This commentary is by Nate Hine, a retired engineer who has lived in Vermont since 1979, and in Strafford since 1989.
For the past seven years, I have been a volunteer guardian ad litem and advocate for survivors of violence. When I visit families in their state-funded hotel rooms, I see how rotten this situation is for them. The alternative, however, is much worse.
I know at least three young couples living in hotels in Washington and Chittenden counties who are attempting to reunify with their children or to avoid having them removed by the Department for Children and Families. Despite their own strenuous efforts and the tireless work of service providers, they are unable to obtain alternate housing, and they face immediate homelessness every time the threat of cuts to motel vouchers looms, as it does again now.
If there is no further action, 3,000 Vermonters will be thrown into the streets in the next few weeks, including 600 children.
Shelters are always full, so if people are ejected from the hotels, their options will be a tent, couch-surfing with unsafe acquaintances, or sleeping in their car if they have one. If they stay in a populated area to be near their jobs, schools and services, they are likely to be pushed out by police, and their few possessions destroyed or lost. The risk of further harm, including losing their children, keeps going up.
One of the myths surrounding homelessness in Vermont is that people come here from other states for our generous handouts. This is wrong on at least two counts, from my experience.
First, most of the families I work with have been in Vermont for generations.
Second, our confusing array of assistance programs, even when people can access them, are insufficient to meet basic needs — often, even for people with multiple jobs.
Here are some of the harms done when people are forced into homelessness:
- exposure to crime
- mistreatment by law enforcement
- substance use disorders
- illnesses from exposure to adverse weather
- separation of families
- children in state custody
- loss of clothing and household necessities
- loss of access to education, child care, and medical care
- loss of employment
- loss of vital documents, family photographs, and memorabilia
- loss of community and family ties
Please don’t allow our Legislature and governor to kick vulnerable people out of this essential program. It must be maintained until adequate homes are available for everyone who needs them.
To save money in this year’s budget by cutting this program is both cruel and a false economy because of the immediate and long-term human and fiscal costs of increasing homelessness in Vermont.
I, for one, am willing to pay more in taxes so that lives aren’t destroyed, if that’s what it takes — as it probably will. We are a wealthy nation, and a wealthy state. If we pretend to be poor as a pretext for allowing others to suffer, then how will history remember us? How, indeed, do we live with ourselves?