Last week’s VTDigger/Vermont Public joint report about the state of Vermont’s $789 million housing splurge and its disappointing impact was a true journalistic tour de force. It was a deep dive into an important story. It involved a ton of work, and it provided real insight into Vermont’s housing crisis. Kudos to both organizations and to co-authors Carly Berlin (Digger/VP shared housing reporter) and Erin Petenko (Digger data reporter extraordinaire).
Two thumbs up, ten out of ten, five stars on Yelp, no notes.
But there is a dark side to this, and it has to do with the ever-diminishing state of journalism in Vermont.
I’ve been thinking about the need for a plausible, recognizable Democrat to step forward as a candidate for governor with a campaign focused on a big policy idea. This is because so many Dems seem to be playing into Gov. Phil Scott’s hands instead of carving out a recognizable alternative, and because the Vermont Democratic Party has been weakened for years by the lack of a strong, unifying voice at the top of the ticket.
Also because the only Democrat to actually win the governorship in the last quarter-century was Peter Shumlin, who staked his fortunes on single-payer health care and won a hard-fought 2010 primary and three straight statewide elections. He’s the only Democrat to be elected governor since Howard Dean in the year 2000. Some of you weren’t even born then.
So I was casting around for a big policy proposal that could turbocharge a gubernatorial campaign, and I remembered a post of mine from February 2024 which floated the idea of a $250 million housing bond. That’s right, take our solid bond rating and gamble it on the sensible proposition that building more housing would pay off in economic growth and higher tax revenues. You know, like a TIF writ large. It’d be an idea tailor-made for Treasurer Mike Pieciak, who has the expertise to craft such a plan while preventing the wise heads at S&P from catching a bad case of the fantods. And who needs to give voters a reason other than “Everybody likes Mike” to vote for him.
But now, in light of two recent news stories, I worry that a massive housing bond would amount to nothing more than pissing into the wind, that there simply may not be a way out of our housing crisis. At least not without structural economic changes on a scale much larger than our B.L.S.
Why? Three reasons, as explained by Carly Berlin, the housing reporter shared by VTDigger and Vermont Public. First, the PIT count happened on a very cold night in January, when the city of Burlington was operating an overnight warming shelter that gave dozens of people a very temporary place to stay. Second, the PIT count should always be considered an undercount because, well, homeless folk can be hard to find. And third, this is especially true of the unsheltered; they might be anywhere, and the state makes no effort at all to keep track of where they are or how they’re doing. No matter how diligent the counters are, they’re not going to find everyone.
Also, it must be said that if the PIT count were conducted now, the number of unsheltered would doubtless be even higher because of cuts in the General Assistance Emergency Housing program, a.k.a. the motel voucher system, imposed in the last couple of months.
Phil Scott has been a denizen of the Statehouse for almost a quarter century. He was first elected to the state Senate in 2000, taking office in January 2001. He was a senator for 10 years, and served as vice chair of one committee and chair of another*. He then served three terms as lieutenant governor, whose duties include presiding over the Senate. Then he became governor, where he’s been ever since.
*His Wikipedia bio mentions, as the signature achievement of his time as chair of the Senate Institutions Committee, that he “redesigned the Vermont Statehouse cafeteria to increase efficiency.” Really? Is that the biggest thing he accomplished as a committee chair? Huh.
So it’s safe to say that if anyone knows how the Statehouse works, it’s Phil Scott. He has seen and done it all. He knows how stuff gets done, and how stuff doesn’t get done.
Which makes it all the more curious, or downright stinky if you prefer, that one of his top officials tried to blow up a legislative debate at the last possible minute. It was a thouroughly counterproductive tactic, unless the goal was to deliver a killshot to the bill in question.
The top official is one Jenney Samuelson, Secretary of the Agency of Human Services. On Friday, May 17 she delivered a memo seemingly aimed at derailing H.91, which would create a replacement to the oft-maligned General Assistance Emergency Housing program, a.k.a. the motel voucher system. For those just tuning in, that’s the system Scott and Samuelson have been criticizing nonstop for years without ever proposing an alternative of their own. This year, the House’s patience finally came to an end. It put forward a plan of its own in the form of H.91.
Fortunately for the delicate balance of democratic government in Vermont, Gov. Phil Scott’s idea of executive overreach isn’t nearly as bad as Donald Trump’s. But that’s kind of like saying the flu is preferable to cancer. You’d rather not get either one, really.
But the governor’s unilateral imposition of new rules for the General Assistance Emergency Housing program prompted a sharp rebuke from the Legislature’s top lawyer. As reported by VTDigger/Vermont Public reporter Carly Berlin, Legislative Counsel director Brynn Hare has deemed Scott’s action “an unconstitutional encroachment on a core function of the Legislature.” Further, she said, his action is “the latest in a disturbing trend of actions by the Administration that flagrantly and unconstitutionally intrude on the authority of the General Assembly.” That trend also includes his appointment of Zoie Saunders as interim Education Secretary after the Senate had rejected her nomination, and his unilateral action authorizing the sale of “Vermont Strong” license plates after the flood of July 2023.
Which is ironic, don’t you think, considering that Scott has been obsessively jealous of the separation of powers when it’s in his interest. He has vetoed a whole bunch of bills on the sole basis that they allegedly intruded on the power of the executive. Well, shoe’s on the other foot now, governor.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Vermont Political Observer. 