This commentary is by Anne N. Sosin, a public health practitioner and researcher and policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College.
Vermont, home to Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean, has long prided itself as the nation’s vanguard of progressive policy, with a history of leading on issues ranging from marriage equality and reproductive liberty to protections for transgender people.
Yet, even as the state faces the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in 2022 behind only California, the Democratic supermajority found common ground with the state’s Republican governor on a budget that will send upward of 2,800 people — including 500 to 600 unhoused children, more than 1,000 Vermonters with disabilities, and many pregnant mothers and elderly Vermonters — to cars, streets and tents by Aug. 1.
Vermont’s surging crisis of homelessness has largely escaped both local visibility and national scrutiny thanks to an emergency housing program that has sheltered nearly 80% of all unhoused Vermonters in motels. Defunding the program will catapult the state’s level of unsheltered homelessness from the lowest level in the country to one of America’s highest in a matter of weeks.
Mayors, state’s attorneys, hospitals, businesses and service providers have voiced concern in recent weeks about the fallout of abruptly displacing more than the vast majority of all Vermonters experiencing homelessness onto taxed emergency rooms, criminal justice systems, and public services.
Vermont shelter workers have found themselves making lists of motel guests likely to die and handing out camping gear.
Distributing outdoor equipment might be an effective economic development strategy for a state that has long been a destination for mountain recreation. But a homelessness policy that rests on handing out tents — or, as some speculate, using private contractors with a history of abuses — to families with young children and people reliant on oxygen and insulin for their survival will result in predictable and preventable harm. Study after study has linked unsheltered homelessness and housing instability to poor health outcomes, including increased risk of death.
I’ve seen the lifesaving impact of the emergency housing program — as well as the devastating cost of eliminating it — through my own research on homelessness and health equity in Vermont. Earlier this spring, one of the thousands of motel guests facing eviction related to me, “I really need to be inside, because my health would just go downhill fast. Before I was lucky enough to stay (in this motel), I was in my car. My doctor said that if I didn’t get inside that I was gonna die. … I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for this program.”
Her story is not unique: The state reported in early 2023 that 75% of households of unhoused Vermonters at the end of 2022 had at least one person with a disability and 40% had visited the emergency department at least once in the past year (state Agency of Human Services data).
In defending Vermont’s decision to end the emergency housing program, Democratic leaders lauded their investments in other housing initiatives. Yet, their celebratory tone betrays the state’s unexceptional thinking in the face of an exceptional crisis.
Many indicators reveal a crisis outrunning the state’s response. Vermont confronts an estimated shortage of up to 40,000 housing units, the lowest rental vacancy rates in the country, and a growing gap between housing costs and wages. The state recently projected a 20% increase in homelessness in 2023.
A year ago, 70% of housing vouchers for families issued were applied; currently, four in five housing vouchers are going unused, as recipients were unable to find rentals on which they could use them in a tightening housing market.
The end of the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program and other federal safety net programs promises to accelerate these trends further. As all indicators have pointed to a growing crisis, the state has also failed to invest in better safety nets to replace its unpopular and costly motel-based program — a program that currently provides shelter for four in five Vermonters experiencing homelessness.
Basic arithmetic shows that it will take years to reverse these trends. Yet magical thinking and zero-sum calculations, not facts, have fueled a debate on how many Vermonters to unshelter, not how to best address this crisis.
Decades of research have taught us that the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness can be successfully housed using a Housing First approach. Cities that have brought proven solutions to scale, including Houston and Milwaukee — both less progressive and more populated than Vermont — have made dramatic progress against homelessness.
Absent adequate housing, the state does not need to choose between keeping Vermonters sheltered or investing in permanent strategies to end homelessness. Oregon and California, states facing critical shortages of both permanent housing and stopgap shelter, have leveraged federal pandemic housing programs to increase their non-congregate shelter and permanent housing capacity quickly.
Studies on the use of hotels during the pandemic have added to evidence that non-congregate shelter also leads to superior outcomes over congregate shelter and unsheltered homelessness. Yet, instead of harnessing this knowledge to reimagine the state’s approach to homelessness, Vermont’s governor and the Legislature have made thousands of the state’s most vulnerable residents pawns in a game of political brinkmanship.
Gov. Scott’s veto of the budget offers an opportunity for Vermont to avert the catastrophic consequences of mass unsheltering. Hanging in the balance of the Legislature’s action are the lives of thousand Vermonters and the state’s ideals.
Shortly after passing a budget that failed to fund shelter for unhoused Vermonters, the Democratic Party wrote, “Vermont is the state that exemplifies Democratic progress across the country — leading the charge in protecting vulnerable communities and defending our shared values.” If Democrats see themselves as a bulwark against a national assault on vulnerable communities, they must reflect these values in a budget that keeps Vermonters sheltered.