Chittenden County is in dire need of shelter beds. Who’s going to run them?

The numbers paint a stark picture.

In Chittenden County, more than 800 individuals were counted as unhoused in a single night, according to point-in-time data conducted in January. In June, 266 people were sleeping “rough” — in tents or somewhere outside — according to data from the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. Only 80 individuals were in similar conditions just two years ago.

“The reality of this number surpassing 300 is very real,” Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness and co-chair of the alliance, said during a City Council meeting in June. “We need to have an immediate response to this growing population as well as intentional planning and to expand emergency shelter capacity.”

But as the number of people in need of temporary shelter continues to grow, the number of shelter beds — traditional beds or those provided through the state’s motel program — has not kept pace. Queen City officials have increasingly been sounding the alarm that they’re shouldering more that they can handle — and they’re asking neighboring municipalities for more support.

Out of the state’s 550 total number of traditional shelter beds, 223 are in Chittenden County, and of those, 183 operate year round, according to data from the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, a coalition of individuals, organizations and government officials. All but 28 of Chittenden County’s traditional shelter beds are in Burlington.

Nearby towns and cities, however, say they are not equipped to finance or staff a shelter, and nonprofit providers who could partner with towns to do the bulk of the work say they are maxed out.

“Where in core government does raising revenues to support this work live?” said South Burlington City Manager Jessie Baker. “I don’t think we as a state have answered that question yet.”

A growing problem

Vermont has the second highest per capita rate of homelessness in the country. According to the point-in-time data conducted in January, 3,458 people were recorded experiencing homelessness, and the largest percentage — nearly 25% — were located in Chittenden County.

The state-run motel shelter program has held much of the state’s unhoused population since the Covid-19 pandemic. In Chittenden County, there are currently 273 motel rooms used for the state program, concentrated in South Burlington, Williston and Shelburne. (There are no rooms used for the program located in Burlington.)

Russell estimates that the county, in addition to those motel rooms and the 223 shelter beds, would need an increased capacity of 300 year-round, low-barrier shelters beds, and another 100 low-barrier seasonal beds to meet the growing pace of unhoused community members.

But who would build these beds, staff them and pay for them remains an open question.

The need for shelter capacity is only expected to grow in the coming months, after state lawmakers decided during the past legislative session to scale back the state-run motel program .

The program, which expanded dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, has sheltered the bulk of the state’s unhoused residents and currently serves about 1,500 households throughout the state. But a new cap will draw that down to 1,100 in September.

Lawmakers also approved a new 80-day limit on households’ motel room stays outside of the winter months, which went into effect July 1 and impacts the amount of time vulnerable households can stay through the warmer months of the year. Eligibility during the colder months — historically open to anyone experiencing homelessness — will be limited to households that meet certain vulnerability criteria.

“It’s clear that at this point the level of homelessness on the streets of Burlington is going to increase dramatically, if it hasn’t already,” Michael Monte, the president and CEO of Champlain Housing Trust, said during an interview with VTDigger earlier this summer.

In crafting legislation to limit the state’s motel program, lawmakers sought to soften the impact by also offering funding to stand up temporary warming shelters in the budget that took effect July 1. That included $10 million for shelters specifically to be stood up between December and March for people who do not meet the motel program’s eligibility criteria during the coldest months of the year.

Fourteen applicants from seven different counties applied, and those requests totaled over $30 million. But only two of those are proposals from Chittenden County, according to Lily Sojourner, the director of the state’s Office of Economic Opportunity, part of the Department for Children and Families.

Another pot of money in the state’s general fund, to the tune of $7.2 million, would support the expansion of the number of permanent shelter beds. The state has not yet released information on who applied for those funds.

There’s agreement among advocates and local officials, however, that this funding won’t make a large dent in the problem.

‘Burlington is essentially doing everything’

There’s widespread consensus that Burlington has been bearing responsibility for sheltering the growing unhoused community in Chittenden County —  and city officials have been increasingly vocal about that fact.

As the state’s motel program winds down, Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is bracing for even more unsheltered people. As the urban core of the county, it’s where many of the region’s services are located, including community health centers, Feeding Champlain Valley, and various housing partners and mental health providers.

In her first three months, Mulvaney-Stanak said the city has focused on providing services to places where unsheltered folks are camping. The mayor allocated $50,000 in the city’s FY25 budget to provide support and services to people living in tents and encampments throughout the city.

The city, in partnership with COTS, has also applied to use some of the $10 million in state funds to build a temporary warming shelter in the old Social Security Administration Building on Pearl Street. That plan remains in negotiations with the state.

“We feel we can at least make a good faith effort to step up,” said Jonathan Farrell, the executive director of COTS, which operates four individual and family shelters in Burlington.

The city will also seek to renew the lease for the Elmwood Avenue “pods,” a temporary shelter site that was originally supposed to close in July 2025.

Meant to provide a relatively brief stay — three to six months — before transitioning folks into permanent housing, the pods have morphed into a long-term operation, with unhoused people staying for a year or more.

“We had to change the policy pretty quickly,” said Monte of the Champlain Housing Trust, which operates the shelter under contract with the city. “Everybody who was there, they were not not wanting to move, they just had no place to go to.”

The site, which has 35 stand-alone rooms, has both a waitlist of people hoping to move from the shelter into stable housing, and a growing backlog of unsheltered folks waiting to get in.

In an interview, Mulvaney-Stanak said that the city has to think of building new shelters in a sustainable way.

“This is not Burlington getting into the business of running shelters permanently, that is not our lane, and I want to be really clear about that,” she said in an interview. “But the only other alternative to me becomes, I think, a critical health and safety emergency — with people literally not having anywhere else to be.”

Burlington city councilors and other officials have been quick to point out that Burlington is struggling to shoulder the burden, while much of the surrounding area has little in shelter capacity.

“We have heard repeatedly that Burlington is not doing enough, but it seems at least in this area, Burlington is essentially doing everything,” said Burlington City Councilor Tim Doherty, D-East District, during the June meeting. “This is not a problem that is reasonable or even remotely possible for Burlington to address on its own.”

In June, Mulvaney-Stanak sat down with a group of town managers and leaders from across the county’s 19 municipalities for a monthly lunch meeting, where the conversation quickly turned into how to address the region’s unhoused challenge.

For Mulvaney-Stanak, the meeting was the starting point of what she hopes will be a coordinated and collaborative approach to addressing the unsheltered crisis in the county — and drawing the attention of state lawmakers.

“To me there’s this concerning pattern by the state… about not really understanding what’s happening here in Burlington,” said Mulvaney-Stanak, who served as a state representative before becoming mayor. “It should not be in the work of a city to be operating shelters, we’re not service providers, and yet we’re at this impossible point. … If the state’s not going to do that, I can’t in good conscience not figure out some sort of small thing that we could be doing to help in a temporary way.”

Mulvaney-Stanak said she recognizes that some Chittenden County towns have played a part in hosting motel program participants, but said she was hopeful other towns would be eager to help in whatever way they can.

‘Not equipped for it’

Leaders of neighboring municipalities who spoke to VTDigger acknowledged that Burlington is bearing the brunt of the crisis. But town managers pushed back on claims that other towns have done little, and noted that municipalities are not well-equipped to finance or staff shelter systems.

In South Burlington, Baker said these conversations have been ongoing among county partners and the state for years. South Burlington, she said, has taken a more long-term approach, building 169 permanently affordable homes over the last two years.

Thirty-nine of those units are specifically dedicated for folks leaving homelessness, Baker said. Through a partnership with the Champlain Housing Trust, the city allocated $300,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to assist the housing organization in the renovations of the former Ho Hum Motel . Twenty transitional rooms are housed there, while another 19 will be housed at Champlain Housing Trust’s Beacon Apartments in South Burlington.

Williston, similarly, worked with the Champlain Housing Trust to convert a former 99-room hotel into housing with 72 units of perpetually affordable housing. Thirty-eight of them are reserved for unhoused households who will receive rental assistance from the Burlington Housing Authority.

The town waived approximately $200,000 in impact fees to assist in the construction of the building, according to Williston Town Manager Erik Wells.

But many town managers say the expectation that towns should operate new shelters is unrealistic. Unlike affordable housing, which offers at least some revenue to offset expenses, shelter operations generate no revenue, and the work requires dedicated mental health and social work experts that municipalities either can’t pay for or can’t find.

“We have no policy to that end and we have no staffing to that end,” Baker said. “It’s really the providers and the state that operate those shelters, not the municipalities.”

Elaine Wang, Winooski’s town manager, noted that the city has the lowest grand list in the county and, she said, simply does not have the taxing capacity to support the sheltering of unhoused residents.

“We’re up against a fiscal problem,” she said. “We don’t have a hard solution. If we did, we probably would have done it already. But it’s kind of an intractable problem. I know a lot of us are saying the same thing. But we do agree that this is not a city function, especially in Vermont — we are not equipped for it.”

A major challenge in standing up a new shelter is getting somebody to operate it, Wells said.

“The town can play that kind of connective tissue role if it’s working with the state and other partners to try and identify possible locations out there. We’re happy to help explore those solutions,” he said. “But just from a day-to-day operational level, there has to be some type of infrastructure put in place for those shelters to operate.”

Baker echoed similar concerns.

“If a provider wants to come to South Burlington and say, ‘Hey, we have this location, we would like to partner with you. Can we jointly submit a grant?’ Absolutely. South Burlington is ready to stand by their side,” she said. “But we as municipal government are not set up to be a service provider in that realm.”

Russell and others in Burlington have acknowledged that other towns are not equipped to be opening shelters.

“But do they have a parking lot where another Elmwood could be established? Do they have a building that’s being underutilized?” she said. “What are the resources that they may have that could ease some of the strain and allow us to expand shelter in other areas as well.”

‘How much more can an organization do?’

While municipalities aren’t clamoring to run new shelters, the service providers most experienced in doing so say their capacity is already stretched.

In September, Paul Dragon, the head of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, was approached about taking over operations at the Champlain Inn, a low-barrier shelter off of Shelburne Road in Burlington. ANEW Place, the nonprofit operating the shelter, had notified the state and the city that it could no longer manage.

CVOEO took over in October and soon began staffing the shelter 24/7, changing the operation to ensure guests were assigned rooms for six months at a time or longer.

A year and a half prior, a similar situation had played out in St. Albans, when CVOEO decided to take over operations at the Samaritan House on Kingman Street. The former organization there said it could no longer successfully operate the site.

The Champlain Inn was the third shelter that CVOEO had either started or taken over in three and a half years — not counting the group’s operation of the Holiday Inn during the pandemic. In November 2021, the organization started Burlington’s Community Resource Center, a low-barrier daytime warming shelter off of South Winooski Avenue, which now sees up to 180 people a day, the majority unsheltered.

Altogether, Dragon said about 80% of the people at the Community Resource Center have some form of disability or are elderly. Dragon said it speaks to the larger needs of society and who is falling through the cracks. But it also highlights the difficulty of the work for staff who are often not trained to work in a mental health facility or a facility for the aging.

“It’s extremely difficult for organizations to run and sustain shelters because they’re expensive, they’re really difficult work, and the funding doesn’t always match what the organizational needs are,” Dragon said.

Other organizations are also feeling the strain.

“Certainly all the nonprofit organizations feel they either have some responsibility to respond, or at least a moral responsibility to respond,” said Monte with the Champlain Housing Trust. “But there’s limitations in there too — limitations in terms of both financial support or long-term financial support or mostly staffing capacity.”

“How much more can an organization do?” he added. “We have felt that at times. I know CVOEO has felt that at times.”

Farrell, with COTS, said his organization is in a position to operate a temporary shelter at the proposed location on Pearl Street, if both the funding and location are approved by the state.

He hopes that eventually the state funding could then allow them to renovate that space for a new home for Waystation, the organization’s nighttime shelter on Church Street that has been in operation since 1983. With a new location, the hope is to expand the number of beds in Waystation by at least a dozen, Farrell said.

But while the organization feels it is financially positioned to expand and operate a new temporary shelter, Farrell has acknowledged, like other providers, that they have their limits.

“We are a very effective but rather small organization when you think of scale,” he said. “What we’re laying out is something that’s achievable, and that we can move forward with in a sustainable fashion. Could we get any bigger than that? I don’t know. We don’t know what shelter funding is going to look like year to year.”

While Dragon with CVOEO said there were more applications than expected for the state’s $10 million temporary shelter proposal, the program presents its own issues in that it only provides one-time funding.

“It’s kind of kicking the can down the road, hoping that maybe something else will come up next year,” he said. “We’re already stretched in terms of capacity.”

Dragon also expressed skepticism over some towns’ willingness to cooperate. Some local officials, he said, have expressed what he said was an “if you build it, they will come” attitude, expressing concern a shelter would draw more unhoused people to town.

Monte said he thinks there could be more coordination at the municipal level on this issue.

“I would not necessarily simply say, though, that other municipalities have just been sitting idly by, I don’t see that happening,” he said. “But when you get down to a very specific work and activity, which is shelter, there could be more work to be done amongst all the municipalities,” he said.

Dragon is in agreement with municipal leaders interviewed by VTDigger that addressing the new need for shelter expansion should be a fundamental responsibility of the state and federal government.

“No nonprofit, or even city, is going to be able to manage such a systemic problem,” Dragon said. “It takes so much effort and leverage, and only the state and federal government can really bring that to bear.”

Mulvaney-Stanak said she hopes that through conversations with other town leaders they can develop a coordinated “advocacy plan” to lobby state leaders as the next legislative session approaches.

“To me, that’s the scariest humanitarian moment in this,” she said. “We’re going to face cold, typical Vermont weather in the matter of months at this point, and I’m very concerned about where people are going to go. That’s really what’s at risk here, unfortunately: a larger health and safety emergency ahead of us, where people — I don’t know where they’re going to survive.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Elaine Wang’s name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Chittenden County is in dire need of shelter beds. Who’s going to run them? .