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For months, Democratic lawmakers and Republican Gov. Phil Scott insisted that extending the Covid-19-era program providing people with vouchers to live in motels past this summer was a no-go. Federal money had run out, and, they said, the program was just too expensive to continue.
Then, at the end of June, lawmakers worked out a deal. The program would be extended, for at least some people, until April. The governor signed the bill.
This comes after about 800 people had already lost their housing earlier that month.
At every stage, the motel program has been at the center of fierce debate — among the state’s leaders and the public at large — over cost, efficacy, and what support is owed to some of Vermont’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.
So what changed to take this extension from out of the question to a done deal? To unpack this and other questions about homelessness, host Sam Gale Rosen talked to Lola Duffort. She covers politics for VTDigger and has been reporting extensively on the motel program and unhoused people in Vermont.
Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Sam: I started by asking Lola for a quick rundown on the program we were discussing. She said that actually, we should go back a bit further.
Lola: I guess we should actually start pre-pandemic because the state has had a shelter program and motels for folks who are unhoused for I think well over a decade now. And there’s actually some great reporting by my colleague Kevin O’Connor about some of the different iterations of it over the years. But you know, in the years, kind of immediately before the pandemic, it was very restricted. So you could only access a voucher to get into a motel if you fit certain fairly strict eligibility criteria. And it was also much more time-limited. So, you know, for example, if you are pregnant in your specifically third trimester, you get 28 days. So those were the pre-pandemic rules. It was much smaller, you know. It was harder to access, and the benefit was much more time limited.
When the pandemic hit, there was just a ton of federal money that flooded into the state, and also this realization that congregate spaces, for kind of obvious reasons, would be a really dangerous place in the middle of a pandemic. And so the state moved to basically reshelter and rehouse, effectively, anyone who was homeless in motels and hotels throughout the state. It was viewed as this public health measure, which also effectively acted as an economic intervention for the motels because, in the very early parts of the pandemic, you know, everything was shut down. These places weren’t open to the general public. So that’s kind of when we got the expanded pandemic-era motel program that we’ve been now talking about going on three years.
Sam: And you said eligibility was much expanded from these pre-pandemic programs. Who was eligible for the motel program?
Lola: It’s gone through so many iterations. There were periods of time, and especially in the winter, when rules even further relaxed sometimes, when it was just like: Are you homeless? Yes. Then you get to have a voucher. And I’m oversimplifying here, but that sort of became the rule.
And that is now kind of changing drastically, now that the federal money is gone, and it ran out in March. And at that time, you had a population of roughly 3,000 people that were living in motels. And as this March date was approaching, there was this desire on the part of the Phil Scott administration, but also Democratic leaders in the Legislature, to start winding down this program because it was very expensive. And also feeling that this was fundamentally a public health intervention that was no longer appropriate, given the fact that we are now living in a, I don’t want to say post-pandemic world, but you know, at least post-lockdown.
So as the March deadline approached, the Legislature, in a kind of midyear spending package that they passed back in March, decided to use state funds to extend this program into June and July. And what they did is they basically created two pots of people, the June 1 people — so these would be the people who lost benefits on June 1 — and then the July 1 people. And the July 1 population were those that fit certain eligibility criteria, which looked a lot like the pre-pandemic eligibility criteria but were still expanded. So you could qualify if you were above 60, whereas the pre-pandemic rules were 65 and above. You know, if you were pregnant — you didn’t have to be in your third trimester — you could qualify. If you were on federal disability benefits, you could qualify. If you were a family with a child, you could also qualify. So if you check those boxes, you got to stay until July 1. And the July 1 folks are the ones who ultimately received a further reprieve past July 1.
Sam: And we’ll get back to the question of what happened to the people who were evicted on June 1. But for now, let’s talk about this most recent extension. I’m talking to you right now on June 30. And so the most recent headline here is that the Legislature worked out this deal for a further extension, and now it has been signed by Gov. Scott. And so can you talk about what the deal is and what this extension looks like?
Lola: So this deal is basically an attempt to both on some level continue the pandemic-era program but also end it. Lawmakers have been sort of unwilling to fully end it, even as they have also badly wanted to end it because it’s expensive and messy, and also just a very large problem and kind of a political hot potato. So in this latest deal that was signed, the program was extended for those July 1 folks. So in order to qualify for further housing, until April 1, you have to have met the eligibility criteria that were included in that midyear spending package, remember back in March, and you have to have entered the program before July 1, so before tomorrow.
And lawmakers did this because they basically wanted to avoid, and I’m sort of interpreting here, but, you know, wanted to avoid a mass eviction of roughly 2,000 people at once, right? Because that’s what we were looking at. I asked for an update about the breakdown yesterday and received updated numbers today. So I can tell you what the most recent numbers are. We are talking about 2,175 people — 1,533 of them are adults, and 642 of them are children.
Sam: And I’m sure anyone in the motel program is going to be grateful for some more time, but what’s the difference between ending this program now and ending it in April?
Lola: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Like what happens in April? So what the state and what lawmakers hope will happen is that April will roll around, and we’ll have found housing or shelter for all of these people. And this deal that was inked this week — signed by the Legislature last week (June 20), and signed by the governor this week (on June 29) — includes a pretty remarkable amount of oversight onto the Agency of Human Services. It is going to be requiring monthly reporting to the Legislature, even in the off session. How many people are still in the program? How many people have left the program, and where they have gone, so what placements have been made.
And that’s pretty surprising and really indicates this kind of loss of faith on the part of lawmakers. The reason that lawmakers say that they changed their mind about this last, further extension of the program, is they realized that we were getting to July 1. There was no place for these people to go. There was no plan. There was no contingency. You know, shelter providers have long said that shelters are already full. And that’s with the majority of the state’s unhoused population sheltering in motels. And we are amidst a very well-documented housing crisis, which I don’t think I need to go further into because everyone is living it.
So this July 1 deadline was coming up, and it became very apparent that 2,000 people were going to become unsheltered. So these reporting requirements are an attempt to hold the administration’s feet to the fire, to try and make sure that with this additional time, the folks who are in hotels are actually going to be placed somewhere that is not a tent. The administration will have a lot of options. They don’t necessarily have to find these people permanent housing. They can simply find them a shelter bed. That’s not necessarily going to be easy because, like I said, shelters are already full.
And so, you know, we shall see. But it’s very possible that we are going to get to April, and that a very large number of these people will still be in hotels because there will be nowhere else for them to go. And that we will be seeing the debate that we saw this session happen all over again and happen at the last minute. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. But that’s a very live possibility.
Sam: Can you talk about what both people in the program, and maybe advocates for them, how they’ve reacted to this new extension and this new form of oversight?
Lola: I think the reaction from advocates has been mixed. I think, you know, there was definitely relief that there’s not this mass eviction that’s coming. There was also a lot of anger and frustration that it happened at the last possible minute. You know, I talked to a lot of service providers that were like: I told my clients that they were being evicted. We were bracing ourselves for this. Do you know how much that damages my relationships with the people I’m trying to help when I tell them something for months? And it turns out to not be the case? How are we supposed to plan? How are we supposed to help these people plan?
Sam: Lola went to the Hilltop Inn in Berlin in mid-June when some people in the motel program were being evicted. VTDigger intern Max Scheinblum went with her and recorded some of the discussions she had with participants in the housing program. You’ll hear from a few of these people during our conversation. Here’s Rebecca Duprey, who is an advocate and was a participant in the motel housing program.
Rebecca: The way the dates are, the shifting of the dates, the extensions that are being given, people not knowing on their exit dates until, I mean, in some cases, hours before. It’s distressful. I mean, just that thought of the unknown because the dates are changing so often, and the notice is not there for people, that it’s causing a lot of distress. I feel it. And I’ve talked to so many others that are feeling the same thing.
Lola: The other bit is that this extension comes with quite a few new caveats. So there are a lot of new rules that are being imposed on these vouchers that are actually modeled off of pre-pandemic rules. And I think probably the biggest one is that now folks who are in hotels will have to contribute 30% of their income towards their stay. And that’s going to be a really huge hardship for some of them. I’m talking to a woman and preparing to publish a story about her, you know, who’s 77 and is the survivor of a stroke, and is panicking about this, and does not know how she is going to come up with the money. Because she already can’t keep up with the bills that she does have, with the limited Social Security that she receives. That is her only income. So, you know, this kind of extended help is going to come with more strings than before.
I think in general, the advocacy community is fine and happy with the additional accountability on the Agency of Human Services, which was categorically saying it was not going to collect this data. You know, I’d ask them, especially with the first cohort that was leaving: Well, do you have any idea where they went? And the answer was: No, and collecting that data is not possible.
Sam: We were talking about the last-minute-ness of all of this. You’ve been writing about the politics behind this change of heart because, as you say, both Democratic lawmakers and Phil Scott, the Republican governor, have been saying for a while now that this just isn’t possible; we can’t afford to extend the program.
Phil Scott: I know how difficult this is. I know what a heavy lift this will be. But the program’s ended. The pandemic has ended. This federal money is not coming in anymore.
Sam: And now they’re both more or less behind extending the program. What changed?
Lola: Well, you know, there are many stories about what changed. And I think they’re all probably true on some level. There was this bloc of Democrats and Progressives in the House, and they were against ending the program. And what they did is they knew that, or they strongly suspected that, Gov. Scott was going to veto the state budget over unrelated objections. He doesn’t like the taxes in it or that are required by it. And so they withheld their support from the state budget. And they told leadership and were public about the fact that they plan to not support the budget, when it would need to come up for an override unless something different was done about the motel program.
So it takes a simple majority to pass a bill or to pass a budget. But if you need to override a gubernatorial veto, you need two thirds of each chamber to do it — the House and the Senate. So this bloc of Democrats and Progressives knew that leadership would need some of their votes in order to override. And so they use this to kind of try and pressure leadership. And so I think the simple story is, you know, leadership buckled to that.
But I also think, and I think some of the people in the bloc also believe, that what changed is lawmakers left Montpelier when they adjourned and came back to their communities and got an earful. And it started to sink in what was going to happen, right? They heard more from their communities. And I also think there was additional media scrutiny about it. There was just more coverage about it. There was also extremely forceful advocacy from Brenda Siegel.
Sam: Brenda Siegel is an activist, and Democratic nominee for governor in the last election, who has been at the forefront of calling for the continuation of the motel program for unhoused people.
Brenda Siegel: There’s not a single party. There’s not a single politician, including myself. There’s not a single one of us that gets to pass the blame to someone else. We did not do enough, and we are causing a humanitarian crisis.
Lola: And the media attention was not just local. There were stories in the New York Times. It was kind of like, wow, this is happening in liberal Vermont, right? And that’s kind of weird to see this mass unsheltering of very vulnerable people in the home of Bernie Sanders.
But I think also that there was this weird suspension of disbelief. It’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever observed. You know, at the end of the session, I was hearing top lawmakers say things like, you know, this feels uncomfortable, but it’s not like thousands of people are actually going to be in the streets, right? Like the Agency of Human Services would never allow that to happen. When it was very clear, if you just kind of looked at the data that the Agency of Human Services was itself providing, that this was going to happen because there was no other place for anyone to go. There was no shelter space, and you were dealing with a population of 2,000 people. And so I think there was a realization that kind of occurred all of a sudden that, oh my God, this is real. And on a hot summer day in July, people in wheelchairs are going to be wheeled out into a motel parking lot with nowhere to go, right? There’s going to be a mom with a toddler in her arms on the 6 o’clock news.
The Senate president pro tem, at one point said: The governor had a press conference awhile ago where he was asked, can you promise that like disabled people aren’t going to be on the street? And he couldn’t say I can promise that. And then the Senate president pro tem said, we were not willing to say that. And so I think there was this realization that it was real, and this unwillingness to kind of have that reality come to be because it’s both morally and politically really hard to stomach. I think it just sort of became real for a lot of people.
Sam: And the argument that I think was being made for a long time was that we can’t afford this. So with that in mind, where is the funding for this extension coming from?
Lola: So basically, in the state budget every year, you have what’s called a contingency list. And it’s basically a series of things that get funded if there are additional surplus funds that come in. And so this was just kind of stuck on that. And then also put on a separate list where you get money if certain costs come in lower. So basically, they’re hoping anticipated surpluses will pay for this. There’s also some additional administrative flexibility that’s been given to the administration to find the money.
And the really big thing is they’re just saying, we’ll deal with it in the BAA. So every year, there’s actually two budget bills. There’s the big bill, which is supposed to be the whole big thing that you pass at the end of the legislative session. That’s the whole state budget. Now, at the very beginning of the legislative session, every year, there’s this thing called the Budget Adjustment Act, and it basically fixes whatever needs to be fixed about the current year’s budget because, oh, actually something was more expensive, or actually something was really cheap, and so we have extra money. So that’s kind of where you fix things. So they’re just kind of saying, we’re hoping it doesn’t come to that, but, you know, if it does, then that’s just when we’ll deal with it. So there’s no published cost estimate about this or anything like that. They just are hoping surpluses sort of take care of it. And if not, then TBD.
Sam: You’ve reported on the role of motels in this and the concerns around them, including concerns that people were — or the state was — being overcharged, concerns about some of the conditions that people are in. Are those things being addressed in this deal going forward?
Lola: Yes and no. So I’ve done some reporting in March about how the state for a while was letting motel owners literally name their price. They eventually did cap it, but the cap was really high, it was like $5,250 a month (per room), which is an extraordinary amount of money. And they were doing basically nothing to make sure that in exchange for often premium prices, that folks who were staying in the motels were receiving the services that they should have been receiving. In many cases, it seems like motel owners use the fact that they were housing a very vulnerable and desperate population to cut back on maintenance and basic services at the same time as they charged really high prices. The Legislature has now acted to demand a better deal for itself.
They have not done anything to make sure that folks in hotels are treated any more correctly by the people who are housing them. And in fact, in the rules that they have included, they’ve reintroduced this old rule that if a motel owner accuses you of misconduct, you can be kicked out of the hotels. And I heard a lot of complaints that because of this authority that motel owners had, residents who were mistreated didn’t feel like they had any power to speak up because they were afraid to lose the little shelter that they had. So not much has been done there.
Sam: You said earlier that you were asking AHS if there was any information available about what happened to the people who were evicted earlier in June? And basically they said they don’t know, right?
Lola: Yes. They were like, I can’t tell you where any of them are going to go. We’re trying to connect them to services. But they’re not required to tell us where they go, so we don’t know. And it was kind of infuriating because you’d go to these press conferences where the secretary of the Agency of Human Services (Jenney Samuelson) would say things like, it’s going fine. And you’d ask, OK, well, where did they go? Have you collected any information systematically about where these people have gone? And the answer was no. And we will not. We do not plan to.
Sam: Do you have any information from other sources — whether it’s reporting or groups that are helping — about how people are doing and where they are?
Lola: Yes, I mean, anecdotally, service providers will tell you that people went camping. There are definitely individual success stories, where people got permanent housing, and that’s great and should be celebrated. But also those are few and far between. Those are the exception. You know, some people went, found a place to crash with their friends or family, at least temporarily. But a lot of people went camping. I don’t want to say most because I don’t have data. I can tell you when I was at one hotel (the Hilltop Inn in Berlin) on June 15, and this was because the motel owner had given folks an extension, just sort of like an informal grace period. But this was the June 1 population, I was talking to service providers, and they were like, we’re handing out tents. And we are directing people to areas where they can camp where it’s probably not technically legal, but we know no one will bother them because there’s nowhere where they can go that’s legal. And that’s sort of the situation that a lot of people find themselves in is camping in places where they can sort of be out of sight and out of mind.
The weird thing, or not weird, honestly, not surprising is we weren’t really able to talk to people who were leaving that day because they didn’t want to talk, right? So we talked to a lot of quote, unquote, July 1 people who were there watching their friends leave and who were talking about their situations. So we talked to one woman …
Lola (at motel): We never asked you what your name was, I think you mentioned Gale?
Gale Holmes: Gale Holmes.
Lola: You know, she mostly just wanted to talk about how, the people who were leaving weren’t bad people and talked a lot about how she came to be where she was. And she had actually lived out of state, but she grew up in Vermont and had a lot of family in Vermont. So that’s why she was back here. And it was serendipitous, or strange, but she was telling us that she had actually worked at that motel 43 years ago. It was one of her first jobs. So it was this weird full circle moment for her.
Gale: First job I ever had. I worked here and loved it. I love people. I love being around people. I love cleaning.
Lola: So 43 years ago you were working at the Hilltop?
Gale: At the Hilltop, when the restaurant was here. The pool was here. Everything was beautiful. And, you know, when I moved out of state, I used to come here and stay. And I used to bring my kids here to stay but because I loved it, always loved it. It was great. I loved working here. And it just makes me so sad. When I see it, you know? I’m like, it was beautiful. This place was beautiful.
Lola: And we talked to one man who was in recovery.
Lola (at motel): Start with your name, Nico. Do you mind giving me your last name?
Nico Spaulding: Spaulding.
Lola: Spaulding, S-P-A-U-L-D-I-N-G?
Nico: Yep.
Lola: And he was on federal disability. And he was just talking about how he doesn’t understand why the state is in this terrible situation where there is nowhere to go, no housing whatsoever. He was just sort of lamenting that.
Nico: I haven’t been here very long. I stayed with my mom for a little while, and then I had to get my own spot. I ended up having to get a motel, never having the money between Social Security not paying very much because I’m on disability. It makes it tough, so as far as these guys go, I was in a motel before my accident. And it’s always been tough watching everybody have to pack up and go and then having to pack all your stuff and then move it all around 1,500 times. I just feel like it’s a shame our country’s like this. Yeah, I mean, the government could easily put up the houses and put money out for these houses and make it so that people have places to go, put some sort of security there, do it like they do shelters and stuff, you know?
Sam: And I think one of the themes here has been sort of that there’s not that much data. I’m gonna ask this question anyway, which is have there been assessments in any systematic way of how effective this whole thing has been as a policy — whether it’s helping people find alternate housing or addressing medical conditions or just helping people stay alive?
Lola: That’s a great question. And there’s not any good Vermont-based data. However, a lot of states performed a similar intervention during the pandemic. And there is a small but growing body of evidence that has studied the use of motel-based shelter, and generally it’s pretty uniformly positive. And I don’t want to imply that motel-based shelter is a panacea or great. It’s still homelessness. I wrote 3,000 words about how problematic Vermont’s management of its motel-based shelter program was. However non-congregate shelter, it seems, is much better at giving folks who are experiencing homelessness more stability, more dignity. And we have seen improved access to services and improved health outcomes in the limited body of research that has been put out about similar programs nationwide. And Anne Sosin, who is a public health researcher at Dartmouth, who also lobbied on this issue this legislative session, has herself been conducting research and interviews in the motels and says that she has found similar things that motel residents report, generally, that this is better than what was before.
I also think we always should look to research, but OK, hey, Sam, if you lose your house tomorrow, what would you prefer? Would you prefer a room of your own where you can shut the door? Or would you rather be in a dorm with 20 people who are all experiencing one of the most difficult moments in their life? Like, which do you prefer? Which do you take? It’s kind of obvious why non-congregate shelter would be superior to congregate shelter.
Sam: I think this relates to what we’re talking about because it gets to whether people’s sense of obligation to this segment of the population is changing at all, but I guess I’d ask you what you think the debate around this program has shown about public attitudes towards people who are unhoused in the state and whether you think that’s changing?
Lola: I don’t know that it’s changing. I do think that Vermont is kind of confronting a new reality about itself. I think that poverty in Vermont used to be a lot less visible and a lot less, frankly, politically important. Vermont simply did not think of itself as a place that had a homelessness crisis. And I think that one thing that the pandemic did that may, in the long term, be positive for the folks who are experiencing this, is that it made this problem visible, and it made this problem politically real and salient.
I don’t want to say that the increase in homelessness is artificial, and that we’re not seeing a growing crisis. We are. But because of this intervention, we are counting our crisis better. We have better information about it. We have better information about how big it is and who is experiencing it.
And one thing that really struck me about the latest data that came out. It came out, I want to say, just a few weeks ago, and it was based on the count that occurred this January. And it’s a 19% increase in homelessness in general, which is bad by itself. And it saw a 36% jump in families with children. So families with children are a huge increase in the population, which is alarming. I certainly did not realize that in a state the size of Vermont, more than 600 children are living in motels. And that’s not the entire population of homeless children. That’s how many are living in motels. Unsurprisingly, the data also show huge racial disparities. That definitely needs to be mentioned. Black people represented 8% of the unhoused population, and they represent less than 2% of the state.
And so I don’t know that attitudes about people who are unhoused are changing yet. There’s still this case being made that some people are virtuously vulnerable, and some people are not. That some people deserve to be where they are. That some people deserve to be destitute and living in tents, and that some people are more worthy of help. But I think, at least, it seems to me that there is growing awareness and understanding and a lot of pushback against that narrative. That this problem is huge and growing. And that actually the vast majority of people, even if you want it to believe in those categories, if you think some people really are deserving of help, and some people are not, I’m here to tell you that the data show that the vast majority of the people who are unhoused fit those categories that you think are more deserving of help, like an astounding number are children. And I think whatever your political persuasion, set of beliefs are, I think everyone agrees, for example, that kids can’t be homeless.
Sam: Thank you so much for being willing to talk to me about this, Lola.
Lola: Thanks so much for having me.
