With Pandemic Aid Ending, Vermont’s Homeless Are Forced From Hotels
Jenna Russell
Tue, June 20, 2023
Downtown Brattleboro, Vt., June 15, 2023. (Richard Beaven/The New York Times)
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — As his few remaining hours with a place to live ticked by last Thursday, Scott Alexander panhandled near a McDonald’s in Brattleboro, in southern Vermont, while running through a mental checklist of the supplies he would need for a move back into the woods nearby.
He had a tent and sleeping bags for himself and his wife, a propane stove and a heater. But he needed tarps and propane, and in two hours of holding his battered cardboard sign — “Any Act of Kind Greatly Appreciate” — he had made only $3.
“It feels like a countdown,” Alexander, 41, said as he eyed the storm clouds gathering overhead. “I’ll be up all night, trying to get ready.”
In the progressive bastion of Vermont, it was a point of pride that the state moved most of its homeless residents into hotel rooms during the coronavirus pandemic, giving vulnerable people a better chance of avoiding the virus.
But this month, the state began emptying hotels of about 2,800 people living there — most of them with nowhere else to go. Driven by the recent end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing, the expulsions have spawned a state budget standoff and, in some quarters, painful soul-searching about Vermont’s liberal values, and the limits of its good intentions.
The situation has also highlighted the growing importance of hotels in the housing crisis nationwide, for people whose other options are tents or sidewalks, and for local governments stymied by a paralyzing lack of affordable housing.
Between March 2020 and March 2023, Vermont spent $118 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and $190 million in federal money altogether, to house people in hotels, according to the state, broadly expanding a program that had long provided shelter in motels in snowy or frigid weather.
It was always clear that the emergency funding would end, but some saw a potentially transformative opportunity in the temporary program: a chance to draw people into stabler settings where they could be counted, connected with services and, ultimately, helped into longer-term housing.
The effort quickly revealed the extent of the state’s housing problem. In the first year of the expanded hotel program, the number of Vermonters counted as homeless more than doubled, to 2,590 in 2021 from 1,110 in 2020. In the most recent tally, completed in January, the total jumped again, to 3,295, in part because the hotel program made people easier to count but also because of the continuing housing crisis, with higher rents and fewer vacant apartments.
The rural state, with a population smaller than any but Wyoming, had risen to the top of two national rankings by last year: It had the second highest rate of homelessness per capita in the nation, after California — but also the lowest rate of homeless people living outdoors.
To some, it felt like a launching point. “With our smaller population, our culture and our passion, I think we felt a lot of hope that we could make real progress toward ending homelessness,” said Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans, near the Canadian border.
But planning for long-term solutions faltered, hindered by a lack of housing stock, labor shortages and glacial timelines for construction. As it became clear that most hotel residents would return to homelessness, tensions rose between Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, the Democrat-dominated Legislature and advocates who were calling on the state to keep people in hotels.
The end date was postponed in March, at a cost to the state of $7 million to $10 million per month. On June 1, the expulsions began. An estimated 800 people statewide were turned out of hotel rooms that day as the Scott administration stressed the need to invest in long-term housing solutions instead.
“We will make every effort to ensure vulnerable Vermonters are sheltered,” Miranda Gray, a deputy commissioner of the state’s Department for Children and Families, said in a statement.
With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like Graff, who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.
“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.
A few hotels, including the Quality Inn in Brattleboro where Alexander and his wife had lived for about a year, granted homeless guests a two-week extension, until June 16. As that deadline approached last week, residents expressed frustration and fear.
Kathleen McHenry, 55, had begun packing some belongings in her car and throwing others away. She said she was weary of the assumptions people made about her — and terrified she would be raped while sleeping outdoors.
“I’m not here because of drugs,” she said. “I’m here because I could not find a place to live.”
As a steady rain fell that night, McHenry kept dry under the hotel’s beige stucco portico, fussing over another resident’s baby before heading back inside to her two cats and her chunky Lab mix, Kirby. She said the bonds among residents, “almost like siblings,” had made the hotel feel more like a home.
Outcry over the expulsions has increased since June 1, ratcheting up pressure on legislators to act. On Tuesday, the final day of their session, they voted to extend the stays of the remaining 2,000 hotel residents who had been scheduled to leave on July 1 — a group that includes hundreds of children, and some adults who are bedridden, dependent on oxygen or take medications that require refrigeration, according to advocates.
The move averted a possible mutiny by a group of progressive lawmakers who had opposed the motel expulsions — and whose votes were needed to override the governor’s veto of the budget passed by the legislature. If unopposed by the governor, the latest extension would allow the most vulnerable Vermonters to stay in motels until April, or until they find housing, as long as they contribute 30% of their income to help pay for their stays.
Brattleboro, a riverfront town tucked into the state’s southeastern corner, has deeply liberal and empathetic instincts. But it is also wrestling with rising crime downtown, and concern that it will hurt businesses and tourism. Days after the first wave of hotel checkouts, the town’s selectboard voted to hire a private security firm to patrol some areas where drug use had increased.
The town was badly shaken by the murder in April of Leah Rosin-Pritchard, 36, at the Morningside House shelter, where she was the coordinator. A resident of the shelter was arrested and found mentally unfit to stand trial. The 30-bed shelter has remained closed since.
The town, like many in Vermont, does not allow camping on public land and has made no exceptions for the people leaving hotels.
John Potter, the town manager, said the impact of the hotel program on Brattleboro, where people had come from around the state to stay in seven hotels, could be long lasting.
“We hope it helped them,” he said, “but what it leaves us with now is potentially more people looking for a roof over their heads than we had before.” The town has asked the state for help setting up a temporary 100-bed shelter in a vacant office complex.
Other states have avoided large-scale expulsions of homeless residents from hotels. In Oregon, state leaders decided early in the pandemic to buy hotels rather than rent rooms in them for months or years. The state spent $65 million in 2020 to acquire 19 properties and convert them to permanent shelters.
A few such purchases have taken place in Vermont, but by individual nonprofit groups. In Brattleboro, Groundworks Collaborative, a nonprofit agency, worked with a local land trust to buy an old chalet-style hotel in 2020, tapping federal relief funds to convert it to 35 units of supportive housing for people leaving the motels. A similar project in northern Vermont turned a former nursing home into 23 affordable apartments, Graff said.
The state made investments too, offering incentives to developers to build affordable housing and grants for renovations of abandoned properties. But as the need kept surging, the supply was nowhere near enough.
At the Quality Inn in Brattleboro, a woman who said she had lost her housing after divorcing her abusive husband worried about keeping her full-time supermarket job while living in a tent in a state park.
She said she copes with homelessness by finding “tiny escapes” — a waterfront picnic or a trip to a Chinese restaurant buffet — “to pretend, for an hour, that this is not our life.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
Jenna Russell
Tue, June 20, 2023
Downtown Brattleboro, Vt., June 15, 2023. (Richard Beaven/The New York Times)
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — As his few remaining hours with a place to live ticked by last Thursday, Scott Alexander panhandled near a McDonald’s in Brattleboro, in southern Vermont, while running through a mental checklist of the supplies he would need for a move back into the woods nearby.
He had a tent and sleeping bags for himself and his wife, a propane stove and a heater. But he needed tarps and propane, and in two hours of holding his battered cardboard sign — “Any Act of Kind Greatly Appreciate” — he had made only $3.
“It feels like a countdown,” Alexander, 41, said as he eyed the storm clouds gathering overhead. “I’ll be up all night, trying to get ready.”
In the progressive bastion of Vermont, it was a point of pride that the state moved most of its homeless residents into hotel rooms during the coronavirus pandemic, giving vulnerable people a better chance of avoiding the virus.
But this month, the state began emptying hotels of about 2,800 people living there — most of them with nowhere else to go. Driven by the recent end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing, the expulsions have spawned a state budget standoff and, in some quarters, painful soul-searching about Vermont’s liberal values, and the limits of its good intentions.
The situation has also highlighted the growing importance of hotels in the housing crisis nationwide, for people whose other options are tents or sidewalks, and for local governments stymied by a paralyzing lack of affordable housing.
Between March 2020 and March 2023, Vermont spent $118 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and $190 million in federal money altogether, to house people in hotels, according to the state, broadly expanding a program that had long provided shelter in motels in snowy or frigid weather.
It was always clear that the emergency funding would end, but some saw a potentially transformative opportunity in the temporary program: a chance to draw people into stabler settings where they could be counted, connected with services and, ultimately, helped into longer-term housing.
The effort quickly revealed the extent of the state’s housing problem. In the first year of the expanded hotel program, the number of Vermonters counted as homeless more than doubled, to 2,590 in 2021 from 1,110 in 2020. In the most recent tally, completed in January, the total jumped again, to 3,295, in part because the hotel program made people easier to count but also because of the continuing housing crisis, with higher rents and fewer vacant apartments.
The rural state, with a population smaller than any but Wyoming, had risen to the top of two national rankings by last year: It had the second highest rate of homelessness per capita in the nation, after California — but also the lowest rate of homeless people living outdoors.
To some, it felt like a launching point. “With our smaller population, our culture and our passion, I think we felt a lot of hope that we could make real progress toward ending homelessness,” said Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans, near the Canadian border.
But planning for long-term solutions faltered, hindered by a lack of housing stock, labor shortages and glacial timelines for construction. As it became clear that most hotel residents would return to homelessness, tensions rose between Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, the Democrat-dominated Legislature and advocates who were calling on the state to keep people in hotels.
The end date was postponed in March, at a cost to the state of $7 million to $10 million per month. On June 1, the expulsions began. An estimated 800 people statewide were turned out of hotel rooms that day as the Scott administration stressed the need to invest in long-term housing solutions instead.
“We will make every effort to ensure vulnerable Vermonters are sheltered,” Miranda Gray, a deputy commissioner of the state’s Department for Children and Families, said in a statement.
With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like Graff, who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.
“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.
A few hotels, including the Quality Inn in Brattleboro where Alexander and his wife had lived for about a year, granted homeless guests a two-week extension, until June 16. As that deadline approached last week, residents expressed frustration and fear.
Kathleen McHenry, 55, had begun packing some belongings in her car and throwing others away. She said she was weary of the assumptions people made about her — and terrified she would be raped while sleeping outdoors.
“I’m not here because of drugs,” she said. “I’m here because I could not find a place to live.”
As a steady rain fell that night, McHenry kept dry under the hotel’s beige stucco portico, fussing over another resident’s baby before heading back inside to her two cats and her chunky Lab mix, Kirby. She said the bonds among residents, “almost like siblings,” had made the hotel feel more like a home.
Outcry over the expulsions has increased since June 1, ratcheting up pressure on legislators to act. On Tuesday, the final day of their session, they voted to extend the stays of the remaining 2,000 hotel residents who had been scheduled to leave on July 1 — a group that includes hundreds of children, and some adults who are bedridden, dependent on oxygen or take medications that require refrigeration, according to advocates.
The move averted a possible mutiny by a group of progressive lawmakers who had opposed the motel expulsions — and whose votes were needed to override the governor’s veto of the budget passed by the legislature. If unopposed by the governor, the latest extension would allow the most vulnerable Vermonters to stay in motels until April, or until they find housing, as long as they contribute 30% of their income to help pay for their stays.
Brattleboro, a riverfront town tucked into the state’s southeastern corner, has deeply liberal and empathetic instincts. But it is also wrestling with rising crime downtown, and concern that it will hurt businesses and tourism. Days after the first wave of hotel checkouts, the town’s selectboard voted to hire a private security firm to patrol some areas where drug use had increased.
The town was badly shaken by the murder in April of Leah Rosin-Pritchard, 36, at the Morningside House shelter, where she was the coordinator. A resident of the shelter was arrested and found mentally unfit to stand trial. The 30-bed shelter has remained closed since.
The town, like many in Vermont, does not allow camping on public land and has made no exceptions for the people leaving hotels.
John Potter, the town manager, said the impact of the hotel program on Brattleboro, where people had come from around the state to stay in seven hotels, could be long lasting.
“We hope it helped them,” he said, “but what it leaves us with now is potentially more people looking for a roof over their heads than we had before.” The town has asked the state for help setting up a temporary 100-bed shelter in a vacant office complex.
Other states have avoided large-scale expulsions of homeless residents from hotels. In Oregon, state leaders decided early in the pandemic to buy hotels rather than rent rooms in them for months or years. The state spent $65 million in 2020 to acquire 19 properties and convert them to permanent shelters.
A few such purchases have taken place in Vermont, but by individual nonprofit groups. In Brattleboro, Groundworks Collaborative, a nonprofit agency, worked with a local land trust to buy an old chalet-style hotel in 2020, tapping federal relief funds to convert it to 35 units of supportive housing for people leaving the motels. A similar project in northern Vermont turned a former nursing home into 23 affordable apartments, Graff said.
The state made investments too, offering incentives to developers to build affordable housing and grants for renovations of abandoned properties. But as the need kept surging, the supply was nowhere near enough.
At the Quality Inn in Brattleboro, a woman who said she had lost her housing after divorcing her abusive husband worried about keeping her full-time supermarket job while living in a tent in a state park.
She said she copes with homelessness by finding “tiny escapes” — a waterfront picnic or a trip to a Chinese restaurant buffet — “to pretend, for an hour, that this is not our life.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
Kayla Jimenez, USA TODAY
Tue, June 20, 2023
Nearly one third of all people who are unhoused in the United States live in the Golden State, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness also reveals 50% of all unsheltered people in the country – who may or may not have a car to sleep in – live in California. Almost 90% reported that the cost of housing was the main reason they could not escape homelessness.
"The results of the study confirm that far too many Californians experience homelessness because they cannot afford housing," wrote Margot Kushel, a principal investigator of the study and director at the University of California, San Francisco's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
The study encompasses findings from nearly 3,200 surveys and 365 in depth interviews with adults experiencing homelessness across the state between October 2021 and November 2022. It is the "largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s," according to the study, which was requested by California Governor Gavin Newsom's administration, Fortune reported.
More than one million people experience homelessness in the United States in a given year and many more are at risk of losing their homes, according to the Biden administration. Florida, New York and Washington also had high rates of homelessness last year, the Annual Homeless Assessment Report shows. The report provides data and analysis for funding decisions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A homeless man sits at his tent along the Interstate 110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles. California Gov. Gavin Newsom met with the mayors of some of California's largest cities to discuss the homeless situation last month.
What does the study reveal?
The study found that many people cannot afford homes in the state. Nearly all people surveyed said they "face barriers," like poor credit history, discrimination, health challenges or prior evictions, when trying to rent or buy a home. California is experiencing a housing shortage crisis, and the states is home to some of the most unaffordable places to live in the country.
The research shows "the incalculable personal costs of homelessness," Kushel wrote in the release.
California's homeless population is growing older in age with the median age of participants being 47-years-old, the new research shows, with nearly half of the state's homeless population being 50-years-old or older. An overrepresented majority are Latino (35%), Black (26%) and Native American (12%).
Micah's Way volunteers serve food and drink to Santa Ana, California residents, including veterans and others experiencing homelessness.
A vast majority of people surveyed were from or last housed in California. And about 20% of the unhoused people surveyed came straight from institutions.
Two-thirds of all participants surveyed reported struggling with mental health issues at the time they were surveyed. And 72% had experienced some type of physical violence in their lifetime, the findings show.
Many of the unhoused people the institute surveyed are looking for jobs. "Participants were disconnected from the job market and services, but almost half were looking for work," a news release attached to the study reads.
Biden administration: Unveils initiative to combat homelessness in 5 US cities, California
To combat the growing housing needs, the group is recommending six policy changes, including:
Increasing "access to housing affordable to extremely low-income households;"
Expanding "targeted homelessness prevention, such as financial supports and legal assistance;"
Providing "robust supports to match the behavioral health needs of the population;"
Upping "household incomes through evidence-based employment supports;"
Growing "outreach and service delivery to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness;" and
Embedding "a racial equity approach in all aspects of homeless system service delivery."
Angel Martinez pours water on Jerry Fullington's head to cool him off from the heat in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022. The friends who used to be a couple have been homeless on and off for years but are hoping to get inside soon.
In an attempt to reduce homelessness nationwide by 25% by January 2025, the Biden administration last month unveiled an initiative called "ALL INside" to help unhoused people in cities with high homeless populations access federal services. Those cities include Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix and Seattle.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @kaylajjimenez.
Who’s unhoused in California? Largest study in decades upends myths
Sam Levin in Los Angeles
Tue, June 20, 2023
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Nearly half of all unhoused adults in California are over the age of 50, with Black residents dramatically overrepresented, according to the largest study of the state’s homeless population in decades.
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research released on Tuesday also revealed that 90% of the population lost their housing in California, with 75% of them now living in the same county where they were last housed. The study further found that nearly nine out of 10 people reported that the cost of housing was the main barrier to leaving homelessness.
Related: ‘I’ve never seen so much vitriol’: activist Paul Boden on America’s homelessness crisis
The research from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, based on a representative survey of nearly 3,200 unhoused people, contradicts several persistent myths about the population, including that most unhoused people come from out of state to take advantage of services, as well as stereotypes that homeless people are mostly young adults who prefer to live outside and don’t want help.
“People are homeless because their rent is too high. And their options are too few. And they have no cushion,” Dr Margot Kushel, initiative director and lead investigator, told the Associated Press. “And it really makes you wonder how different things would look if we could solve that underlying problem.”
California is home to more than 171,000 people experiencing homelessness, comprising 30% of the homeless population in the US and half of all Americans who are unsheltered and living outside. The crisis has become a public health catastrophe in recent years as an ageing population is forced to live in tents, cars and other makeshift shelters, with thousands dying on the streets each year. California is considered the most unaffordable state for housing, where minimum-wage earners would have to work nearly 90 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
The study further found that among the older population, 41% said they experienced their first episode of homelessness after age 50. Most participants in the research reported that the cost of living had become unsustainable before they lost housing, reporting a monthly median household income of $960 in the six months before homelessness.
Nearly half of adults surveyed were not living on a lease in the six months before facing homelessness, meaning they were couch-surfing or had moved in with family and friends in precarious situations. Renters with leases reported a median of only 10 days’ notice that they were going to lose their housing, while people without leases reported a median of only one day of warning.
Researchers reported that participants had endured significant trauma, with two-thirds reporting mental health symptoms, more than a third experiencing physical or sexual violence during homelessness, and more than a third visiting an emergency department in the past six months. Access to care and treatment was also a major challenge cited, with one in five who use substances reporting that they wanted treatment but could not obtain it.
The study found that while Black residents make up 6% of California’s general population, they account for 26% of the unhoused population. Native American and Indigenous people were also overrepresented, accounting for 12% of the unhoused population. Latinos made up 35% of the unhoused population, fairly comparable to their proportion of the general population.
The study was done at the request of Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration, but was not funded by the state.
The researchers recommended that the state increase access to housing that is affordable to extremely low-income people, including by expanding rental subsidies; expand homelessness prevention through financial support and legal assistance, including for people leaving jails, prisons and drug treatment; expand eviction protections; increase access to treatment; and increase outreach and services for people living on the streets.
Claudine Sipili, a member of the research project’s lived expertise board, said in a statement that she hopes the research will help the state develop effective strategies that allow people to transition out of homelessness and into stable housing circumstances: “Having experienced homelessness first-hand, I vividly recall the relentless fight for survival, the pervasive shame that haunted me, and my unsuccessful endeavors to overcome homelessness on my own.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Sam Levin in Los Angeles
Tue, June 20, 2023
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Nearly half of all unhoused adults in California are over the age of 50, with Black residents dramatically overrepresented, according to the largest study of the state’s homeless population in decades.
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research released on Tuesday also revealed that 90% of the population lost their housing in California, with 75% of them now living in the same county where they were last housed. The study further found that nearly nine out of 10 people reported that the cost of housing was the main barrier to leaving homelessness.
Related: ‘I’ve never seen so much vitriol’: activist Paul Boden on America’s homelessness crisis
The research from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, based on a representative survey of nearly 3,200 unhoused people, contradicts several persistent myths about the population, including that most unhoused people come from out of state to take advantage of services, as well as stereotypes that homeless people are mostly young adults who prefer to live outside and don’t want help.
“People are homeless because their rent is too high. And their options are too few. And they have no cushion,” Dr Margot Kushel, initiative director and lead investigator, told the Associated Press. “And it really makes you wonder how different things would look if we could solve that underlying problem.”
California is home to more than 171,000 people experiencing homelessness, comprising 30% of the homeless population in the US and half of all Americans who are unsheltered and living outside. The crisis has become a public health catastrophe in recent years as an ageing population is forced to live in tents, cars and other makeshift shelters, with thousands dying on the streets each year. California is considered the most unaffordable state for housing, where minimum-wage earners would have to work nearly 90 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
The study further found that among the older population, 41% said they experienced their first episode of homelessness after age 50. Most participants in the research reported that the cost of living had become unsustainable before they lost housing, reporting a monthly median household income of $960 in the six months before homelessness.
Nearly half of adults surveyed were not living on a lease in the six months before facing homelessness, meaning they were couch-surfing or had moved in with family and friends in precarious situations. Renters with leases reported a median of only 10 days’ notice that they were going to lose their housing, while people without leases reported a median of only one day of warning.
Researchers reported that participants had endured significant trauma, with two-thirds reporting mental health symptoms, more than a third experiencing physical or sexual violence during homelessness, and more than a third visiting an emergency department in the past six months. Access to care and treatment was also a major challenge cited, with one in five who use substances reporting that they wanted treatment but could not obtain it.
The study found that while Black residents make up 6% of California’s general population, they account for 26% of the unhoused population. Native American and Indigenous people were also overrepresented, accounting for 12% of the unhoused population. Latinos made up 35% of the unhoused population, fairly comparable to their proportion of the general population.
The study was done at the request of Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration, but was not funded by the state.
The researchers recommended that the state increase access to housing that is affordable to extremely low-income people, including by expanding rental subsidies; expand homelessness prevention through financial support and legal assistance, including for people leaving jails, prisons and drug treatment; expand eviction protections; increase access to treatment; and increase outreach and services for people living on the streets.
Claudine Sipili, a member of the research project’s lived expertise board, said in a statement that she hopes the research will help the state develop effective strategies that allow people to transition out of homelessness and into stable housing circumstances: “Having experienced homelessness first-hand, I vividly recall the relentless fight for survival, the pervasive shame that haunted me, and my unsuccessful endeavors to overcome homelessness on my own.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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