Bridget Mientka and her husband received word from their landlord earlier this summer that they and their two children would be evicted, for no cause, within 30 days from their two-bedroom Colchester home. Their landlord also planned to start charging $2,200 monthly for the apartment they had paid $1,500 a month to occupy.
After much pleading, their landlord agreed to let them stay until the end of the school year, Mientka said, and to increase the rent a lower but nevertheless steep amount — to $1,900.
“We don’t have another $400 a month for rent. If we did, we would live in a three-bedroom apartment where our son and daughter could have their own room,” Mientka said Monday morning, flanked by housing advocates in front of Montpelier’s Christ Episcopal Church at a press conference organized by Vermont Interfaith Action. “The feeling of helplessness to provide stable housing for our children has sent us into a spiral of anxiety and depression.”
Mientka is one of more than 12,000 Vermonters currently receiving assistance through the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program, or VERAP. The pandemic-era, federally funded program has kept thousands in their homes, but state officials announced earlier this month that it had begun to run out of money and would abruptly ramp down.
Also for lack of funds, a transitional program housing people experiencing homelessness in hotels and motels is set to stop taking new applications beginning Oct. 1, officials have said.
Mientka said she and her family would continue to receive some reduced assistance through November, at which time their benefits would end. Both she and her husband, a veteran, work full-time, she said, but she still worries about making it work.
She said she expected even one late or missed payment would result in another eviction notice.
“Our landlord sees our apartment as one of his investment properties. But our children see it as their home,” she said. “Imperfect though it may be, it’s where we live. But without VERAP, it might not be for much longer.”
Advocates from Vermont Legal Aid, Vermont Interfaith Action, and Rights & Democracy gathered Monday to call on Gov. Phil Scott’s administration to reverse course and put together a plan to keep vulnerable households sheltered through the winter.
They echoed what countless service providers have been saying on the ground: The state’s most generous-ever housing assistance program is ending just as renters confront the most brutal housing market in a generation.
“The state is ending the rental assistance program just when Vermonters need it most. Unless we take action, evictions will increase dramatically, and many more people will become homeless,” Rebecca Plummer, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid, said Monday.
Plummer also made clear that Mientka’s story is no outlier. Other Vermont Legal Aid clients relying on these benefits include a couple and their two children who were evicted from their home of three years and who cannot find another home in their children’s school district, Plummer said, and another mother forced to move out of her home of six years when her children were found to have high levels of lead in their blood.
Another client, Plummer said, is now in treatment for substance use disorder and was recently released from jail after serving time for shoplifting. Yet another finds himself with no job and no home after returning home to care for his mother until her death.
Religious leaders and housing advocates did not present their own plan for what should be done, nor did they suggest how Vermont might pay for the programs now that federal funding was winding down. But they made clear that they believed all options should be on the table.
“There are empty buildings all over Vermont. We call for our government to immediately stand up and oversee humane and respectful units of supportive temporary housing across the state,” they wrote in an open letter to state officials. “If that requires the use of eminent domain, so be it. It is a crisis!”
Tom Proctor, an organizer with Rights & Democracy, said the organization was also at work on a comprehensive list of demands to put before lawmakers when they reconvened in January. And Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, from the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre, said Vermont Interfaith had been at work on its own list when the state’s surprise announcement about VERAP and transitional housing came down. A new series of proposals is now in the works, he said.
Kooperkamp also echoed many lawmakers who have complained that the administration has not yet provided the analysis it used to determine that the state was, indeed, running short on federal cash. (VTDigger has filed a public records request for it.)
“I think even before we talked about what the solutions are, we need the data. And if the Agency of Administration doesn’t have it, they’re very derelict in their duty,” he said.
Scott press secretary Jason Maulucci, in an email, touted a quarter-billion dollars invested in housing during the governor’s tenure. With federal funding drying up and Vermont’s state of emergency ending, Maulucci said, state officials had done what they could to make “the transition back to the pre-pandemic state as smooth as possible for (program) participants.”
“If we made no changes, we estimate the funds could run out by the end of the year for all participants. Instead of everyone facing a cliff, the Administration’s plan will ramp down through to Spring, prioritizing the Vermonters in greatest need,” he said.