[O]ne of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s special commissions says the state can eradicate poverty faster if it dedicates more money to building affordable housing and funding rental assistance programs.
For the second year in a row, the Council on Pathways from Poverty has proposed a new $2 per night occupancy fee on people staying in hotels and motels so the state can use the money revenue to fight homelessness. The measure didn’t pass in the last biennium.
The Council on Pathways from Poverty called the fee one of its top priorities in its November 2016 report, saying the state has “failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.”
Shumlin created the all-volunteer council in December 2013, and it is set to expire Jan. 15. The volunteers want Gov.-elect Phil Scott to extend the council for several more years or make it permanent.
Ethan Latour, the spokesperson for Scott, said the governor-elect believes in the council’s mission and will decide in the coming weeks “whether extending the council is the most effective way to achieve the goal of lifting Vermonters out of poverty.”
Erhard Mahnke, the coordinator for the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition who was involved in writing the report, said the state has “deep-seated and long-term poverty issues” that are related to a “long-term, protracted affordable housing shortage.”
“Very poor people pay 50, 60, and 70 percent sometimes of their disposable income for housing if they don’t have a section 8 voucher, and that means they don’t have any money left over for basic needs,” Mahnke said.
The Vermont Statewide Point-in-Time Count, which measures the number of people who are chronically homeless in a given year, rose from 1,160 in 2012 to 1,523 in 2015, but fell to 1,102 in 2016.
Mahnke credits the state’s strategic and targeted investments in housing for the decrease. “We’ve got to stay the course and, in fact, really, to make some real headway, we need a major new infusion of money into housing and homelessness,” Mahnke said.
Chris Curtis, an attorney for Vermont Legal Aid who serves as co-chair of the council, said low-budget motels are already subsidizing homelessness programs because they accept state-funded vouchers that pay for people in housing crises to stay in the motels.
He said those motels are sharing the burden of addressing homelessness by accepting the vouchers, but larger and higher-end hotels are not. He said if all hotels and motels had to collect the fee, the whole industry would be involved in ending homelessness.
The $2 nightly occupancy fee the council is proposing would raise between $11 million and $12 million per year. Curtis said that out-of-state tourists would pay 94 percent of the total.
“We hear over and over again that Vermonters do not have any additional taxing capacity,” Curtis said. “This is a fee that would not fall on Vermonters. It would primarily fall on out-of-staters.”
The council’s report recommends using the revenue to fund a “three-legged stool of investments in housing and homelessness”: increasing funding to the Vermont Housing Conservation Board that funds affordable housing, expanding rental assistance programs, and funding housing-related services that the Agency of Human Services administers.
Jen Hollar, the director of policy for VHCB, said the organization has no position on the occupancy fee. But she said the board often has to turn down affordable housing proposals because it doesn’t have the money to fund them.
“There are more projects out there that are ready to go or could go in the next few years than we are able to fund, and we know that they are needed in communities,” Hollar said.
She said that while affordable housing complexes are being built, they’re not being funded “at a rate to keep up with the demand” so the state has fallen behind in the past several years, and demand for affordable housing continues to build up.
The organization uses state money to leverage federal money, and after meeting with leaders in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Hollar said: “it’s pretty clear that the federal programs are going to be under threat (under President-elect Trump), and that’s going to have an impact on Vermont.”
The council also recommended changes in education policies, public assistance programs, and information technology systems as ways to also fight poverty.
