This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Two state shelters for families experiencing homelessness are on track to be up and running by Friday, Nov. 1, though state officials are unsure if they will meet the need.
The two sites – located at the former state police barracks in Williston, and the Waterbury Armory – will be able to accommodate 17 families, Chris Winters, commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, said in a Tuesday interview.
Families will need to contact the state in order to get access to the shelters. Winters described the accommodations as modest but said they will keep people safe and warm as temperatures drop. The facilities will be operated by state employees and a contractor, though Winters on Wednesday declined to name the contractor.
The state’s decision to open the shelters comes on the heels of a mass wave of evictions from Vermont’s motel voucher program this fall, which prompted a public outcry from service providers, municipal leaders and lawmakers.
Since mid-September, nearly 1,400 people have exhausted their motel vouchers, hitting a new 80-day limit on motel stays imposed by lawmakers earlier this year, according to Joshua Marshall, communications and operations manager for DCF. That number includes 343 children.
Restrictions on the motel program will be loosened during the winter months. Beginning Dec. 1, the state will lift the 80-day time limit, along with a cap on the number of rooms available through the program. But facing a severe housing shortage and maxed-out shelter capacity, many people leaving the emergency housing program have ended up in unstable accommodations in the meantime. Some have had little option but to set up camp, including families with young children.
While many vulnerable people have been evicted from the program this fall – including elderly people and people with complex medical needs – the new, state-run shelters are specifically designated for families with children.
“One of the things that we’ve wanted to focus on is children, as one of the most vulnerable populations – although there are others,” Winters said.
The Williston shelter location, on Route 2A near Interstate 89, is designed to accommodate seven families, Winters said. The Waterbury site has space for 10 families.
A rotating cast of employees from the Agency of Human Services will be onsite to connect people with Reach Up and Three Squares benefits, Winters said, as well as with employment programs, child care and housing coordination.
He described the undertaking as “a trial run on wrapping people with every service imaginable at a shelter site to see if we can move them out of that shelter site and into something more permanent as quickly as possible.”
The shelters will operate until April 1, Winters said. They will be open 24-7 so that families are not required to leave during the day, he added.
There is no set opening time on Friday, however, because the shelters will not have “walk-in” access, Marshall wrote in an email on Wednesday. Families will have to go through an intake process to access them, and can do so by calling DCF’s Economic Services Division at 1-800-479-6151.
The Waterbury and Williston shelters will be available to any family experiencing homelessness, not just those that have been evicted from the motel program, Winters said.
The shelter spaces will be “pretty basic – a place to sleep in, a roof over your head, and a place to be safe,” according to the commissioner.
Officials have assured that the shelters will provide more privacy for families than the large, congregate shelters the state assembled in March, during a previous wave of evictions from the motel program. The Williston and Waterbury locations will have full bathrooms and showers, and places for people to store their belongings, Winters said.
The Williston location is near a bus line, but the Waterbury Armory shelter is “a bit removed,” Winters said. Officials are talking with Green Mountain Transit about providing on-demand service at the site, and if demand ends up being regular, they’ll discuss making the site a stop for buses, Winters said.
Asked if he expected the emergency shelters to meet the current need, Winters said, “it’s really hard to tell.”
He noted that six families had been camping at a municipal campground in Burlington, which the city shut down for the season on Oct. 15, and that “there are folks in central Vermont.”
State officials have been using field services workers to attempt to gather information about the need for shelter among families, Winters said, but gauging how many will utilize the new shelters has been a moving target. Some people’s accommodations might be “very temporary,” he said – people might be couchsurfing, staying with family, or using what money they have to pay for a hotel room before running out of cash, he added.
“If we see that there’s more need, we may have to adjust again,” Winters said, of the state’s shelter plan. “If we see that there’s less need, we’ll adjust our approach. But it’s really important for us to have something up and running, particularly with the cold weather setting in.”
With service providers across Vermont stretched thin, figuring out staffing for the new emergency shelters has been a key sticking point.
The Williston and Waterbury shelter sites will be run by a mix of state employees and contracted workers. Winters declined to share the name of the contracting group until the state has finalized its agreement but said, “it’s a contractor that we’ve worked with before, and they have run shelters in Vermont before.”
The question of who will staff the sites has been especially critical for the Waterbury Armory. Town officials contend that the state would need a new zoning permit to operate a shelter at the state-owned facility unless it’s staffed by state employees. The state has appealed the town’s decision, and the case is now pending in the Environmental Division of the Vermont Superior Court.
“In Waterbury in particular, we’re going to make sure we have a very heavy state presence, so that we meet that definition of state-operated,” Winters said. “We’re going to get volunteers and people reassigned from different parts of state government to work on this.”
A third family shelter location is in the works for Montpelier, though officials have not yet chosen a building to use among several contenders, and are still talking to service providers about staffing, Winters said.
Officials have not yet provided the per-night costs of the shelter sites. “We are still finalizing budgets and costs associated with the project,” Marshall wrote in an email on Wednesday.
The shelter sites are concentrated in northern Vermont, though state officials have acknowledged the need to provide more shelter options in Rutland in particular, which has historically had the largest number of people in the motel program.
State officials have funding ready for a more permanent shelter project there, at the former Loretto Home, previously owned by Vermont Catholic Charities. The Rutland Housing Trust is prepared to purchase the building, Winters said, “but that sale’s not going to happen unless there’s a provider to go along with it.”
Other shelter expansions are underway ahead of the winter months in Burlington, St. Albans, central Vermont and the Upper Valley, he added.
Read the story on VTDigger here: 2 shelters for 17 families experiencing homelessness to open Friday.