Category Archives: Housing

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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How Not to Debunk a Myth

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The latest edition of “Brave Little State,” Vermont Public’s question-answerin’ podcast, addresses a widely-held belief that our homelessness problem is largely caused by people moving to Vermont to take advantage of our motel voucher program. And addresses it poorly, incompletely, and at great length.

The episode is entitled “Is Vermont’s motel program a ‘magnet’ for out-of-staters experiencing homelessness?” There is no evidence for the notion. In fact, there is a body of research showing that people in distress don’t cross state lines in any real numbers in hopes of accessing better benefits. Reporter Carly Berlin, whose work is co-published by Vermont Public and VTDigger, gets there eventually, but takes a godawful long time to do so. In the process, she manages to distort the basic issue, omit crucial aspects of the story, and get some key facts wrong.

The fundamental problem isn’t with Berlin or her many co-producers and overseers. (A total of seven Vermont Public staffers are cited in the closing credits.) The problem is that the issue was subordinated to the format. This wasn’t a story about homelessness and benefits; it was A Reporter’s Journey In Search Of Truth, filtered through the highly developed process of long-form public radio storytelling pioneered by Ira Glass’ “This American Life” and refined in this age of public media serial podcasting. The end goal of the production is more esthetic than journalistic.

This question can easily be resolved, but that’s not how you build a podcast. A long-form narrative needs a build, a measure of suspense, unexpected twists and turns, even if the actual path is pretty straightforward. Which is how you wind up with a 38-minute-long piece of audio that kind of bungles the assignment.

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The Humanitarian Crisis Is Almost Upon Us, and Official Vermont Is Doing Nothing About It

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Nothing has changed since my August 18 post about pending reductions in the state’s emergency housing program. Well, that’s not exactly true. Nothing has changed in terms of the official response, but there are all kinds of ways in which the situation is looking even worse than previously thought. That light you see at the end of the tunnel? That’s the headlight of the train headed right for us. Today is September 6; hundreds of people in state-paid motel rooms will see their eligibility expire beginning in mid-September, at the same time a cap on the number of motel rooms will take effect.

That cap is 1,100. At last count, there were more than 1,400 households in the program — and a waiting list of hundreds more. Om case you’d forgotten, eligibility had already been restricted to the truly vulnerable: People with young children or disabilities, people who had suffered a natural disaster or are fleeing domestic abuse.

Remember when Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jane Kitchel sought reassurance that no one in a wheelchair would be put out on the street if the voucher program were cut back, and Department of Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters replied “Hopefully not”? Well, turns out we definitely will be kicking out people in wheelchairs, and others with severe disabilities, and generally, people with nowhere else to turn.

In Friday’s mail was the latest edition of The Montpelier Bridge and its two front-page articles: “City Moves to Clear Country Club Road Encampment” and “Motel Program Restrictions Mean 100 Local People To Be Ousted.” Yeah, welcome to the greatest nation on Earth.

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And So We Trudge Predictably Toward Our Next Humanitarian Crisis

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Our political leaders — of all parties — are failing us again. And it was all perfectly foreseeable. In fact, it was quite literally baked into the most recent iteration of Vermont’s grossly inadequate policy on sheltering the homeless.

The damning details are available in “Vermont’s New Motel Room Limits Are Primed to Push Out Hundreds of Households This Fall,” posted Friday by shared VTDigger/Vermont Public reporter Carly Berlin (because homelessness isn’t a big enough issue to warrant separate reportage, apparenty). It’s not a pretty picture, not at all.

The headline should come as no surprise whatsoever, since the “new motel room limits” were designed “to push out hundreds of vulnerable households this fall.” The program is rolling out precisely as intended. Except, as Berlin’s piece makes clear, the looming reality is somehow even worse than that.

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There’s Only One Good Thing About Vermont’s Homelessness Situation, and That Thing Is About to Get a Lot Worse

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Vermont ranks at the extreme end of the 50 states in two measures of homelessness. We rank #2 in the nation in per capita homelessness. That’s, need I say, not a good thing. What is a good thing is that we rank #2 in the nation in the lowest percentage of unhoused people who are unsheltered.

In short, we have a lot of unhoused people thanks in large part to our critical housing shortage, but we’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping roofs over their heads.

Sadly, this is in the process of changing. We have been steadily ratcheting down the General Assistance housing program that’s been keeping thousands of Vermonters in state-paid motel rooms. And we are tightening the screws even more in the fiscal year beginning July 1. The result will almost certainly be a sharp rise in our unsheltered population starting in mid-September.

It’ll be a while before the official statistics reflect this, but it’s a virtual inevitability. As a result of deliberate policy choices by the Scott administration and the Legislature, we will soon be “exiting” (such a nice bureaucratic word) a lot of homeless people to fates unknown.

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Phil Scott Presents: Stupid Map Tricks!

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What you see above is a portion of Gov. Phil Scott’s latest masterstroke: A map of Vermont showing all the land that would get enhanced protections under H.687, the housing/Act 250 reform bill he vetoed last week. He thinks the map proves his point, that the bill goes way too far on conservation and not nearly far enough on encouraging development. Just look at all those yellow and brown areas! The Legislature is out of control!

However… I do not think his map means what he thinks it means.

This map reminds me of the Republican electoral maps showing who won each county. They show that the vast majority of the country’s physical space voted Republican, and help fuel stolen-election conspiracy theories. Truth is, Republicans win the big empty parts of the country while Democratic strength is mainly in population centers. And since our system involves one person, one vote — not one acre, one vote — well, the map is deeply misleading and proves nothing.

Same with Phil Scott’s H.687 map. It proves nothing.

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The Goal Isn’t to Prevent Suffering. It’s to Make the Suffering Politically Palatable.

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“I can’t believe this is where we are again.”

Those words came from Brenda Siegel, former gubernatorial candidate and head of End Homelessness Vermont, upon finding herself back in the Statehouse begging legislative budget writers to provide shelter for vulnerable Vermonters.

She spoke at a press conference called today by housing advocacy groups, in the middle of budget deliberations by a legislative conference committee. That panel is hammering out (Only in Journalism) a compromise budget for FY2025, and one of the items at issue is the General Assistance emergency housing program. The House budget includes a fairly robust program; the House also passed a bill to transition from the current bowl-of-spaghetti program to something that makes sense.

The Senate, as it so often has, pinched pennies on the issue. Its budget imposes a cap of 80 nights’ stay in state-paid motel rooms for each household, and caps the total motel rooms available at 1,000 in most of the year and 1,300 in winter. As the advocates pointed out, this would result in hundreds of households losing access to housing. (The Senate also killed the separate transition bill, which means the program would continue to be an ungovernable mess.)

The beauty of it, from a political point of view, is that the pain would be spread out over months and months. Instead of a mass unsheltering that might attract unpleasant media attention, people will be “exited” (such a nice bureaucratic term) slowly over time, a few here, a few there, as they run out of eligibility or the need is greater than the arbitrary room caps. Hey, if the problem is invisible, does it really exist?

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“Will You Be Putting Somebody in a Wheelchair Out on the Street?” “Hopefully Not.”

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It appears that the Senate Appropriations Committee is ready to kill a House-passed proposal to extend the motel voucher program that shelters thousands of homeless Vermonters. So says the chatter in the hallways, which I would not take as gospel — except that the committee made its intentions more than clear in a recent hearing.

On April 2, the committee heard from Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families and some of his top deputies. The panel had asked him to prepare a presentation on the challenges of implementing H.883, the House-passed FY2025 budget bill that includes a broader version of the voucher program than the administration has proposed.

Mind you, the panel made no effort to hear from anyone in the House to tell their side of the story. The committee took no testimony from housing advocates or clients of the program. They sought counsel only from the very administration officials who have been responsible for repeatedly fumbling the program and trying to kill it. Committee members rarely pushed Winters or challenged his testimony. They pretty much took his word on every issue. You might think the committee was on a fishing expedition looking for reasons to kill the House plan.

Because that’s exactly what they were doing.

At one point, committee chair Sen. Jane Kitchel was seeking assurance that nothing bad would happen under the administration’s plan. She lobbed Winters a softball: “Will you be putting somebody in a wheelchair out on the street?”

And Winters replied, “Hopefully not.”

How reassuring.

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The Phil Scott Shelter Clusterfuck Takes Another Bad Turn (Plus, Bonus Eclipse-Related Unsheltering)

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No foolin’ this time: April 1 brought yet another mass unsheltering for no good reason whatsoever, and the blame appears to fall on the Scott administration’s failure to communicate with clients of the motel voucher program.

It seems that somebody realized sometime last week that roughly 800 households — which, by the standard calculation of 1.6 persons per household, would be about 1,280 individuals — were eligible to stay in their state-paid motel rooms, but in order to do so they had to apply for reauthorization by April 1. And they hadn’t done so.

According to designated unsheltering pool reporter Carly Berlin, a mad scramble ensued. Well, she used “scramble.” The “mad” part is mine. Berlin:

The [Department of Children and Families]’ pleas were captured in an email sent to service providers on Friday afternoon, in which a DCF official said more than half of the 1,600 households “have an authorization that ends on 4/1/24 that has yet to be renewed.” In the message, Lily Sojourner, interim director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, asked for providers’ help in securing residents’ renewals.

To clarify: Sojourner “asked for providers’ help in doing the job DCF should have done.” Ugh.

The scramble brought the number of evictions down to about 360 households (570 individuals) as of early Monday afternoon. Great!

On top of this comes the cheery news from Seven Days that in Chittenden County, “more than 150 households” (at least 240 individuals) will lose their rooms on Saturday and Sunday nights so motel operators can rent ’em out to eclipse tourists at extortionate rates. It’s unknown how many will lose their shelter outside of Chittenden County. There are eight other counties in the totality zone, so the total unsheltered could be much higher.

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