This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and Vermont Public reporter Lola Duffort, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Ernest Martin prepared to leave the Hilltop Inn in Berlin on Sunday morning uncertain about what could come next. The 58-year-old said a friend would let him stay at her home for “a week or two,” but after that, “I have no clue.”
Martin, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after a hit-and-run several years ago, had been living at the motel since February. That morning, he had called the state at 8 o’clock sharp, hoping to secure his room for just a little while longer. After about two hours on hold, the news had been bad.
“She wasn’t rude in any way,” he said of the worker he spoke to from the Department for Children and Families. “She just said there’s nothing they can do for me.”
At motels and hotels across Vermont on Sunday, the impacts of the state’s latest attempt to scale back its emergency housing program began to come into stark focus. Unlike prior mass evictions from the program, this one will come in waves over the course of the fall. All told, over 900 households could lose their vouchers in the coming few weeks, though officials note the exact numbers will fluctuate as people come and go from the program of their own volition.
The first wave came on Sunday, when a new legislatively-imposed cap on the number of motel and hotel rooms available through the program went into effect. The state will only pay for 1,100 rooms this fiscal year, with the exception of the winter months, when that cap will be lifted.
As of Sept. 9, 1,386 households were sheltered with state vouchers. That number included 1,707 adults and 529 children.
By definition, everyone currently sheltered in the motel program has previously been deemed vulnerable by the state for one reason or another — because they have children, are elderly, or have a disability, for instance.
“By needlessly pushing vulnerable Vermonters out of emergency housing — the vast majority of whom simply have nowhere else to go — state leaders are letting down our neighbors and our communities,” James Lyall, executive director of the ACLU of Vermont, said in a statement on Monday.
“This is an injustice not only for the people who rely on the program for a safe place to sleep each night, but also for local communities who are already strained and who will now be forced to reckon with the consequences of this latest policy failure.”
In order to decide who’d get to stay sheltered as the number of rooms in the program shrank, the Department for Children and Families put forward a prioritization policy last month. Anyone who didn’t meet one of the priority categories — about 300 households — was slated to get a checkout date on Sunday, Nicole Tousignant, the head of DCF’s economic services division, said at a meeting with local service providers last week.
Those people were instructed to call the state on Sunday to try to secure a room on a first-come, first-serve basis, Tousignant said.
Across Central Vermont, about 100 people were set to potentially lose their motel shelter on Sunday, according to Jennifer Armbrister, the outreach case manager at Good Samaritan Haven. At the Hilltop, 16 guests had been told to get on the phone with DCF as early as possible on Sunday in the hopes of securing one of the last remaining rooms in the state.
It was unclear where anyone would go. Area shelters were full, affordable housing waitlists were a mile long, and towns and cities across the state have grown more aggressive about evicting campers from public land.
“Unfortunately, everyone that’s here at this point, they don’t have other arrangements. That’s why they’re here,” Armbrister said.
I’m telling them, "We may have to get you a tent, and a sleeping bag, and and a whole lot of prayers."Jennifer Armbrister of Good Samaritan Haven
In the weeks leading up to Sunday, Armbrister said she’s had “very serious” conversations she had been “hoping and praying I would never have to have,” including with motel tenants who have severe disabilities.
“Some can’t even, you know, if they sit down, they won’t necessarily be able to get back up on their own. And I’m telling them ‘We may have to get you a tent, and a sleeping bag, and and a whole lot of prayers.’”
At the Travelodge in South Burlington, Corey Moquin, 39, had been waiting to get through to the state for three hours. He’d been hung up on once already. Moquin entered the emergency housing program in March, after a stint at a hospital getting treatment for his mental health — which, he said, deteriorated during a period he spent living on the streets.
As of 11 a.m. — checkout time at the Travelodge — Moquin was still waiting. He had left the door to his room open and told the housekeeping staff they could clean it.
“If they have to kick me out, they have to kick me out,” he said from the motel parking lot, talking over the hold music playing on a loop, on speakerphone.
Moquin, who recently began a job at Burger King, was holding out hope the state would tell him he could stay put for a few more days. Like many at the Travelodge, he was on lengthy waiting lists for assistance — for housing; for Social Security disability — but that help, it appeared, wouldn’t come in time.
“Now, unfortunately, a lot of us are going to be getting tents, and moving into tents,” he said.
Ultimately, DCF issued only 32 denials on Sunday due to hitting the 1,100 room cap, Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ economic services division, wrote in an email Monday.
But that number is likely a major undercount of the people who left the program yesterday, said Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont, which aided people through the voucher renewal process yesterday.
“Some people were on the phone on hold and found out that the cap had been reached, and hung up the phone,” Siegel said. Others were told by the state that the cap had been met as soon as they got on the line, foregoing a full application process that would result in an official denial, Siegel added.
In addition to the room cap, lawmakers this past session also limited participants’ motel stays to 80 days a year — outside of the winter months, when the cap will be lifted. Those 80-day limits will start kicking in this Thursday and will continue to set in through the rest of September and into early October.
That means nearly the entire population in the program could turnover for a couple of months — before the program rules loosen back up in December.
With their clocks ticking, many residents at the Travelodge worried about what would happen to them if they ended up unsheltered, even for a brief period of time.
Mary Littleton, 56, has multiple sclerosis, which makes walking difficult. As of Sunday, her voucher at the Travelodge was good for just under two more weeks.
“My doctor doesn’t want me in no shelters, because I can’t defend myself,” she said. “And I’ve got medication that is worth money on the street, and he’s afraid that something bad is going to happen to me.”
Littleton was holding out hope that an independent living program she had applied for would come through and keep a roof over her head, somehow. If it didn’t pan out, her prognosis of her situation was blunt.
“There’s no way I can survive out in the street,” she said. “No way whatsoever.”
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