As Beth Davis and her husband move further into their 70s, they’re reckoning with the practicality of life in their home in Shoreham.
“We’re getting older, you know?” Davis said. “We’re starting to have issues that old people have — physical, mental.”
It’s not their own housing situation they’re most concerned about, however. Rather it’s what happens to their 43-year-old son when they can no longer provide the supportive housing environment he needs.
The shortage of housing for the 3,400 Vermont adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities who qualify for supportive living arrangements is about to get worse as the parents many of them live with grow older. And as the Davis family has learned in recent years, there often aren’t any options for families making that transition.
“So we’re just really stuck,” Davis said. “Where do we go from here?”
A new report commissioned by the Vermont Legislature attempts to provide some answers. A 12-person committee that included lawmakers, executive branch officials, housing industry representatives and advocates is calling on lawmakers to allocate more than $60 million over the next five years to bolster the infrastructure and workforce that will be needed to ensure safe and dignified housing for people with developmental disabilities.
“Quite frankly, we could be looking at higher numbers of unhoused or unstably housed people in a very challenging population.”Kirsten Murphy, committee chair and executive director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council
Kirsten Murphy, the committee chair and executive director of the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, said the state faces severe consequences if it doesn’t move swiftly to address the problem.
“Quite frankly, we could be looking at higher numbers of unhoused or unstably housed people in a very challenging population,” Murphy said. “We could be looking at increased institutionalization, by which I mean nursing homes.”
Since the closure in 1993 of Vermont’s lone public institution for people with developmental disabilities, the state has relied primarily on parents like the Davises, and “shared living” arrangements that essentially function as adult foster care.
Murphy said it was a progressive model at the time and has generally worked well. But living with family has become less practical as parents age. And the financial incentives available to homeowners who might consider welcoming a person with a developmental disability into their house have been outstripped by other options, including short-term rentals.
“I think there is a historical legacy that put Vermont on a trajectory where they relied very heavily on one particular model,” Murphy said. “But we didn’t do what other states did, which was invest money over time in some other types of housing — apartments and buildings that are occupied by multiple different populations.”
Gloria Quinn, executive director of Upper Valley Services, said there are promising models developing in locations including Waterbury and Brattleboro, where a certain number of units in affordable housing complexes are being set aside for people with developmental disabilities.
The key, she said, is to scale these efforts to accommodate the wide variety of needs. The report says Vermont needs to create a minimum of 600 new units for people with developmental disabilities over five years.
“Some people really want to just live alone, and some people do want to live with somebody that they’re really close to, and some people want to be married,” Quinn said. “So we need lots of housing options across the state that are going to make this viable for people to live successfully.”
The committee also recommends using state funding to create Section 8 housing vouchers for people with developmental disabilities. And it’s calling for an overhaul of regulations that require group homes with more than two people to conform with the same onerous requirements as nursing homes.
“So that becomes more cost prohibitive,” Quinn said.
Windsor County Sen. Alison Clarkson, who helped draft the report, said the committee’s $61.5 million funding request accurately reflects the need. She said she plans to introduce legislation in January that would establish a “permanent funding source” for state-subsidized affordable housing, including for people with developmental disabilities.
“The resources are what we have to address,” said Clarkson, the Democratic chair of the Senate Committee on Economic Development. “This is our challenge in the Legislature this year and in the future.”
Clarkson said she has not yet determined what revenues would be used to fund the effort.
