This commentary is by Anne N. Sosin, a public health practitioner and researcher at Dartmouth College.
While floodwaters are now receding across Vermont, the state’s crisis of homelessness is only swelling. Vermont reported the second-highest rate of homelessness in the United States in 2022 and an 18.5% one-year increase in homelessness in 2023.
Destruction and damage of the state’s insufficient and aging housing stock will push many more Vermonters into the growing ranks of the unhoused and exacerbate the challenges of Vermonters trying to exit homelessness.
Newly unhoused Vermonters will face dire prospects: Vermont already had a housing shortage of up to 40,000 housing units, the lowest rental vacancy rate in the U.S., and a large gap between housing costs and wages. Even prior to flooding, four in five families with housing vouchers were unsuccessful in finding housing units, up from only 30% a year earlier.
Many displaced by flooding will also confront a critical lack of shelter, or interim housing, as they struggle to rebuild or find alternative housing.
Weeks before the storm arrived, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott inked a deal with lawmakers that sent upwards of 25% of all Vermonters experiencing homelessness to tents, cars and streets and began to dismantle the state’s already threadbare motel shelter program.
Motels accounted for nearly 80% of all shelter beds in the state in 2022, and conventional shelters have long been full. This decision not only put many Vermonters experiencing homelessness in harm’s way during the storm, but will also undermine the recovery of the newly unhoused.
Shelter is not the problem. Unsheltered homelessness is. Many of the hundreds of Vermonters recently unsheltered from motels sought refuge along waterways, under bridges, and in their vehicles, all places extremely vulnerable to sudden weather events. Living in a tent or a car also makes it more difficult to rely on phones to access timely information and support in times of need.
By contrast, first responders were quickly able to locate and move unhoused people at a Good Samaritan shelter in central Vermont as floodwaters rose, facilitating a more efficient and effective emergency response.
Shelter is also not the solution to Vermont’s crisis of homelessness. Housing is.
Decades of research show that the vast majority of people — ranging from those recently displaced by natural disasters to those experiencing chronic homelessness — can be successfully housed. Yet, the disaster and its aftermath reveal the folly of zero-sum thinking on housing and shelter.
Vermonters were already falling into homelessness faster than they were exiting it, and the state is not producing permanent housing quickly enough to eliminate the need for a more robust safety net of shelter.
Vermonters unhoused by flooding will not only encounter a shelter program that is inadequate to meet the growing volume of homelessness but one that is also out of step with best practice. Pop-up congregate shelters in schools and churches are critical during an emergency but do not provide a foundation to stabilize and rebuild lives following it.
Many studies on the use of hotels in other states during the pandemic have added to evidence that non-congregate shelter, or housing people in private rooms with adequate wraparound services, is superior to congregate shelter and unsheltered homelessness. Leading national experts on homelessness see hotels and other forms of non-congregate shelter as part of “potentially real and lasting transformations in homeless policies and practices.”
Vermont has now spent many years debating how to unwind its already insufficient non-congregate shelter program instead of leveraging this evidence and federal resources to achieve this transformation.
As it begins to rebuild, Vermont should use federal and philanthropic funds to invest in a permanent safety net of interim housing in line with best practices.
Oregon’s experience offers a blueprint to inform the state’s efforts. Faced with the twin crises of wildfire displacement and Covid-19, Oregon launched a hotels-to-housing initiative to rapidly scale non-congregate shelter through the purchase and modest retrofitting of existing hotels. In less than seven months, the state increased its overall non-congregate shelter capacity by 20%, providing immediate interim housing for both newly and chronically unhoused Oregonians. It has continued to invest in shelter expansion as part of the state’s comprehensive approach to housing and homelessness.
Hotels acquired through the state’s program will later be converted into permanent housing, increasing both interim and permanent solutions in a single investment. This approach eliminates reliance on private motels at tourist rates and the well-documented abuses plaguing Vermont’s poorly designed and administered general assistance emergency housing program.
In a New Yorker interview with Sue Halpern, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, “Vermont can be a model for the country. … It can do all the right things — and it won’t matter, because this is a global crisis.”
Vermont can’t prevent cataclysmic weather events. It can, however, offer a model of how to avert the secondary emergency of unsheltered homelessness during “unnatural disasters” and end it during more ordinary times.
But first, Vermont leaders must recognize that homelessness — not the people experiencing it or the strategies to address it — is the problem.
