Tag Archives: Frank Knaack

“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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    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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    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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