With pandemic aid ending, Vermont’s homeless are being forced to evacuate hotels

As his few remaining hours with a place to live run out last Thursday, Scott Alexander rummaged around a McDonald’s in Brattleboro, southern Vermont, working through a mental checklist of the supplies he would need for a move to the forest 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 kindness is greatly appreciated” — he’d made just $3.

“It feels like a countdown,” said Alexander, 41, as he watched the storm clouds gather above him. “I’ll be up all night getting ready.”

In Vermont’s forward-thinking bastion, 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 evicting hotels of about 2,800 people living there — most of them with nowhere else to go. Driven by the recent end of federal funding for emergency housing in the pandemic era, the evictions have led to a deadlock in the state budget and, in some quarters, a painful self-examination of Vermont’s liberal values ​​and the limits of its good intentions.

The situation has also highlighted the growing importance of hotels in the nationwide housing crisis, for people whose other options are tents or sidewalks, and for local governments hampered by a crippling 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 in total, to house people in hotels, the state said, reinforcing a program that has long provided shelter in motels, broadly expanded. in snowy or icy weather.

It was always clear that emergency funding would end, but some saw a potentially transformative opportunity in the temporary program: an opportunity to draw people into more stable environments where they could be counted, connected to services, and ultimately aided in longer-term housing.

The effort soon revealed the magnitude of the state’s housing problem. In the first year of the expanded hotel program, the number of Vermont residents counted as homeless more than doubled, from 1,110 in 2020 to 2,590 in 2021. the most recent census, completed in Januarythe total rose again, to 3,295, partly because the hotel program made people easier to count, but also because of the ongoing housing crisis, with higher rents and fewer vacant apartments.

The rural state, with a population smaller than any other except Wyoming, had risen to the top of two national rankings last year: It had the second-highest per capita homelessness rate in the country after California, but also had the lowest rate of homeless people living outside the home.

For some it felt like a starting 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 non-profit organization. for-profit organization in St. Albans. , near the Canadian border.

But planning for long-term solutions faltered, hampered by a lack of housing stock, labor shortages and glacial construction schedules. When it became clear that most hotel residents would be homeless again, tensions rose between Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, the Democrat-dominated legislature and lawyers calling on the state to keep people in hotels.

The end date was pushed back in March, costing the state $7 million to $10 million a month. The evictions began on June 1. An estimated 800 people statewide were evicted from hotel rooms that day as the Scott administration stressed the need to invest in long-term housing solutions instead.

“We will do everything we can to ensure vulnerable Vermont residents are taken care of,” Miranda Gray, a deputy commissioner for the state’s Department of Children and Families, said in a statement.

With waiting lists for shelter beds and temporary housing, the only available option for most people forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Statewide social workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that hurt providers like Ms. Graff, who saw 28 households evicted from hotels in her northern Vermont area on June 1.

“Even buying the tents is horrible because you’re standing in the store with a cart full of camping gear and people say, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!'” she said.

A few hotels, including the Quality Inn in Brattleboro, where Mr. 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 started packing some items in her car and throwing others away. She said she was tired of the assumptions people made about her — and terrified that she’d be raped while she slept outside.

“I’m not here because of drugs,” she said. “I’m here because I couldn’t find a place to live.”

As a steady rain fell that night, Mrs. McHenry stayed dry under the hotel’s beige stucco porch, fussing over another resident’s baby before heading back inside to her two cats and her fat Lab mix, Kirby. She said the bond between the residents, “almost like siblings,” made the hotel feel more like a home.

Outrage over the evictions has mounted since June 1, increasing pressure on lawmakers to act. On Tuesday, the last day of their session, they voted to extend the stay of the remaining 2,000 hotel residents due to leave on July 1, a group that includes hundreds of children and some adults who are bedridden and dependent on oxygen or take medications that require cooling. need, according to lawyers.

The move averted a potential mutiny by a group of progressive lawmakers who had opposed the motel’s evictions — and whose votes were needed to overturn the governor’s veto over the budget passed by the legislature. If the governor doesn’t oppose, the latest extension would allow Vermont’s most vulnerable residents to stay in motels until April, or until they find housing, as long as they contribute 30 percent of their income to help pay for their stay

Brattleboro, a riverside town in the southeastern corner of the state, has very liberal and empathetic instincts. But it also struggles with rising downtown crime and concerns that it will hurt businesses and tourism. Days after the first wave of hotel checkouts, the city’s selectors voted to hire a private security firm to patrol some areas where drug use had increased.

The city was shaken heavily 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 ever since.

The city, like many in Vermont, does not allow camping on public land and has made no exception for the people who leave hotels.

John Potter, the city manager, said the hotel program’s impact on Brattleboro, where people had come from all over the state to stay at seven hotels, could be long-lasting.

“We hope it helped them,” he said, “but what it leaves us with now may be more people looking for a roof over their heads than before.” The city has asked the state for help in setting up a temporary shelter for 100 beds in an empty office complex.

Other states have prevented large-scale evictions of homeless residents from hotels. In Oregon, state leaders decided early in the pandemic to buy hotels instead of renting rooms for months or years. The state spent $65 million in 2020 to acquire 19 properties and convert them into permanent shelters.

A few such purchases have occurred in Vermont, but by individual non-profit organizations. In Brattleboro, Groundworks Collaborative, a non-profit organization, worked with a local land trust to purchase an old chalet-style hotel in 2020, using federal relief funds to convert it into 35 units of supportive housing for people moving out of the motels. A similar project in northern Vermont turned a former nursing home into 23 affordable apartments, Ms. Graff said.

The state also made investments, encouraging developers to build affordable housing and granting subsidies for the renovation of abandoned buildings. But as the need continued to rise, the supply was nowhere near enough.

At the Quality Inn in Brattleboro, a woman who said she lost her home after divorcing her abusive husband worried about keeping her full-time grocery store job while living in a tent in a state park.

She said she copes with homelessness by finding “little escapes” — a picnic by the water or a trip to a Chinese restaurant buffet — “to spend an hour pretending this isn’t our life.”