Lawmakers are pledging to modernize the state’s motel-based shelter program for people experiencing homelessness. And in a daylong hearing intended to prepare for the upcoming legislative session, they were told Thursday in no uncertain terms just how badly further investments and reforms are needed.
“We’re losing the battle,” said Sue Minter, executive director of the central Vermont anti-poverty nonprofit Capstone Community Action. “The numbers are going up.”
She was echoed again and again by a series of local service providers, who described a crisis fast outpacing the state’s interventions.
Mary Cohen, executive director of the Housing Trust of Rutland County, told lawmakers that her organization was putting financing together on a series of projects that could bring another 80 units of affordable housing to the area by 2025. But while that was “significant and impactful,” she noted, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the outstanding need, as revealed by a recent market study commissioned by the housing trust.
“The (study) indicated that in Rutland County, by the end of 2024, there will be a need for 2,700 affordable units,” she said. “We’re hoping to get 80 online — but the report is saying 2,700 units.”
The decision to ramp down the use of motels to shelter unhoused individuals over the summer appears to have exacerbated the problem of unsheltered homelessness. Sarah Russell, the special assistant to end homelessness for Burlington and co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, told lawmakers that the percentage of people without any shelter among those who are unhoused in Chittenden County likely increased by more than 120% in the period between January 2023 and July 2023, and more than 175% over the last year.
“This increase is shocking, considering that since 2019 Chittenden County has doubled its shelter capacity from 149 emergency shelter beds to 319 today,” Russell wrote in testimony submitted to lawmakers.
‘No one was prepared’
Service providers underscored that massive and last-minute shifts in policy around the motel program had been extraordinarily difficult for both state workers and local nonprofits to manage. Angus Cheney, executive director of the Homeless Prevention Center in Rutland, praised the Department for Children and Families for doing the best it could, but said the “timing and scale” of Act 81, an 11th-hour deal struck between the House and Senate on the subject of motel housing, had been hard to implement.
He also told lawmakers that eligibility criteria changed so often and were so confusing that even he couldn’t get a handle on the rules, or explain them to his staff.
“I can’t track it. And that’s a problem when someone in my position can’t understand what — like as of today, this hour — what is the eligibility,” he said. Several others also criticized the current criteria for having a far too strict definition of disability, excluding many who badly needed help.
Act 81 allowed those staying in motels as of June 30 to remain there until April 1. Service providers warned lawmakers on Thursday that the state will have to prepare for this spring much more carefully than it did this summer’s eviction of hundreds from motels, when eligibility for the pandemic-era program was first tightened.
Minter, for example, told lawmakers that many on-the-ground providers weren’t given adequate information from the state about motel guests who had severe medical needs.
“No one was prepared; it was a very stressful and difficult situation that no one wants to repeat,” she said. “A plan of action for each hotel guest must be in place before April 2024 and a strategy should be shared between state and local service providers.”
Several local service providers also complained sharply about how difficult it had been on motel residents and their caseworkers to keep people enrolled in motel shelter, given extraordinarily long call wait times. Wait times have been reduced since the state hired a call center, several providers said — while still others complained that the temporary workers brought on were sometimes ill-informed of the program’s rules.
Special rules in Act 81 require the state to publicly report granular data — on a monthly basis — about where people in a pandemic-era program are going when they leave motel-based shelter. But figures reported out by the state make it hard to gauge Vermont’s success.
Of the 409 households that have left the program since July 1, according to data presented to lawmakers Thursday, 126 have found “permanent housing.” But Rachel Feldman, a spokesperson for the Department for Children and Families, clarified to VTDigger after the hearing that this “permanent housing” figure also included households that had moved into shelters or who were “staying with friends/family.”
It is unknown, meanwhile, where the lion’s share of those who have left the program have gone. Of the 409 households who have left, 191 simply did not renew their vouchers, according to the latest state data.
‘When do we see the plan?’
Two people who had recently navigated the state’s maze of housing programs also spoke to lawmakers on Thursday. By and large, they said, people who are unhoused face rampant prejudice — including from the people and systems who are supposed to help — and benefit programs that often fail to meet their needs.
Those living in poverty are expected to complete mountains of complicated paperwork to access aid and can be harshly penalized for any errors. For help, they must rely on overtaxed social workers, who are themselves often stumped by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy their clients face.
Bryan Plant, a Bristol man who recently moved into a subsidized apartment, told lawmakers that while he was a success story, he’d had to fight tooth and nail to maintain his benefits, often alone. In three years, he noted, he’d had 11 separate service coordinators.
“Why are people who are experiencing this always held to a higher standard than providers, state agencies and others?” Plant said. “They can miss deadlines — we cannot. They can lose paperwork — we cannot.”
Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly pointed the finger at Gov. Phil Scott’s administration for failing to come up with a plan to address the problem. And at the close of the hearing, both Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, and Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, who helm the Senate and House panels with jurisdiction over the human services, pointedly asked administration officials when they planned to offer a solution.
“One of the things that we are bound and determined not to repeat — all of us, I know, including you — is the sort of emergency nature of putting in place a less than perfect act that we’re working with now,” Wood said, addressing Miranda Gray, who heads up DCF’s economic services division. “And so, when will the administration come forward with a proposal?”
“When do we see the plan?” echoed Lyons. “We continue to ask for the plan.”
Gray pledged to offer something soon. But Wood and Lyons also appeared to acknowledge that that they, too, will have to come up with their own ideas, and said they would make that a priority in the upcoming session. Lawmakers intend on “modernizing” the state’s motel-based shelter program, Wood said, and will be “hearing and building upon people’s lived experiences” as they work toward reform.
“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” she said.
