Tag Archives: Frank Knaack

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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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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Pointed Questions and Jazz Hands

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The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee tried something different today. It didn’t really go that well.

The committee called a hearing that was kinda meant to embarrass the Scott administration over its utterly inadequate response to our crises of homelessness and affordable. Well, it was cast as part of the JFC’s responsibility to track the progress being made (or not) under Act 81, the Legislature’s last-minute extension of the General Assistance housing program approved in June 2023. But the intent was to put administration officials under a bright light and watch them squirm.

Problem was, said officials (including Miranda Gray of the Department of Children and Families and Agency of Human Services Deputy Secretary Todd Daloz, pictured above) came prepared with reams and reams of jargon. They filibustered the hearing. It wasn’t 100% successful, but it limited the committee’s capacity to ask questions. It also had the truly unfortunate effect of almost completely sidelining input from providers of shelter and services to the unhoused. On the agenda, the administration was allotted 45 minutes of the 90-minute hearing and three provider witnesses got a combined 30 minutes. In actual fact, the administration occupied an hour and fifteen minutes, while provider testimony was crammed into the final 10 minutes of the affair.

There were still some embarrassing moments for the administration and some good information from the providers. The hearing wasn’t a bust, but it was far less effective than it could have been.

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