The key change announced on Friday involves the “restart” of the pre-pandemic general assistance emergency housing program. It will not affect the 730 people expected to have to leave hotels on June 1. But some who were slated to leave on July 1 — a population considered more vulnerable — may get an extension.

Homeless advocate Brenda Siegel immediately blasted the announcement as doing little more than creating “three-tiered exits” from the program. Now, up to 600 children could be made homeless on July 29 instead of July 1, she said.
“There is nothing in this plan that provides long-term safety of the people in the program,” Siegel said. “I know that they will be camping in every single community and in our streets and on our sidewalks.”

Jenney Samuelson, secretary of the Agency of Human Services, said the motel program must be discontinued because it was a short-term effort to keep people safe and isolated during the pandemic. That isolation, Samuelson said, has become a problem.
The program lacks the services that people need to turn their lives around — including to address mental health, substance use and job training — which is not acceptable, she said. She also said some residents had reported fearing for their safety.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment to get these Vermonters to a better place, literally and figuratively,” she said.

Chris Winters, the new commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, said state workers have been trying hard to find better housing situations for people in the motels for months. A number of efforts are under way to expand shelters, but he acknowledged that social service organizations are overwhelmed, workers are burned out, and shelters are at capacity.

Scott said he has instructed state department heads to look at ways to rapidly increase the stock of affordable housing.
This includes finding homes that have been taken off the market due to code violations and introducing owners to the Vermont Housing Improvement Program; talking to towns with wastewater capacity to spur the construction of new units; and working with housing agencies to speed construction of short-, medium- and long-term affordable housing.

Scott said he had also asked top administration officials to put their heads together to identify “all local and state rules and regulations” that “challenge” the development of affordable housing and report on whether suspending such rules “could get us there faster.”

Many of the efforts that administration officials outlined sounded good, Siegel said. But without clear, direct plans to increase shelter capacity rapidly, people won't get the beds they need, she said.

“This is going back to a world where we are treating those with the most need in the worst possible way,” she said.

In Burlington, where city officials have grappled for years with encampments, Mayor Miro Weinberger said he supports an "orderly end" to the motel program. He said the city's been working with state officials on plans to help 200 adults in Chittenden County who are expected to leave the program in June.