BRATTLEBORO — Olga Peters, Moderator: Lawrence, I would love it if you would share some experiences about what led to homelessness for you, and what did it feel like to be homeless in this community?
Lawrence Wardlaw: The experience of being homeless is something I wouldn't trade for anything else in the world. I was homeless for 10 months, from July 2014 until I moved into my own space in May of this year. Six months of it was at the Groundworks Seasonal Shelter.
The prior months I stayed in hotel rooms until my Social Security disability income ran out. I spent several nights in parks in downtown Brattleboro until I remembered I had a broken-down SUV I could live in. I lived in that car only to sleep, because I spent all of my time during the day at the Works Bakery and Café.
I like to stay busy, even though I'm homeless. So I would occupy my time and my frustrations with what had happened to me by collecting buttons. I love them.
But it's the shame that one feels internally, the way other people look at you, that makes it extremely difficult and even more complicated. After I was homeless, was I asked to leave an establishment? I think because a number of the individuals I was with, of course, hadn't bathed and had an inordinate amount of bags.
Of course, I'm kind of to blame a little on that, too, but presentation to me is everything. My grandmother raised me, and so, therefore, I felt like I needed to behave, even though I was homeless just like everyone else.
There's a camaraderie among the homeless individuals in this town. We look after each other - me more than a lot of others. That's one of the things that I have learned and will never regret. I learned how to empathize and be compassionate beyond belief.
And I think that because of that closeness, when I was asked to leave, I did, along with all the other homeless individuals.
Even though all of my clothes - excluding my hat - I get through donations, I present myself well, so everyone assumes that I may have a dime, when in fact I do not.
A lot of times, homeless people don't behave the way you think they should. That is a preconceived notion on your part because more often than not, you don't know where they come from or what they have experienced until you do it yourself and/or have a conversation with them over a cup of coffee in a café that you like.
Undoubtedly you will learn, and grasp, and hopefully understand how very important it is to lend a helping hand - even if it's nothing more than a sympathetic ear and a kind word.
Peters: Becca, you were on your way here from another conference and had an experience where you caught yourself.
Becca Balint: The last two days, I had been at the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity's annual Vermont Vision for a Multicultural Future Conference. We were specifically looking at issues of bias that we think we've addressed but that we have to continue trying to negotiate.
So I was coming from there, and I was concerned, because I had to pick up my kids from the sitter, come home, and get dinner on.
I was dashing into a store to get some food, and a woman approached me who, from my eyes, was homeless. She asked if I had a few minutes to talk, and of course, I'm thinking, “No, my kids are waiting at the sitter, and I need to get food.” I said, “I'm sorry,” and I moved on.
It was one of those moments where you think, “I'm on my way to talk about homelessness, and if ever there was a sign from above to stop and talk, then this was it.”
So I bought my groceries, I came back out, and I asked, “Are you in a hard place?”
She told me her story, and we brainstormed about what she could do long-term for help. Bottom line: she needed some money.
I've lived in several major cities and was trained by my very skeptical father that when people ask you for money, just keep walking - you don't know what they're going to do with it. And that's true: we never know what people do with their money, and it's none of our business; frankly, it's a human experience.
So I was thinking a lot about how we are in this moment together: what kind of courage it takes to reach across to a stranger and say, “I need help.”
In that moment, I gave her some money. She threw her arms around me. I drove home, and the whole way, I kept thinking, “Was that the right thing to do? Is that the right thing to do?”
And I thought, “Why are you even asking yourself this?” Again, what she does with her money is her business, and she will make that decision based on what she needs.
I came home and told my babysitter about this experience.
She said, “You know, I was homeless in this town, with two small children, and let me tell you about what that was like.”
These conversations were incredible. We think we have dealt with our bias, and all of us have to continue to revisit it.
How we view homeless people is a particularly American experience. In a 2009 poll, 75 percent of the French said that they felt solidarity with people who are homeless. And 56 percent said they believed that they someday could be homeless.
Now in contrast, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill did a study: 91 percent of Americans surveyed said people were homeless due to drugs and alcohol abuse, and 62 percent said it was due entirely to laziness.
So I think that's very illustrative, because when we talk about this issue, it's not just a local put-your-nose-to-the-grindstone or bootstrap issue. This is a national problem. And I think we really need to examine it.
Peters: The Vermont Housing Finance Agency, which works with affordable housing in the state, has just released a report talking about how the average length of stays at emergency shelters are at their highest point since 2002.
So people are needing to use shelters more and more. Chris or Josh, have you seen changes in the faces of homelessness or changes in the demographics of people seeking affordable housing? Are you seeing more families where people might both be working but just can't afford a place to live?
Josh Davis: We absolutely have. There's not enough affordable housing, and the length of time it takes to get from the shelter into housing is increasing every year. We have a waitlist; only 15 percent of the people on it actually make it into the shelter for the intensive case-management services we offer to help them find permanent housing.
So are the faces of homelessness changing? Right before I started with Morningside, we added two rooms onto the shelter to serve families, because we've seen an incredible rise in the number of families experiencing homelessness, which means an incredible rise in the number of children experiencing homelessness.
Do we have people at the shelter who are employed? Absolutely. Do we have people at the shelter who are hard working? Absolutely.
It's not a question of agency, it's not a question of laziness. It's a question of wages, it's a question of affordable housing, it's a question of an ability to get out of the shelter once you get in - to get out of this system once you're wrapped up in it.
Chris Hart: I want to make a very, very important distinction between affordable housing and low-income housing. I think we all just talk about affordable housing, and we think that covers it.
Brattleboro Housing Partnerships has federal public housing. It's low-income housing: it's deeply subsidized.
Our rents are not based on the size of the apartment or how much it costs us to run the property. Our rent is based on 30 percent of your adjusted gross income.
You do not have to have an income to get into our public housing. Affordable housing is affordable, but you still have to pay for it. In public housing, you can have zero income, and we will take you.
We often say that many of the people who live in our housing are one flat tire away from having no income - or, if they weren't in our housing, homelessness. So you can have an income, come into public housing, lose your income, and we won't evict you.
People trying to move from homelessness often need a deep subsidy. We have 284 apartments in Brattleboro that are deeply subsidized.
But it's a very, very scarce resource: I have a waitlist of 1,138 people as of mid-November for those apartments, and we have seen the number of people leaving go from an average of 50 to an average of 25 a year.
Peters: Chris, for the Brattleboro Housing Partnerships, the federal government decides how many subsidies you receive, so it's not something we can completely control locally?
Hart: We don't control it locally. It is, sadly, controlled by Congress. And I say that because every year we figure out how much money the federal government should subsidize us to operate the housing, and I think in a good year, we've gotten 85 cents for every dollar we need.
The federal government really wants to get out of the public housing business, and I just don't know how we will replace that deep subsidy. Losing that will really have an incredible effect on poverty, on people that are in homelessness or trying to get out.
Peters: Which expense in the personal budget tips the scales for people and causes them to ask, “OK, so can I afford housing or food?”
Davis: In my experience, it varies, of course, from family to family. But we see two primary issues leading to homelessness: medical expenses and transportation.
Chris was talking about people who are one flat tire away from being homeless. We see a lot of individuals who have chronic health issues.
Peters: One of the myths that we have all heard is that if people just work harder or if they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they can avoid homelessness. Josh mentioned that one of the issues is wages. As a reporter, one thing I see over and over again when I'm covering economic development issues is we're living in an area where expenses and wages just are not in alignment.
Has the state identified some of the broader causes behind that, and is there anything in the works to help remedy that imbalance?
Balint: If you just look at one piece - the housing piece - in terms of economic development, you realize wages aren't keeping up with the cost of housing.
And the housing itself isn't available. We have an incredibly low vacancy rate statewide, for housing: less than 1 percent, which essentially means there is no available housing.
One of the things that we talked about in my Senate committee is because there is an aging housing stock, and because there isn't enough of it, you have people living in housing that would be otherwise affordable for people who are on a different socioeconomic ladder rung.
Yet we are hesitant in Vermont to build more housing. It touches on issues of open space. It's a problem because you want to be able to free up some of the housing that could be more affordable at the bottom rungs.
Davis: A healthy vacancy rate would be 4 to 6 percent.
Balint: So we're at a critical point in terms of population issues in Vermont. We have so many businesses and nonprofits that need more workers, but there's no place for them to live, so we have to wrestle with this idea of open space and more compact housing for our workers.
We also have a workforce statewide who is aging out in the next 10 to 15 years, and we simply don't have the workers to replace them.
One thing that I think is critical in this conversation is the education piece. We have many people - not just in Vermont, but throughout the country - who are opting out of parts of the social compact. I'm not placing judgment on decisions that people make about schooling; we make decisions based on our kids. But if I look locally at the people who are choosing not to send their kids to public school or are choosing to home school or some hybrid, you have a continued stratification. And when that happens, I believe you become a less compassionate society.
My kids are in public school here in Brattleboro, and because they are in school with people from many different backgrounds, we can have really intense conversations at home about why it is that some of my son's or daughter's classmates are living in tents.
To have that conversation with a 5-year-old or 8-year-old puts it in very harsh perspective because they just cut right through it: “Why are there people in my class who don't have housing and they're living in tents?”
That kind of conversation - that it isn't bootstraps - needs to happen person to person, in these committee rooms, also in the Senate and the House chambers.
Peters: Josh, can you speak to the myth of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps?
Davis: In our society's understanding of poverty and homelessness, we have “deserving poor people” who are working really hard to get themselves out of the situation and then we have “lazy people.”
We base worthiness for assistance on that will power, that drive, that character, that motivation. So if you have those qualities and you're receiving the benefit, you're OK, but if you don't, it's a very shameful experience.
Our rules create an us/them dynamic. It's very much homeless-over-there and me-who-has-a-home over here, and our needs are very separate. We have a disconnect of this human connection.
We help out in crisis only for the short term. Things have to be really bad before the assistance comes in, so if the power goes off, you have to be evicted before these services come into play. We've literally had to turn people away from the shelter and tell them, “OK, when it gets worse, come back and then we can help you out.”
It's basic needs-only. As you move up and get more benefits and start to make money - let's say you get a job - benefits just shut off. This system leaves you hanging. We have this myth that the benefits foster a dependence on the system, which they really don't.
Think back in your life: there are key moments where you got the support that you needed to help you reach your full potential, and our communities are stronger when all people can do so.
When we support well-being, when we make sure that everyone can reach their full potential and can fully contribute to our communities, then it drastically changes what those programmatic responses would be.
Then we're talking things like social relationships, we're talking coffee and conversations, we're talking community resources, we're talking opportunities for everybody in our community to thrive, not just some people to thrive.
Peters: Chris, I saw you writing something down. Did you want to add something?
Hart: I was doodling.
Wardlaw: That's a sign of a great mind.
Hart: One of the things that I always tell our staff, especially when they first start with us, is that it is extremely important for them to learn how to lose their middle-class values and to meet our residents and applicants where they are.
Where are they in their life? And what is going on for them? When we ask these questions, we can start to really give them assistance or a path that works for them.
We put so much of our own lens on this issue: it's like if you don't fit my definition of the way a homeless person should be looking and acting and they should be working and they should be doing this and that, and if they're not, they're lazy or something.
That's just not it.
Davis (to Balint): You know, it's ironic, that the thought that went through your head when you met this woman is what we've put into our programs. We're very suspicious about giving anybody money to help them because we need to know that they're going to spend it on the right thing.
Balint: As if we all do that!
Davis: Absolutely, absolutely.
Balint: I feel like there's a gender issue at work here as well. We alluded earlier to the disfunction of Congress, where we have the rise of a very vocal right that has a libertarian streak, perhaps more than just a streak.
What we know is that men who have that libertarian streak are much less likely to ever imagine that they will have financial insecurity and end up homeless. Women? Basically, the numbers are flip-flopped. They're absolutely convinced that at some point in their life, they will face financial insecurity and might possibly be homeless.
And so, I bring it back to representation: Who's controlling the conversation in these committee rooms - not just at the state level, but nationally? What has their experience been? What has shaped their thinking? Some of that is their gender experience.
It's very difficult to get to the heart of the matter.
When I was trying to talk about the housing shortage in Vermont to some of my colleagues in the Legislature and I felt like we weren't really understanding each other, I finally had to say, “Look, I had a good job, with benefits, and I worked for the school system, but in this state I couldn't buy my first house until I was 39. By the time you pay off your student loans and you scrape together the down payment and the closing costs, it's really not affordable, and if it's not affordable for somebody with a full-time job with benefits, how can you have the bootstrap argument for folks who are making minimum wage? It's still not enough, and you could be working three jobs.” It was an “a-ha” moment for people in that room.
It sometimes takes a lot of individual conversations to change the thinking.
Peters: So here's a common myth: because Vermont, in general, and Brattleboro specifically, has so many great services, people are moving here just to get them. And if all those services went away, then we wouldn't have homelessness.
Wardlaw: Really? My word.
Peters: Is that how it works?
Wardlaw: Well, they're terribly deceived. It's amazing to me how individuals jump so quickly to a conclusion.
The judgments that people jump to - it concerns me a great deal.
I frequent the churches in town for lunch. I enjoy the company that's there. I don't have to go there; I can afford to eat at home, but I want the company, and I want to know how they're doing.
Not that I'm a sage by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a sympathetic ear and I voice my concern. I wish that other people would do the same thing. It doesn't take a great deal to just say hello. Please don't assume when you see a homeless individual that you need to give them a dime. They might ask for it, but you certainly can offer them kindness in place of that. You might feel more comfortable with that.
My story involves having finished lunch at Brigid's Kitchen and of course I was in my black hat and long black coat. I like black - only because I have a white beard, I think - but I came outside and one of the individuals continuously said something about my being Jewish. I don't like confrontational conversations, and it was a difficult conversation.
Believe you me, I have nothing against any kind of religion whatsoever, but I turned to him and said, “Excuse me, I'm not Jewish.”
And he said, “What?”
And I said no, I'm not Jewish at all, and he said, “Well, you dress like one.”
Later in the evening, I came to supper here, and the synagogue was serving the meal. I had befriended one of the ladies - we liked to talk buttons, of course. And so, she sat with me while we ate.
“I'm sorry, please don't be offended,” I said, and I told what had happened to me, that I was very upset about it because I worried that I might be seen as mocking something else. I was afraid because I knew she was Jewish that I was offending her.
She looked at me, just as dry as could be, and she said, “Lawrence, you have way too much style to be Jewish.”
And that was a wonderful way to defuse something that I was so emotionally upset about with an individual who has no home.
Peters: And isn't it wonderful that she held the space for you guys to have what could've been an uncomfortable conversation. So, Chris or Josh, what about the idea that if the services go away, then so will the homelessness?
Davis: I just think it's another myth that perpetuates the us-and-them.
If we say that people are coming from Massachusetts or - God forbid - New Hampshire, to take advantage of our services, then it's just another way that we don't have to deal with the actual issue that is going on here.
Then, the remedy for that situation would be to move people out of our community, as opposed to seeing people as being of this community.
Statistically, the majority of the people who we see at the shelter and in our agency are from greater Brattleboro, Windham County, and the rest of Vermont.
The way we look at people shapes how we work with people, how we treat people. If we look at them as the other, then we're really not getting anywhere and we are perpetuating the problem.
Hart: I would totally agree that the vast majority of the people who finally get into our housing are from Brattleboro and from the area.
And I just cringe when people say, “You know, it's all those services, if you didn't have those, then you wouldn't have homelessness, there'd be no poverty.” That's just not true.
The other myth that I hear a lot that really bothers me is that we have all this low-income housing and affordable housing in town and that people come here because of the Windham-Windsor Housing Trust, that if we just make sure there's no more of that, then all the poverty will go away, all the homelessness will go away. And that's just not true.
Audience questions
Question: I know that many youth face homelessness because they do not have a suitable home, and they have special needs and sensitivities. You talked about some wonderful initiatives of collaboration. What are we doing for our homeless youth? And how are they - and homeless people, in general - able to lead us toward a solution that works?
Davis: Morningside Shelter started a youth shelter here in Brattleboro, thanks in part to a United Way grant. We rented a four-bedroom apartment; a resident manager lives on site. Again, we connect people to intensive case-management services, so they can transition out of the shelter and into permanent housing. We are replicating this model in the Rockingham area as well.
You're right: youth homelessness is a huge problem. Youth usually don't do as well in the shelter themselves, they do much better among peers, so that's why we had this idea and worked with Youth Services.
We've made some inroads there, but we need to ask: How can we as a community, as social-service agencies, create space so that people who use our services - as opposed to the funders - tell us how those services should be administered and what they look like?
It's a tough dance. We're in the middle.
Question: I think it's a myth that people believe that homelessness can't affect every single one of us. One catastrophic event could send any one of us into that situation. And I'm frankly very concerned about that. I see people just hanging on by their fingernails, and I worry so because we don't have housing.
Discussions like this one are a stepping stone to really facing the issue. I'm really proud of our community for what we do.
I was a single mom; I was so grateful for the community I had around me which kept me supported when I was on fuel assistance. Local businesses helped. The fuel company helped me, the electric company helped me, I was one step away from the welfare system. I used to go out of town to use my food stamps so my neighbors would not know - and I considered myself a middle class, well educated person.
Steve West: As the co-chair of Changeworks (the social-justice branch of Groundworks Collaborative), we're sort of charged with saying, “Hey, this is not Groundworks or senators or the housing project solving this thing for another segment of the community. This is every single one of us, and we're trying to get all of you to come help us to do that, because we're really good at it, but we need as many people as possible.”
Hart: I sometimes feel like when I open my mouth about these issues as someone who works with them, it's like mommy talk - my son won't hear me anymore. “Oh, we know what she's going to say.”
So I think it's really important for people in the community to speak up. We had a deacon in our church who would always say speak truth to power and on this one it's got to be people standing up and saying, “No, that's just not true” or “No, that's just not right.”
And we have to be brave about that, because sometimes people can be intimidating because of their stature or whatever. Sometimes we want to stay quiet and not rock the boat, and we shouldn't, we just shouldn't.
Balint: One morning, while running, I ended up talking with one of the construction workers who was at that point working on the Brooks House.
His story was amazing because he was biking miles and miles from the backwoods of Dummerston to get to his job because he didn't have reliable transportation. And he was carrying all of his really heavy construction gear with him on this 10-speed bike, and I thought, “Here's a perfect example of somebody who's a paycheck away, he needs to ride his bike because he lost his car. He's still trying to get to work - so much for the myth of the laziness and the bootstraps.”
Question: What can the state and our local government provide or put together to offer developers as incentive to build affordable housing? These guys are in business to make money. Some kinds of incentive should be able to be generated by the state, locally, to get these guys into the game to build more affordable housing.
Hart: It's really hard to get private developers into affordable housing. There just isn't enough money in it, and the state just can't put enough money into it, even for the nonprofit development system that we have, which is very, very, good.
The building that we're putting up is $15 million, and we have about 10 sources of funding in that. And it's probably the last time the state will be able to get together $15 million for one project. There's just not enough money in the state, and it's very hard.
And the affordable housing that we have is really good, but their margins are very, very tight. Private developers want high rents, and you just can't get that and have an affordable housing. It just doesn't work in Vermont.
Question: For those of you that aren't as familiar with Groundworks, Changeworks, which is a part of our organization, is really devoted to raising consciousness and really having people understand better the underpinnings of a lot of the issues of poverty and social justice.
And one of the things that I find a bit dismaying, as someone who has been in communities working on this stuff for decades, is that we often put the onus on ourselves, as communities, to find solutions.
I hear people talk all the time about shrinking federal dollars, and I marvel at why we accept that. I think back to the early 1970s: I had two friends who became pregnant in their senior year in high school, and rather than them just becoming teenage moms and living the life on welfare, back in the day, welfare paid them to go four years to UMass, paid housing, gave them food stipends. They graduated, they became property owners, they had children who went on to college.
I've never forgotten that when our federal government provides a reasonable social safety net, and provides services that help us be a healthy society, everyone can thrive.
I'm sorry to be on a soapbox, but I'm just going to remind everybody that elections are coming up. We should be demanding more money from our own government, and there should be less onus on ourselves as community members to try to solve this complex problem on our own.
Audience: It seems there is a fairness to asking developers who want the cream. Of course, if they are going to get that permit, they must also contribute to uplifting and upgrading the quality of housing at the other end, and the place to start that is with local legislation requiring some kind of contribution by the developer to the other end of the economy.
That seems to me to be an initiative that could be aggressively undertaken, but I'm also wondering if there are models of this thinking already in place out there, that Brattleboro and Windham County might be able to become informed by.
Hart: There are a lot of models. Massachusetts has a law that gives developers a bonus if they, in fact, put some affordable housing in a development, so there's a lot of models for doing it. I would say that it's getting consensus and a political will to put it in place.
Davis: Repeat that, please: “Consensus and political will.”
Byron Stookey: I agree with the woman who urged the federal government to do a better job to provide a safety net. But I wanted to add to that the importance of the federal government to do something about minimum wage. If we had people earning a livable wage, it would solve a large part of our housing problems.
When people earn a livable wage, it becomes feasible for a builder to build decent rental housing and rent it at a profitable rate because people will be able to pay the rent.
Without a livable wage, there's so much we can't do.
Final thoughts
Balint: I just want us to keep in mind that my understanding that the fastest growing segment of people in need of housing, emergency housing in Vermont? They're families. They're families. A third of the homeless population in Vermont are children. So I think we need to hold that in our image, too. When we think about this problem, we're talking about our future.
Peters: Especially for a state with an aging population.
Balint: Absolutely.
Hart: We have many families with children we're serving in transitional housing. And in our public housing, we have 85 folks who earn wages, and the average income is $16,000.
You can't live on the market with that kind of wage.
Davis: I always like to end on a call to action: A shameless plug to get involved with the seasonal overflow shelter. If that's too big a commitment, we do have volunteer opportunities within the organization - groundworksvt.org can link you to our contact information. I'm excited that we're kickstarting these conversations, and I'm looking forward to it.
Peters: Lawrence, we have about 30 seconds left. Do you want to say anything?
Wardlaw: Oh, I've said enough.