BRATTLEBORO-It's a warm, late summer day, and Kayla sits on the curb at the edge of the Quality Inn parking lot on Putney Road, smoking a cigarette. Tammy sits across from her, playing games on her phone. Nearby, Amber is calling the state's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to renew the housing voucher that allows her and her fiancé and their 11-year-old son to stay at the motel.
Kayla, Tammy, and Amber are three of the 253 adults and 76 children experiencing homelessness who are housed at a law passed this legislative session, the program caps the number of available rooms at 1,100 during the warmer months. Priority for these rooms will be given to the most vulnerable households, including those with children, those who are pregnant, those experiencing domestic violence, and those over 65.
Participants' stays are also capped at 80 days a year during the warmer months.
Kayla says that she and her husband won't be evicted as he's on disability, but she worries about others.
"This is a pandemic," she says looking around at people milling about the parking lot. "There are more homeless people now than there has been in the past. The drug addiction, the fentanyl and heroin, there's more overdoses now than there has been in the past. That's a pandemic in itself."
Kayla was born in St. Johnsbury, and her husband is from Berlin. They landed in Brattleboro two weeks ago when a motel room became available.
'It's always lists, and waiting'
"I've been homeless for five years," Kayla says. "The pandemic killed Vermont. There's nothing here. There's no apartments."
Asked if she has a housing case manager to assist her in finding shelter, she says, "We're on a list to meet with somebody to get on a list. It's always lists, and waiting."
"I've never been to jail," Kayla says, "but I've heard people describe it. God, sometimes this feels like jail."
Tammy and her husband, who is disabled, were evicted from their Rutland apartment last winter, after 18 years, when the new owner wanted to renovate the building.
She's hoping to be accepted into senior housing in Rutland.
"I want to get back to family," she says. "My mom's not doing so good."
'That's $300 that I don't have'
Amber has learned from OEO that she and her fiancé have to pay for five nights at the hotel before they can receive another voucher for free nights. "And that's $300 that I don't have," she says.
Her fiancé's hours at Stratton Mountain Resort were cut during the off-season, and she still hasn't found a job after she quit the one across town because she couldn't get back in time to meet the school bus. She's hoping to hear good news after a recent job interview at a workplace on Putney Road.
"I just tried explaining to Economic Services that with everything else that's coming out of [my fiancé's] check, we don't have the $300 to pay," Amber says. "We have to pay $150 in gas to get to Stratton and back, $65 for car insurance, $300 in child support for his other son, $150 for a storage unit, and then food, because we don't get food stamps."
Amber describes her tenuous housing history.
After bouncing from a friend's house during the pandemic to a motel in Springfield, they were given a voucher for the Econo Lodge at Exit 1 in Brattleboro. When they thought their voucher would expire, they went to a friend's place in Guilford but had to leave "abruptly when that situation became very violent," she said.
Now, at the Quality Inn, "we're trying to start all over again," she says.
"It's really hard having to pay for everything and not be able to save for an apartment," Amber said as she approached the motel manager, hoping to negotiate her bill.
The constant struggle of homelessness
Kayla talks about the struggles that homeless people face.
"I hate how you have those people who sit there and judge us," Kayla said. "They say, 'Go get an apartment, go get a job.' Well, I just got a job at McDonald's, but it's not as easy as everybody thinks it is. The constant struggle: when we're gonna get our next meal, how we're gonna eat, where we're gonna stay. You know, it's hard."
"Some of the homeless people are addicts or are recovering," she continued. "I'm a recovering addict, and I can tell you being homeless is extremely hard. I want to use [drugs] more now than I did before."
Meanwhile, "it's so hard to get into a recovery program," Kayla said. "There's always a wait list. I got sober on my own - I had to. I had no other option; there wasn't a program."
Referring to discussions about public safety in Brattleboro, Kayla says, "You're just gonna cause more problems, banning stuff and putting more police out. You're spending more money on things that you don't need instead of trying to get these people places so they're not sitting in the streets."
"I'm not saying that doing drugs in a parking lot is OK," she continued, "but where are we supposed to go? We have nowhere to go. We're struggling out here."
Housing market keeps shelter out of reach, study says
Where will they go, indeed.
According to the Department for Housing and Community Development's newly-released Housing Needs Assessment 2025-2029, Vermont will need 24,000 to 36,000 additional year-round homes between 2025 and 2029 to meet demand, normalize vacancy rates, house the homeless, and replace homes lost from the housing stock through flooding and other causes.
During the Great Recession, from 2008 to 2012, Vermont issued permits for only 1,500 new homes per year. Even with an increase in permits issued since then, new home construction has not returned to pre-recession levels and the demand for housing continues to outpace the supply.
Low-income Vermonters have been hit the hardest.
According to the Housing Needs Assessment, Vermont's long-standing shortage of affordable homes available to lower-income households became more severe as the housing market shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pace of home building slowed, construction costs rose, and demand for housing increased as more people moved to Vermont. Home prices and rents rose, and Vermont's rental vacancy rate fell to 3%, "well below the 5% rate of a healthy market," the study said.
The result was a dramatic increase in homelessness.
'We're the same as you!'
With 3,295 Vermonters experiencing homelessness during the 2023 Point-In-Time count - a number that has tripled since 2019 - Vermont has the second-highest rate of homelessness in the country.
"I feel like the government should be doing more than they are," Kayla says. "I'm grateful for what they're doing, but I don't feel like they're doing enough. I don't feel like they're actually listening enough to the homeless people."
Tammy tells Kayla that she should be an advocate for people who are homeless. Kayla is considering attending the next Brattleboro Selectboard meeting.
"I'll go, I'll be a voice for our community," she says proudly. "We're the same as you!"
This Special Focus item by Ellen Pratt was written for The Commons.