[B]URLINGTON — U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro was in the Queen City on Thursday to announce that Vermont will receive $3 million from the recently formed National Housing Trust Fund.
Vermont is the second state to have its application for money from the trust approved. The dollars will support the creation of rental housing for families below the federal poverty line.
The money will be allocated by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.
During a roundtable discussion hosted by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., affordable housing advocates and government officials praised Castro, a former San Antonio mayor whose name was bandied about as a possible vice presidential candidate for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
At the same time, advocates from the array of nonprofits working to curb homelessness and increase the availability of affordable housing peppered Castro with a laundry list of requests ranging from the very broad to the extremely specific.
Several advocates urged him to work more closely with other federal agencies, especially the Department of Health and Human Services, to recognize the connection between housing and health.
Others asked Castro to help ensure largely rural states such as Vermont aren’t boxed out from HUD programs by rules that are more tailored to the country’s predominantly urban population.
Castro said his department, created in the 1960s by the Johnson administration, could just as easily be called Housing and Community Development because its mission is to serve both rural and urban populations.
“I say that to say, ‘I hear you,’” said Castro, who was visiting Vermont for the first time.
To address the rural-urban disconnect, Castro said, he has tried to instill “mission-driven flexibility” in the work carried out by his department. But he acknowledged that often there is a grant program or department rule that “doesn’t quite fit with the circumstances on the ground in places like Vermont that are so rural.”
Erhard Mahnke, with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, pressed Castro to use his remaining time as secretary to implement as much of HR 3700 as possible. That legislation, recently signed by President Obama, makes reforms to the Section 8 subsidized housing program as well as mortgage and insurance regulations and housing support for homeless veterans.
Nancy Owens, president of Housing Vermont, dove farthest into the policy weeds, calling on Castro to make changes to federal regulations governing the survey and safety mitigation requirements for propane tanks in housing developments.
Current rules involve a “burdensome” survey and an “unrealistic and frankly unnecessary” mitigation requirement, Owens said, and if modified as recommended in a recent HUD report, it could save tens of thousands of dollars for Housing Vermont’s projects.
Castro said he had heard similar frustrations at another meeting with New England advocates and that he is optimistic changes could be made.
Many of the requests to Castro involved restoring funding that had been cut over time. While he acknowledged the challenges Vermont and the rest of the country face, he did not appear sanguine that Congress would appropriate the money to restore what was cut.
Richard Williams, a board member with the Vermont State Housing Authority, said 651 of Vermont’s 7,434 federal subsidized housing vouchers are unusable because of a lack of funding.
Despite challenges, and the unending need for further support cited by advocates, Vermont is making progress to reduce homelessness, said those around the table at City Hall.
The most recent point-in-time homelessness survey showed a precipitous drop in the number of homeless people in Vermont. That snapshot evaluation, conducted Jan. 26, showed homelessness in Vermont at a five-year low.
Sara Kobylenski, with the Vermont Commission to End Homelessness, said the most recent survey shows real progress. But she said the percentages touted by many at Thursday’s roundtable — the last survey showed a 28 percent decrease in the number of homeless people — overstate what’s changed because the numbers were small to begin with.
The 2016 survey found 1,102 people were homeless on the night of Jan. 26, down from a peak of 1,559 in 2014.
In addition, Kobylenski and others warned that the annual count is limited to people who meet the strict HUD definitions of homelessness, which don’t capture people who are “doubled up” living with friends or family and others who might not know where they’ll sleep in the coming days or weeks.
Correction: Castro is a former mayor of San Antonio not Houston.
