Tuesday was the Housing Policy Dog and Pony Show at the Statehouse. Housing-related officials from the Scott administration made the rounds of three House committees, talking about housing policy with an emphasis on helping the homeless. The big takeaway: Man, are we ever screwed.

The lead witness slash sacrificial lamb was Chris Winters, former deputy Secretary of State and former Democratic candidate for SoS, who now occupies the hottest seat in Montpelier — the commissionership of the Department of Children and Families, home base for the moral and administrative failure that is Gov. Phil Scott’s policy for dealing with homelessness. (Winters is pictured above with one of his deputies, Interim DCF Business Office Director Shawn Benham, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee.)

There were, as my headline indicates, a whole lot of hard questions and precious few clear answers. But the biggest and least-answered question of them all: How in Hell did we get to this place, where Winters and his team are hastily cobbling together a temporary shelter program that will, at best, house a fraction of those about to be unhoused when the state’s motel voucher program expires on April 1?

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