This commentary is by Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger.
It’s shameful that, until this moment, there has been nothing in the way of a statewide strategy to end homelessness.
When the state opened motels to homeless community members in the early days of the pandemic, many Vermonters, myself included, breathed a sigh of relief. We knew that extended stays for these vulnerable households would offer new stability and lower risks from Covid.
As time marched on, we heard growing concerns over the effects of isolation and lack of direct services for people living in motels. Eventually it became clear to me and mayors across Vermont that this beleaguered program needed to end when its federal funding ran out — so we called for an orderly and collaborative wind-down plan.
Instead, despite having months (if not years) to prepare for this moment and tens of millions of dollars allocated in the Legislature’s budget, state leaders had, in the end, no plan at all.
All we had to work with was a cold deadline set by the governor to fall in the heat of midsummer.
Over a matter of days straddling Memorial Day weekend, my team — with a cohort of other municipal leaders and experienced housing and service providers — engaged in heartbreaking conversations about how to triage this impending crisis. Together, we created a proposal to stand up new emergency shelter in Burlington for the adults already expelled from the motels, and to place in permanent or transitional housing the remaining 165 or so highly vulnerable households still in motels across the county over the coming months — while bringing new, critical services into the motel program for the interim.
While the state deflected questions around the realities of frail and vulnerable Vermonters sleeping rough, we instead made the case that putting kids, elderly Vermonters, and people living with disabilities on cots in gymnasiums or office buildings was both morally unacceptable and equally as expensive as simply improving the motel program for a short period of transition.
Congregate shelters are the best we can do amidst the chaos of natural disaster. Surely there’s a better way to treat people when sunsetting a multiyear shelter program amidst a housing crisis that has made more people per capita homeless in Vermont than in 48 other states.
Last week, the Legislature took extraordinary measures by passing a new amended “companion bill,” which essentially scales up our strategy into a statewide plan, adding to it legislative oversight and an assessment of barriers to building housing in state land use laws.
This is a far better outcome than the disaster we faced, literally, just a few days ago.
Now there will be no mass evictions of Vermont children and seniors. For the first time, there will be a focused effort to house everyone while services and conditions in the hotels improve. And, the costs will diminish monthly and be less overall than the Scott administration’s proposed mass-congregate shelter plan.
If you’re feeling a sense of whiplash, I don’t blame you.
This proposal (now law) came together in days, but it’s important to understand this has been years in the making.
A decade ago, we took a leap forward in our regional effort to end homelessness by creating the coordinated entry system to give Chittenden County Homeless Alliance member organizations real-time data about who is homeless in the region and what their specific needs and barriers to housing are, and to ensure equitable access to affordable and homeless-dedicated housing.
Predicting a huge post-pandemic surge in homelessness, the city doubled down by putting hundreds of thousands of American Rescue Plan Act dollars towards strengthening coordinated entry. The command team empowered by that investment has since housed over 200 households, supporting an average of over 25 households exiting homelessness each month in 2023.
Since 2012, Burlington has quadrupled our rate of housing development through a series of reforms to local land use laws. Today, over 700 new homes are in construction. We have a collective goal to build 5,000 homes in the county by 2025 and anticipate 100 new homeless-dedicated units this year.
Recognizing that, when it comes to building homes, even fast is slow, we also opened two low-barrier, year-round emergency shelters to respond to the massive recent rise in the number of unsheltered individuals.
Critically, we created a single point of accountability for all these efforts and more within the city by hiring our first special assistant to end homelessness — the indomitable Sarah Russell (who is also co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance).
These combined initiatives cost far less than the motel program and are more productive at transitioning homeless Vermonters into housing by an order of magnitude.
For the companion bill to amount to more than “kicking the can,” these effective systems we’ve created need to be quickly implemented statewide. Each region needs accountable leadership with the authority to act, reliable real-time data, more homes built quickly, and close coordination between government agencies and local housing and service providers.
This bill maps a new path forward by asking the state to work in true partnership with communities. Now we have a collective duty to see it through to the end.
