BRATTLEBORO-A great tsunami of pain is coming toward us, and there's no getting out of the way.
Oh, sorry. False alarm. It's already here.
I'm talking about homelessness. We see some piece of the situation every day. On the streets, camped by the river, in the library, panhandling near the supermarkets. Every day we see people who are vulnerable, exposed, and hungry.
Vulnerable to violence, to theft, to all sorts of criminality.
Exposed. So exposed. Imagine not ever having a door to close behind you to protect you from the gaze of your fellow citizens.
Hungry, although Brattleboro is compassionate and offers several food shelves and soup kitchens.
Did you know that during the winter, some people experiencing homelessness huddle at the library all day, where they can have access to water, bathrooms, and heat?
(1)Understandably, they are unwilling to leave at closing time. The town has hired special police officers to help the librarians make sure the building is empty before it is locked for the night.
For 18 months, I've been writing about housing and homelessness. I have listened to lectures, read books, done interviews with the housed, the unhoused, the police, and the people - heroes - who work on the front lines of the issue.
I've talked to the compassionate and the not-so-compassionate, attended meetings, written stories, won awards for those stories, and moderated panels on the topic.
Still, I feel the pain.
Every day, my heart breaks in a different way. And I see no relief in sight.
* * *
The housing/homelessness issue is a deep and complex one; one wonders if it ever will be solved without some catastrophic world event causing a rupture in the Force. I'm thinking of the Great Depression, which only ended with World War II. I would not call World War III a welcome solution.
This is a national problem, not just a problem for Windham County. How can we, as a culture, as Americans, accept that we let people sleep in tents, in cars, in doorways? Doesn't it affect our shared humanity?
In Brattleboro, the numbers are a bit staggering. According to Libby Bennett, the executive director at Groundworks, Windham County has 385 households on the Coordinated Entry Master List, which means they are experiencing homelessness. Approximately 90 households are experiencing unsheltered homelessness. We have 136 households warehoused in motels.
And between 75% and 90% of homeless people have roots in Windham County. They're from here! They didn't drift here because we have the first exit off I-91, or because we have free lunches or a nice downtown.
"This is home," Bennett said at a panel on homelessness put on earlier this year by Vermont Independent Media, the organization that publishes The Commons. "People are accessing services where they live."
An even more unsettling statistic is that we have 108 homeless students in the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union. These students, who range from kindergarten to high school, may be couch surfing their way through school.
Dealing with homelessness on top of school must be insanely difficult. It's hard enough to get through high school if you're not a football player or a cheerleader. Or even if you are. Imagine trying to memorize state capitals when you don't know where you'll sleep that night. Or writing a book report when the book was lost last week when you moved from one friend's house to another.
Some people have lost their homes because, perhaps for no fault of their own, they've lost their income. Maybe they got hurt at work, or their company moved out of the area, or they had a sick relative who demanded much of their time.
Some people have been forced out of their homes and apartments because of rent increases. Or domestic violence has left them fleeing for safety. Or drug addiction has taken over their life, leaving them little time for taking a shower or earning a regular income. Or mental health issues have risen and taken over their minds. Or a combination of these factors are in play.
Sometimes we are annoyed by homeless people. (2)Having someone with a cardboard sign standing outside the supermarket and panhandling for spare change is a bad look for the town. And where, oh, where do they poop?
Some people are just travelers moving along, often with girlfriends or boyfriends - and dogs. But they, too, are out on the street panhandling, especially in parking lots near the parking kiosks.
And don't mix these up with those who are drug addicted, also apparently on the street, although many have apartments they're often not in.
Many street people embody all types at once: They are homeless, dependent on drugs, have mental health issues, and ask people for money to get by.
The homeless presence on the street is driving a wedge into the community. No business owner deserves to come to work in the morning to find a broken store window. Or a stoop covered in trash. Or worse, a stoop someone used as a bathroom.
No one living downtown wants to step over a sleeping person to get to their apartment. None of us want our cars broken into, our parking change hoovered up, our catalytic converters removed.
* * *
Some people ask, "Why is it our problem?" "Why do we have to do anything for them?" "Why don't they just go away?"
Some of this argument has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In June, the court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that cities and towns that banning encampments on public land does not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" for homeless people.
The suit centered on an ordinance in Grants Pass, Oregon, which prohibits people from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within city limits. Invoking the Eighth Amendment, three homeless people sued the town for fining them when they broke the ordinance.
To my mind, fining homeless people just seems like an exercise in futility.
But what is the answer? At the library a few weeks back, Constitutional scholar Meg Mott led a packed house in a discussion of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson lawsuit.
Someone mentioned putting up quonset huts, which this country did when it incarcerated its West Coast Japanese American population after Pearl Harbor. The mind leaps quickly to the idea of concentration camps. (3)Then possibly a Final Solution? Exactly what is the plan here? And how do we live with ourselves afterward?
"As a culture, do we care or not?" asked Mott.
Every person suffering is a human being. Every person has their own story to tell.
* * *
When observers note one aspect of a person, which could be some form of mental illness - like someone raging to themselves - or age or color or the trappings of homelessness - there is a tendency to automatically associate other characteristics with that person. These are characteristics that the person actually may or may not have.
So if someone is sleeping on a doorstep, one person might think, "Well, they're addicted to something."
Someone else might think, "They're mentally ill."
Someone else might think they lost a job three months ago and haven't been able to get back on their feet.
Any one or more of those theories could be true. Yet what is happening here is stereotyping: picking up on one feature and creating a whole story that has nothing to do with the actual person they see.
If we feel horrible about the way unhoused people live, especially during a Vermont winter, think about how they must feel.
I was at a meeting recently where a homeless woman said, "The homeless have something to give. I don't feel the hearts of my neighbors. All we want is for you to look us in the eye as you pass us. We're human beings. Acknowledge us. Look us in the eye."
Then she ran out of the room in tears.
Even if I had run after her to offer her comfort, what did I really have to offer that she could use? Whatever money I could give her would not be enough to get her an apartment - if one even existed.
* * *
Which leads us to housing. There isn't any.
The keys to ending homelessness would be to end poverty and build more housing stock. There's a movement called Housing First, devoted to the idea that to end homelessness we first must build houses. And maybe houses that offer social services, at least for a while.
Yet there is no significant national will and no community will to do these things.
For one thing, it is well established that hedge funds and private equity firms have been buying homes and apartment buildings across America, even here, and forcing out their tenants (especially their Section 8 tenants), doing a little rehab, and renting the apartments for three or four times their former rental rates or using them for short-term rentals.
This is called "speculation," and sometimes "gentrification." And sometimes "monetizing."
Construction costs went skyward during the pandemic and, like so many other things, have not returned to earth.
Meanwhile, people willing to do the construction work seem to have disappeared. Finding a plumber is as difficult as finding a doctor these days.
That being said, according to Brattleboro Planning Director Sue Fillion, "In total for 2024, we've approved 32 new housing units since Jan. 1. We lost three units - one to demolition and two units to (4)down conversion."
So let's balance the numbers. On one hand, we have at least 385 households experiencing homelessness in Windham County, south of Bellows Falls. That's not counting any homeless people who just don't contact the social service agencies.
On the other hand, economic opportunity or late-stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it might be building 32 units in Brattleboro in the future. And if I could hazard a guess, not all 32 of those will be affordable.
The streets of almost every town and city in this country are filling up with a rising tide of pain and suffering. Have we forgotten that a community is an interconnected ecosystem? The cultural circumstances that lead to increasing homelessness, drugs, panhandling, and mental illness seep into a community's foundation.
How do you go about opening a business in that environment? Don't we have to figure out a cure for this before we can talk about "economic development?" Does it have to be either/or?
No.
There's a tsunami of pain on the streets of America. Many good-hearted people here in Windham County are working to reverse the tide.
But mostly, they have band-aids to offer, not buildings. We have to find a comprehensive solution before we can move forward in any meaningful way. Or else the pain will overwhelm all of us.
And none of us, not even the wealthiest, will be immune.
Joyce Marcel is a regular reporter and columnist for The Commons, where she regularly covers housing, homelessness, and economic development issues. She and reporter Ellen Pratt won a second prize in the 2023 New England Newspaper and Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest for their ongoing coverage of these issues.
This News column by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.