I found it 20 days later when looking for information on the 9/27 meeting of the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee.

To sum up: As of June 30, there were 1,266 households in need of emergency motel rooms. Reminder: until the very last moment, the administration and Legislature had planned to cut off the voucher program and immediately unhouse all those people. Instead, realizing they were about to cause a humanitarian crisis, they cobbled together a compromise that extended the program under new rules and restrictions.

Well, of those 1,266 households, only 68 have found housing so far.

Sixty-eight. That’s a success rate of 5.4%. Which shows you just how inadequate our supply of affordable housing is. And just how vital the voucher program remains.

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Canaan Backs Down From Loitering Ban

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Unsurprisingly, the selectboard in the Northeast Kingdom town of Canaan has backed away from its broadly-written, almost certainly unconstitutional ban on loitering — or doing just about anything else without permission.

At its September 18 meeting, the selectboard adopted a new ordinance aimed specifically at unauthorized camping on public property. (The text can be downloaded from the town’s website.) The change in heart likely follows some pointed communications from those darn busybodies at the Vermont ACLU and Vermont Legal Aid.

The original ordinance, adopted in August, would have barred anyone from sitting, standing, or loitering “in or about any municipally owned or municipally maintained land, park, building, or parking lot between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.” unless authorized by a town official. It would also have banned sitting, standing, or loitering on any “street, sidewalk, municipal land, building, or any other public space in town” if an “owner, tenant, or custodian thereof” asked them to leave.

Yeah, that’s pretty damn unconstitutional.

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Canaan Launches Purification Drive

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Oh Canaan, my Canaan. What are you up to now?

The Northeast Kingdom town, best known in these parts as (1) the home of the only public school district that never adopted a mask mandate during the Covid epidemic, (2) the home turf of former education secretary Dan French, and (3) the place where a parent threatened to “kill somebody” if his child encountered a transgender person at school, has just enacted a broad, sweeping ban on loitering — or doing just about anything else not specifically authorized by the town — on public property.

It’s obviously aimed at unhoused people, and it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. The Selectboard itself gave that game away when it inserted a “separability” clause, which anticipates a losing battle in court.

The Vermont ACLU, which has previously reminded other Vermont communities that anti-panhandling ordinances are unconstitutional, seems likely to fulfill the Selectboard’s anticipation. “[The ordinance] does appear to raise a number of constitutional concerns,” wrote ACLU Communications Director Stephanie Gomory in an email.

But wait, there’s more! The Canaan Selectboard has also embarked on a drive to clean up “junky yards,” a concept that’s clearly in the eye of the beholder.

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