Category Archives: Housing

Phil Scott’s Shelter Policy Has Started Literally Killing People

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Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! The Vermont State Police found two people dead inside a tent in Wolcott on Thanksgiving Eve. They were Lucas Menard of Montpelier and Tammy Menard of Berlin. Few details are available, although police do not suspect foul play.

Unless, of course, you consider this fall’s mass unsheltering “foul play.”

And yes, the Menards were among the close to 1,500 vulnerable Vermonters recently unsheltered following cuts in the GA emergency housing program. Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont says they were clients of her organization who had “complex medical needs” but were denied shelter by the state. Siegel on Facebook:

Wonderful vibrant people. And Tammy herself helped so many others. Tell me again how what we did was fine and people will manage. Is this what you mean by “manage”?

I can’t add much to that, except to remind everyone that this was the inevitable and long-predicted result of denying shelter to so many of our most vulnerable. And the cold weather is just beginning. Siegel gets the last word:

I wanted nothing more than to be wrong about the catastrophic outcomes this policy would cause. But I knew that I was not.

We Are Unsheltering You For Your Own Good

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I circled back to Gov. Phil Scott’s November 13 press conference because I was interested in the coverage of his comments about our burnt orange president-elect. VTDigger reported that Scott was urging people to give Donald Trump a chance:

“For the sake of our country, we need to tamp down the division and fear, and we need to at least give him the opportunity to do better and do the right thing.”

It sounded like the pundit class’ evergreen hopes that any minute now, Trump was about to start acting presidential. But when I listened to Scott’s full remarks, I got quite a different impression. Yes, he urged a wait-and-see attitude, but he was also sharply critical of Trump and rested his hopes more on “those who are coming into power with him” than on the president-elect himself. That’s a bold thing to do with a leader who has a proven capacity for vengeance. I thought it was more than a bit courageous on Scott’s part, actually.

Not so much with his comments on the newly-opened, grossly inadequate, and budget-bustin’ family shelters. On that score, he was deeply disingenuous — and the assembled reporters let him get away with it.

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Those Temporary Family Shelters Are Costing How Much Now?

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We already knew that the Scott administration’s pathetically inadequate family shelters were a Potemkin village meant to project the image of concern without making any effort to address the scope of the homelessness crisis.

And now we know, thanks to VTDigger, that this sham effort is also a colossal waste of resources.

The shelters, which can house up to 17 families for up to five months, will cost at least $3 million. The bulk of that money, some $2.6 million, will go to an out-of-state contractor that will provide staffing for the shelters because, well, local service agencies are already stretched to the max.

You may recall that the motel voucher program, deemed too costly to continue intact by Gov. Phil Scott and the Democratic caucuses in the Legislature, had a maximum cost of $80 per motel room per night. If you divide $80 into $3 million, you’ll see that the money spent on these family shelters — really, spent almost entirely on well-compensated staffers from a for-profit company — could have paid for 37,500 nights of motel shelter.

Can you say “boondoggle,” friends? I know you can.

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The Potemkin Shelters Are Open. Alert the Press.

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After months of inaction that led to a mass unsheltering of close to 1,500 vulnerable Vermonters, the Scott administration today took a step toward addressing the crisis. A step so insultingly small that the governor might as well have slapped a homeless person across the face.

The administration opened two shelters with space for 17 families. That’s 17 out of close to 1,000 unsheltered since mid-September, when new caps on state-paid motel vouchers took effect. For those unprepared for a bit of higher math, that works out to 1.7% of the need. Want another appalling statistic or two? According to the state, 343 children have been unsheltered since mid-September. These shelters will house maybe a couple dozen or so kids. The rest can go hang.

Actually, as of the orchestrated press tour on Friday morning, only one shelter (in WIlliston) had opened for business. Hasty preparations were still underway at the Waterbury Armory and reporters were not allowed to enter, according to VTDigger. The Waterbury space reportedly features partitioned areas for families, with the partitions not reaching the ceiling. The Williston facility looked a bit more inviting.

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Scott to Homeless: Talk to the Hand

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Alleged “nice guy” Gov. Phil Scott has done more than his share of garbagey things. The constant belittling of the Legislature, the persistent passive-aggressiveness, the blame-shifting and refusal to take responsibility for anything that happens, the stubborn adherence to policies that don’t work even as problems continue to worsen, just off the top of my head. But I don’t know if anything tops — bottoms? — what his administration did on Wednesday about the state’s deliberate mass unsheltering of vulnerable Vermonters.

What it did — well, what it actually did was nothing whatsoever. What it hinted that it was planning to do, in off-the-record leaks to Vermont’s two biggest TV news operations, is set up “at least two shelters for families, with a projected completion date of Nov. 1″ according to WPTZ, which reported that the shelters would accommodate “11 families, including 21 children.” (WCAX reported that “three new shelters for homeless families” were in the works.)

This is just despicable on a number of levels. First, it’s so inadequate that it’s practically an insult. Hundreds of households, totaling at least 1,500 vulnerable people, have been unsheltered since mid-September, and the state’s plan is to provide for about 30 of them?

Second, WCAX reported that state officials are “aware of”… “at least 21” children left unsheltered. That’s bullshit. There are far more children than that who’ve been affected by new limits on the GA housing program. And they know it. (They admitted it this morning. See below.)

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The Groundhog Day of Our Disgrace

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One month later, nothing much has changed. Except that the humanitarian crisis then foreseen by advocates for the homeless has become a reality that ought to scar our consciences and lay to rest any claim we have to moral superiority, to the comfortable myth of Vermont as a better, more caring place.

It was on September 15 that a group of advocates gathered in the Statehouse to sound the alarm about the completely predictable unsheltering of close to 2,000 vulnerable Vermonters due to new limits on the GA emergency housing program. They gathered again on October 15 to sound the alarm yet again, as the unsheltering has proceeded apace and state leaders have refused to lift a finger to stop it.

“We are working frantically to keep people from dying,” said Julie Bond of Good Samaritan haven (pictured above, with former Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell and Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont looking on). “The situation is impossible, it is immoral, and it is untenable.”

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“The Days Grow Shorter, the Nights Grow Colder”

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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.

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    Whistling Past the Encampment

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    We’re a few days into our latest mass unsheltering, and the devastation wrought by Our Political Betters’ mishandling of the situation is fully as bad as expected, if not worse. People on the front lines, trying to help vulnerable Vermonters no longer eligible for state-paid motel rooms, are working their asses off and trying to hold back the tears as they do it. Problem is, they are so committed and dedicated, that they can’t help but push themselves to the brink.

    The city of Burlington is reduced to seeking donations of tents and camping gear because THE STATE CAN’T EVEN BRING ITSELF TO DO THAT SIMPLE INADEQUATE THING. Municipalities around the state are begging the state to lift a goddamn finger, and gotten nothing from Gov. Phil Scott in response. Helping agencies are seeking donations* to enable them to conduct the vital work they’re doing because, again, THE STATE IS SHOWING THE BACK OF ITS HAND TO THE UNSHELTERED.

    *Organizations worthy of support include End Homelessness Vermont and, in my neck of the woods, Good Samaritan Haven.

    The governor, I must remind you, is the guy who has insisted since Day One of his administration that he has three strategic priorities: Grow the economy, make Vermont more affordable, and protect the must vulnerable.

    I guess we can cross off that last one, because clearly he isn’t committed to it anymore. Hundreds of our most vulnerable have been kicked to the curb under his watch, and hundreds more will follow in the coming weeks.

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    A Desperate Cry for Help From Vermont’s Municipalities

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    “All of these municipalities here would give the shirts off of their backs to help those in their communities, and in fact we have,” said Rutland Mayor Mike Doenges, seenv above alongside Winooski Mayor Kristine Lott and Montpelier City Manager Bill Fraser. “The problem is, we’ve run out of shirts.”

    Municipal leaders from every corner of Vermont gathered in Montpelier this morning (or signed onto a joint statement) to plead with the state government for help in addressing our worsening crisis of unsheltered homelessness. (Video of the press conference can be seen here.) The urgency was driven by looming cutbacks in the emergency housing program that promise to unshelter hundreds of vulnerable households. But the leaders went beyond the current situation to issue a wide-ranging, comprehensive critique of the state’s entire system for helping the unhoused.

    That system, including the Agency for Human Services and its network of nonprofit service providers, is “broken,” said Mayor Lott. The resultant “unsustainable pressures,” she added, are being borne by Vermont’s cities and towns.

    “We need immediate and decisive action from all three branches… executive, legislative, and judicial,” Fraser said. This, to fix a system that fails to provide enough shelter, transitional housing, support services and outreach, and accountability in the judicial system for those who break the law.

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    A Modest Suggestion for Our Newsgatherers — Oh, Never Mind, They’ll Just Ignore Me Anyway

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    Really good piece of work by the cross-media combo of Carly Berlin and Lola Duffort on the humanitarian toll about to occur thanks to cuts in the state’s emergency housing program. They went out and did the work, speaking with numerous recipients of state-paid motel vouchers who are about to lose their places. The stories are heartbreaking, and dismaying for those of us who’d like to believe we’re capable of better than the planned unsheltering of up to 900 households, all of which fall into one or more category of “vulnerable.”

    By the customary multiplier, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 individuals, including people with disabilities, children, and those fleeing domestic abuse. And where will they go? That’s “unclear,” per Duffort and Berlin.

    Area shelters were full, affordable housing waitlists were a mile long, and towns and cities across the state have grown more aggressive about evicting campers from public land.

    Full credit for a job well done. And now I have a suggestion for a great follow-up.

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