Is Vermont’s motel program a ‘magnet’ for out-of-staters experiencing homelessness?

Over the past few months, VTDigger and Vermont Public reporter Carly Berlin has been looking into a persistent narrative about unhoused people living in Vermont. We’re excited to be able to share the results of that investigation in this podcast, produced by the Brave Little State team at Vermont Public.

For as long as Carly Berlin has been reporting on housing issues for Vermont Public and VTDigger, she’s been hearing some version of this question: Is Vermont’s rise in homelessness due to unhoused people moving here from out-of-state?

She hasn’t been able to track down an easy answer to this question. And in the absence of information, the idea that Vermont’s benefits are a “magnet” for those experiencing homelessness has taken root, from the aisles of grocery stores to the Statehouse floor. It’s a narrative that’s shaping the conversation about homelessness in Vermont, and what the state should do to address it.

But is it even true? In this episode, Carly goes digging for data.

Note: The Brave Little State show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.

‘It’s hard out here’

Burgess Brown: From Vermont Public, this is Brave Little State . I’m Burgess Brown.

Carly Berlin: And I’m Carly Berlin.

I met Priscilla Smith back in January. And she’s been on my mind ever since.

Priscilla Smith: It’s hard out here when you don’t have a place to stay, when you’re homeless. It’s hard.

Carly Berlin: Priscilla was sitting outside her room at the Autumn Inn, a motel in Bennington. She’d moved to town about two months earlier, from Connecticut.

Priscilla Smith: When I was back in Connecticut, things … after my parents passed away, it didn’t feel like home. So it wasn’t nothing keeping me in Connecticut. So I came to Vermont.

Carly Berlin: A relative offered her husband a job at a restaurant here.

Priscilla Smith: So he asked my husband, “Hey, won’t you come to Bennington, you got a job. And you’ll be OK.” Well, we came to Bennington, my husband has a job, but we wasn’t OK. We had nowhere to go.

Carly Berlin: Even with her husband’s new job, they couldn’t make ends meet. So they’re homeless, in the middle of winter. Priscilla was looking for help, and she found the motel program. Basically, the state pays for motel rooms for eligible homeless people when shelters are full — which they usually are.

The room at the Autumn Inn was a roof over their heads and gave them time to put in call after call to find something permanent.

Priscilla Smith: Because, um, I want to get out of a hotel, I want to get my own apartment. We are just looking for a place to call home.

Carly Berlin : Priscilla’s story is a familiar one in Vermont right now. For the last few years, Vermont has had the second highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country. During COVID, the number of people counted as homeless more than doubled , and the numbers keep going up.

And so lots of people are trying to grasp: Why is this happening? Why have we seen this huge, dramatic spike in the number of people experiencing homelessness here?

I was brought on by Vermont Public and VTDigger last year to report on Vermont’s housing crisis. I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to researchers, politicians, government officials and housing advocates to understand the situation here. And I’ve spent a lot of time with people who don’t have a permanent home right now.

But Priscilla, in particular, has been on my mind lately, because I’ve been getting a lot of questions from listeners and readers about people like her. Unhoused people who have come to Vermont from somewhere else.

My inbox is full of messages asking some version of this question: How many homeless people in Vermont are really from here?

And sometimes, the question is really more of an implied explanation — that Vermont’s recent rise in homelessness is driven by people like Priscilla, crossing state lines.

The sentiments behind these messages range. Some people are curious if there’s truth to basically rumors that they’re hearing. Like Joseph Valaske, in Putney.

Joseph Valaske: You know, I hear a lot of complaints about, just homelessness and the cost of living has risen so much.

Carly Berlin: When I call Joseph, he’s on his lunch break at a construction site where he's working. He’s a homebuilder, so it’s a little bit noisy.

Carly Berlin: So what prompted you to get in touch with me with your question about how many of Vermont's homeless people are from here?

Joseph Valaske: Well, on Wednesdays I play golf with a bunch of guys, and, you know, some of us are tradespeople...

Carly Berlin: Homelessness, it turns out, is a big topic of conversation at this golf game. Joseph tells me one of his golf buddies recently closed down his family business in Brattleboro and was railing about how people had been sleeping in the doorway there. Another speculated that panhandlers are coming from out-of-state.

Joseph Valaske: Oh, one had a theory that somebody's driving people up in a van and dropping them off at places to panhandle … which I find to be pretty absurd, I don’t think they’d make enough money.

Carly Berlin: Other people have reached out to me to outright accuse me of mischaracterizing the homelessness crisis and cast doubt on my reporting.

Like a guy named Mark Tarmy, also from Putney.

Mark Tarmy: I’ve lived in Vermont for about 40 years.

Carly Berlin: Mark originally emailed me to critique a line I’d written in a story. I had referred to people experiencing homelessness here — and accessing benefits here — as “Vermonters” . Mark was like, using that term, “Vermonters” — it paints an inaccurate picture, in his mind, of the people putting a burden on his community . His words.

Mark Tarmy: What I’ve come to understand is that the vast majority of these people are newly transplanted into this state.

Carly Berlin: And here’s the crux of it: People aren’t just grappling with whether people became homeless here, or if they became homeless somewhere else, then moved here. They’re also grappling with whether we owe unhoused people something different based on where they’re from.

When I talk to Mark, I ask him that, straight up.

Mark Tarmy: Yes. That may be a really, um, uh … I don't know, sort of bad thing to say. But it feels different. Everybody here will bend over backwards to help their neighbors and their friend, and then to have, you know, somebody just arrive or come, just to take advantage of that, it rubs me the wrong way.

Carly Berlin: Mark’s impression is that the spike in homelessness over the last few years? It is caused by unhoused people coming into Vermont from out-of-state — specifically, to take advantage of our benefits.

This impression is the basis for a lot of the questions I get in my inbox. The idea is that Vermont has developed a reputation for being generous with its benefits, and it’s that reputation that has drawn unhoused people here.

Part of what got me obsessed with this question in the first place: There’s not an easy answer. I haven’t had any readily available numbers or data about where the unhoused population is from to point people to when they’ve reached out.

And in the absence of data, this narrative — that unhoused people are flocking to Vermont — has taken root. I hear it over and over again, repeated essentially as fact.

But here’s what I want to know: Is it true?

Burgess Brown: Welcome to Brave Little State . Today on the show: What can we find out about how many unhoused people in Vermont have come from out of state?

Reporter Carly Berlin — who covers housing and infrastructure for Vermont Public and VTDigger — searches for the numbers.

Anne Sosin: There's gotta be a way for us to find it.

Burgess Brown: And we ask — how do the stories we tell ourselves about homelessness in Vermont impact how we understand the problem, and what we do about it?

Jim Harrison: So we — in a different type of way — have put out a welcome mat.

Gregg Colburn: I firmly believe this is a homegrown problem.

Burgess Brown: We’re a proud member of the NPR network. Welcome.

Theories run deep

Carly Berlin: Right around the same time I started getting all these messages — that unhoused people are moving to Vermont — I noticed: the same theories, they weren’t just confined to my email inbox. They were being echoed by Vermont’s legislators.

Like Rep. Jim Carroll, a Democrat from Bennington. He tells me he was getting an earful from his constituents about people coming into Vermont to use the state’s motel voucher program. He’d have these conversations with people on the street, in the grocery store.

Jim Carroll: What they pointed out was there was this exodus into Vermont — from New York state and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire — to take advantage of the hotel voucher system in the state.

Carly Berlin: Rep. Carroll is talking about the General Assistance Emergency Housing Program. Or, for short, the motel program. The idea that people are coming to Vermont to access benefits, it swirls around this program in particular.

Vermont has had a motel program for a long time . Basically, when homeless shelters are full, people who meet certain criteria — they have kids, or they just went through a natural disaster — they can get a voucher for a motel or hotel room. Historically, it’s opened up to anyone during especially cold winter days, too, to get them off the street.

Then, during COVID, Vermont greatly expanded who could get into this program. And there was a lot more demand for rooms, too. The state went from sheltering, max, a couple hundred households on a cold winter night pre-COVID, to sheltering thousands now.

More from Brave Little State: ‘"Can’t we just buy them?’ The future of Vermont’s motel housing program"

So, what caused that spike? It’s true that Vermonters absolutely lost their jobs and lost stable housing during the pandemic. And it’s true that the expansion of the motel program made it a lot easier to count people experiencing homelessness. So, that’s played a role in the jump in numbers, too.

But at the same time, many people are making sense of the spike by pointing to unhoused people moving to Vermont from away. Like the constituents giving Rep. Carroll an earful at the grocery store. But those ideas getting tossed around in the bread aisle, they have real impact at the Statehouse.

They sometimes color the debates lawmakers have over the future of the motel program — how robust it should be, who it should serve, how much we, as a state, should pay for it.

Like once this spring, I was sitting inside the House chambers while lawmakers were getting ready to vote on a bill that was basically aimed at streamlining how the motel program works in state law. It didn’t end up going anywhere. But another Representative Jim — Jim Harrison, a Republican from the town of Chittenden — got up and gave this speech:

Jim Harrison : So we, in a different type of way, have put out a welcome mat. That you can come here — say you don't have a home or an address, but you plan to stay in Vermont — and we will provide you a hotel room. And I just … we all want to help our neighbors. But I'm not sure the small state of Vermont can afford to be … house everybody in the Northeast that wants to come here because they find themselves in circumstances that are unfortunate, as big a heart as we have. So Madame Speaker, I will be voting no on this bill.

Carly Berlin: So, lawmakers like Rep. Harrison were on the House floor, repeating this idea that, as he puts it, “Vermont is housing everybody in the Northeast that wants to come here.”

But I kept asking myself, “What is this based on?” Is it just anecdotes and theories passed along from constituents? Or is there data or a study somewhere that backs this idea up?

In order to figure out whether there’s any truth to this, I needed to understand where these theories come from.

Back in April, I sat down with Molly Dalton. She’s a benefits program specialist with Vermont’s Department for Children and Families — DCF, they run the motel program. And I put my question to her.

Carly Berlin: I guess I am curious, anecdotally, if you encounter a lot of people coming from elsewhere or if most people are coming from—

Molly Dalton: In the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot coming from out-of-state.

Carly Berlin: Molly’s one of the people who picks up the phones and processes applications. It’s kind of rare to get to interview a rank-and-file employee of a state department like this. Usually, I’m redirected to an official PR person, or one of the higher-ups.

So while I have her, I want to know what she’s seeing and hearing from people in the motel program.

Molly Dalton : I think I remember somebody saying that there was … they had received an information … they saw like, some poster, like somebody had put like on a billboard, that, “Oh, go to Vermont, they’ll house you.”

So that's why a lot of people came to Vermont, because there was signs out there that were telling them — Vermont’s easy to get housed, just go to them.

Carly Berlin: A poster. Information on a billboard. Whatever it was, Molly says she heard about a sign that was circulated outside of Vermont in the beginning of the pandemic, targeted at homeless people, telling them to come here to get a motel room.

I’d heard other people say that word of Vermont’s benefits had spread through the grapevine, but I was surprised to hear a story like this coming from inside DCF.

Carly Berlin: Do you remember where—

Molly Dalton: I don’t remember where it was, or where the person stated that they saw the poster, you know, the sign and it's just — I just remember them telling me about it. It was just like, woah.

Miranda Gray: So we had heard, um, this is a rumor. But when we looked into it, we weren’t able to verify the rumor one way or another.

Carly Berlin: This is Miranda Gray, the higher-up I usually talk to at DCF — she’s a deputy commissioner. She’s heard versions of the poster story, too. And she says the department hasn’t been able to rule out that this poster thing happened — can’t confirm or deny it.

Miranda Gray: And I think we just hear anecdotally, you know, from different communities, even a sense that there are a lot of people here from other states. However, that doesn’t mean, even if that were true, which isn't something, that isn't something that we collect for data in economic services. People have that right to come here and we wouldn't want to exclude anyone from wanting to come to Vermont and to become a resident here.

Carly Berlin: Miranda is talking in circles a little bit here. But she’s saying, the department has heard, anecdotally, that there are people from other states in the motel program. But the state doesn’t collect data on this — on where people in the program were last housed.

Miranda says, that’s because it’s not a critical factor in determining whether or not someone gets help. People just need to indicate that they intend to stay here, in the future.

A hunt for data

Carly Berlin: Over the last few months, I’ve been pulling on as many other threads as I could think of. I try again to see if the state can compile information on where homeless people were last housed. No dice. I call around to service providers and academics and advocates, and I learn the system that tracks resources for unhoused people across the state, called coordinated entry — it doesn’t capture this stat.

The annual census of unhoused people, called the point-in-time count — it doesn’t either.

So, I start to think that the number I’m looking for might just not exist. But then, I get a lead.

Brenda Siegel: I can't remember when this was. But it was like, out of the 3,000 people, 37 were from out-of-state.

Carly Berlin: Oh, I’m so curious how they knew that.

Carly Berlin: I’m talking to Brenda Siegel, an advocate for unhoused people in Vermont who spends a lot of time on the ground, helping people maintain their vouchers. And she’s like, "I think the state did track where people in the motel program had come from, at one point."

Brenda Siegel: Ugh, Anne might know, Anne might know when that was.

Carly Berlin: So, I call Anne.

(Phone ringing)

Carly Berlin: Anne Sosin, a Dartmouth public health researcher who studies homelessness.

Anne Sosin: Hi, Carly!

Carly Berlin: Hey, Anne, how are you?

Carly Berlin: I tell Anne I heard she might have some more information for me.

Anne Sosin: Yes. There is a presentation that AHS or DCF put out in early ’23, based on what they called an assessment, and I have been looking everywhere for it. And I can’t find it.

Carly Berlin: Lots of acronyms there: AHS is the Agency of Human Services, DCF is the Department for Children and Families, within it. They run the motel program.

Anne’s like, “This report never got shared widely.” For a while, she was the director for an affordable housing group and was at the Statehouse all the time. She remembers seeing a document that summed up this assessment, passed on by a legislator. But since then, it’s disappeared.

Anne Sosin: There's gotta be a way for us to find it.

Carly Berlin: I ask Miranda Gray — the deputy commissioner at DCF, who we heard earlier — if she knows anything about this report.

Carly Berlin: Does that ring any bells for you?

Miranda Gray: That does not ring any bells for me, no.

Carly Berlin: OK.

Carly Berlin: I ask the records custodian at the department the same thing. She’s like, no bells. She tells me she would look around for it for me, but then I don’t hear back for a few days. So, I’m hitting a bit of a wall.

But then one day in late July, I open my email: Anne Sosin has found it.

So I grabbed my producer Burgess and we jumped in the studio so that I could show him what Anne had uncovered.

Carly Berlin: OK, here, I printed some copies for us.

Burgess: OK, thanks. Let me just put on my headphones.

Alright, looks like a PowerPoint of some kind from AHS?

Carly Berlin: Yep. Agency of Human Services.

Burgess Brown: OK, so guide me — what should I be looking at?

Carly Berlin: So, a couple pages in, you can see, this was a subset of people living in the motel system at the time. A little over 1,000 households were surveyed here .

Brenda Siegel — that’s the advocate I’ve been talking to — didn’t remember these numbers quite right. That’s about 1,000 households — not 3,000 people, like Brenda thought.

And if you flip to the next page, it shows how people answered a question about the last place they’d lived before entering the motel housing program.

Burgess Brown: Um, yeah, OK so I’m seeing a table here. And at the top it says, like, “rented an apartment or a home.” Some people responded that they had stayed with friends or family. And there's "unsheltered."

Carly Berlin: Yep. That means they might have lived in an encampment outside or slept in their car.

If you look further down, you’ll find our number.

Burgess Brown: OK, so there’s a line that says “lived out of state.” And then … 37 households.

Carly Berlin: 37 households, out of just over 1,000, said they lived out-of-state.

Carly Berlin: So, under 4% from out-of-state. And, a couple weeks ago, I got a message from Brenda Siegel. She has some new preliminary data from a report she hasn’t even released yet . Her team surveyed 200 people in the motel program last fall and winter, and their numbers are basically identical to the state’s: 4% of people they interviewed came most recently from out of state. The other 96% became homeless here, in Vermont.

So there are obvious caveats to these numbers. Brenda’s an advocate, so she’s got an agenda. And the state’s data appears to be self-reported, so it’s only as good as what people were willing to tell them. And both of these are just snapshots in time. They can’t tell us how trends might’ve changed.

I want to talk to someone who was around when the state put their report together.

(Phone ringing)

And eventually I get connected to Dave Riegel, the director of housing policy and planning for AHS.

Dave Riegel: Hi, this is Dave.

Carly Berlin: Hey, Dave, this is Carly.

Carly Berlin: I give Dave my spiel about what I’m up to with this story.

Carly Berlin: So when I learned about this assessment that AHS had done, I was really interested in learning more about it.

Dave Riegel: Oh, you’re like, “There’s a number! There’s a number somewhere!” (laughter)

Carly Berlin: (laughter) Exactly.

Carly Berlin: Dave tells me that this assessment kicked off during the fall of 2022. It was released in March 2023.

This was a moment when the state was using federal pandemic relief funds to cover motel and hotel stays for people, but was anticipating that those funds would soon run out.

Dave says part of the reason for this assessment — it was to get a sense of people’s needs as the state faced this fiscal cliff. And as part of this, Dave’s team asked people where they lived before entering the motel program, and they got that number — 37 households who said they’d lived out of state.

I told Dave about the question I’m investigating, about out-of-staters in the motel program.

Carly Berlin: This suggests that that number is very small. Was this a surprising finding for you? How do you, how do you kind of make sense of it?

Dave Riegel: I mean, I wouldn’t call it surprising. I think that that narrative has been out there, you know, for a while, but I don’t know that there’s ever been any evidence to support it.

Carly Berlin: I have to say: this was surprising to me to hear. I’d been having these conversations with others in the agency, like Molly and Miranda who we heard earlier, and they were either suggesting that there may be some truth to these theories about people coming from away or even outright echoing the story about the poster.

And then you have Dave, who’s a director at the agency, saying, “There’s never been evidence to support this.”

So, why this disconnect? And why was this assessment so hard to find? I wish I had a clear answer. Anne Sosin, the Dartmouth professor, thinks it might’ve been buried for political reasons. But it could just be because there’s been so much turnover at this huge state agency that it got lost.

Dave goes on to say, his sense is that for people in the motel program who might be part of that 37 number, many have roots here.

Dave Riegel: A lot of those people are folks who, you know, really have deep ties to Vermont, who moved out of state with family or friends or partners, or whomever, and then those situations sort of fell apart. And so they're actually folks who were out of state immediately prior to experiencing homelessness. But they're returning back to Vermont, to be into the communities and around the people that they're most familiar with and connected to.

Carly Berlin: I’ve certainly encountered people in my reporting who fit that bill.

But like, I’ve talked to people in the program who fit just about any bill you can think of: flood victims who haven’t been able to find a new apartment a year later, elderly people who have lived outside in encampments for months before getting a room, survivors of domestic violence. And some of them have moved to Vermont in the not-too-distant past.

When I’ve asked people experiencing homelessness about this out-of-stater narrative, their responses have ranged. Some people have said they think it’s happening. Some have been a bit defensive.

And most have bigger, more pressing issues on their mind. Like, figuring out where to live after their stay in the motel is up.

And either way, the numbers show: The majority of people in the motel program became homeless here, in Vermont.

So why, then, is it so attractive to say they came from somewhere else? Why do we gravitate towards that theory?

That’s after the break.

'Homelessness is a housing problem'

Carly Berlin : So, this idea — that a lot of people are moving across state lines to access better benefits, and that that’s driving Vermont’s rise in homelessness — I’ve only found evidence to the contrary. But it turns out that this narrative — it’s not limited to Vermont. In fact, it’s really common.

Gregg Colburn: It’s almost for me gotten a little bit comical.

Carly Berlin: Gregg Colburn researches homelessness. When he was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, he heard people blame homelessness in Minneapolis on people moving from Chicago.

Gregg Colburn : And so I studied that a little bit when I was in graduate school, and didn't find a whole lot of evidence of that.

Carly Berlin: He’s since moved to the University of Washington.

Gregg Colburn : When I moved to Seattle in 2017, in literally my first meeting, someone said, “Well, you know, it's people coming from elsewhere — California, whatever the case may be, that's why we have a problem with homelessness.” And I just said, “Oh, that's interesting. That's what Minneapolis said.”

Carly Berlin: And he’s even been in meetings in California — where people say, you know, “ we're a magnet for homelessness.”

Gregg Colburn : And so I joke that not everyone can be the destination. That’s not how magnets work. And almost every community that I visit feels that if they weren't so generous, this, this would go away.

Carly Berlin: In 2022, Gregg co-wrote a book called Homelessness is a Housing Problem . The thesis is in the name. Basically, Gregg was seeing this disconnect between what the academic scholarship says about what’s driving homelessness and the popular narratives about it. The theories that get tossed around at the cocktail party, or at the golf game.

They found ways to test rates of homelessness against a bunch of these common theories they were hearing — like the benefits-magnet theory. For this one, they looked at how states divvy up federal welfare money. Gregg says, some states are relatively stingy, and some are relatively generous.

Gregg Colburn : And what you don't see is people congregating in generous states. There's basically no statistical relationship between generosity and rates of homelessness. So if the magnet really were a driver here, we should see some relationship between generosity and rates of homelessness at the state level. We don't find any of that.

Carly Berlin: For what it’s worth, it’s incredibly difficult to accurately compare benefits from place to place. A lot of apples to oranges. And programs are constantly in flux. For instance, New York City and Massachusetts have historically had some version of a right-to-shelter policy, basically guaranteeing emergency shelter for some homeless people. That’s arguably more generous than the motel program, which turns people away all the time.

But, as Gregg says, “generosity” isn’t even the measure we should be concerned with. If we want to explain why rates of homelessness vary so widely across the country, there’s one metric that Gregg and his co-author tested that rose to the top.

Gregg Colburn : The thing that jumps out when you do this analysis using pretty basic statistics is that housing market conditions are the best explanation for regional variation of rates of homelessness. Meaning, places with really high rents and low vacancies, places where housing is expensive and not abundant, have much higher rates of homelessness.

Carly Berlin: Sound familiar? High rents , low rental vacancy rates — that describes the extraordinarily tight housing market we face today in Vermont.

I should say, Vermont isn’t actually in the sample Gregg is looking at here. He’s primarily focused on large metro areas, and he says, there are some different dynamics around rural homelessness that should get studied more. But broadly speaking, it’s these kinds of conditions that best explain where we see a lot of homelessness.

Now, the housing market doesn’t tell us why any given individual becomes homeless. There’s a difference between the situation that can lead one person to become unhoused and the root causes of housing instability in a given community.

Gregg likes to use a metaphor to explain this, about a game of musical chairs.

Gregg Colburn: 10 friends, 10 chairs. They come together, play this game. The leader starts the music. They walk around the circle. The leader pulls one chair out. We now have 10 people in nine chairs. When the leader stops the music, everyone scrambles for a chair. And by definition, someone loses. And the loser of this game, in our fictional game, is Mike. And Mike was on crutches after spraining his ankle, and therefore was unable to move quickly when the music stopped. And so unsurprisingly, you know, he lost the game.

If we interviewed Mike after the game and said, “Why did you lose the game? What caused you to lose the game?” What would he tell us? “I had a bad ankle.” And everyone would nod and say, “Yeah, Mike lost because he had a bad ankle.” If we ask a different question, though, and say, “Why didn't Mike have a chair?” It's because we didn't have 10 chairs. If we'd had 10 chairs, Mike would have hobbled over to the 10th chair and sat down. It might have taken longer. It might not have been pretty, but he would have found a chair .

Carly Berlin: So when we have a scarcity of chairs — or, a scarcity of housing — it accentuates the ways in which people are vulnerable. It makes it that much harder for them to get a chair.

In Vermont, we don’t have enough chairs — for people who were born and raised here, or for people who have recently arrived. And Gregg says anything other than addressing that shortage is just a distraction.

Gregg Colburn: We can wring our hands and spend all of our time worrying about the one or two people who are moving or on a bus from another community, or we can look in the mirror and acknowledge that decisions we've made over the last 30, 40 years are having huge consequences in terms of of people not being able to access housing. I firmly believe this is a homegrown problem.

So, sure: Can we find the anecdote that somebody moved here from away? Definitely. I’ve met them. Can we find someone who came here to access benefits? We probably can. But that phenomenon is not what’s driving Vermont’s rise in homelessness.

Gregg says, it might be easier to cling to that story about the outsider coming in. To assign blame for homelessness elsewhere. But until we accept that we — this state, Vermont — caused this, we can’t get clear-eyed about how we fix it.

Looking out of state

Carly Berlin: Are you from around here, originally?

Kevin Douglas: Yeah, I was born in Burlington, lived in Williston for a few years, with my parents … yeah.

Carly Berlin: This is Kevin Douglas. He’s 37, an independent contractor who used to deliver furniture for work. He and his wife and their two young kids and their dog all live together in one room here at the Days Inn, in Colchester. When I meet them, they’re out in the parking lot playing, riding a skateboard around. They’ve been here around two months.

Kevin Douglas: Uh, for us? It was like, a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, we had a three bedroom in Burlington. We had, like, a nice little yard. We're right next to the bike path. That was a great place for the kids and the dog, and it was nice. And, yeah, our landlord did the eviction process for no-cause eviction .

Carly Berlin: They fought the eviction, Kevin says, and they won, on a technicality. But it was clear the landlord wanted them out. So ultimately, his family decided to leave. They went and crashed with his wife’s dad — and then his landlord threatened to evict all of them, because there were too many people in the apartment.

So they ended up here, at the Days Inn. And Kevin says he does meet people at the hotel who aren’t originally from Vermont — people from West Virginia and Louisiana and Texas. And he says he sometimes compares notes with these people, about what jobs pay in other places or how much housing costs.

And the thing is — he and his family are struggling so much to find housing here that they’re thinking about moving away.

Kevin Douglas: We're even looking like out of state now at this point — New York, or even down south, like everywhere.

Carly Berlin: Kevin wants to raise his kids where he grew up — here, in Vermont. Moving away from the place he’s lived his whole life is scary.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture his family landing somewhere else — in New York, or in the South, or wherever — chasing some kind of job opportunity, or housing lead. And having that thing fall through.

And ending up like Priscilla Smith, who we met at the top of the episode — homeless somewhere they’ve never been before, with nowhere else to go and looking for a safety net to fall into.

Credits

Thanks to Joseph Valaske and Mark Tarmy of Putney for sharing their curiosity with us.

This episode was reported by Carly Berlin and produced by Burgess Brown. Editing and additional production from Sabine Poux and Josh Crane, with support from April McCullum and Alicia Freese. Angela Evancie is our executive producer. Theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Special thanks to Lola Duffort, Laura Nakasaka, Sophie Stephens, Jess Graff, Sarah Russell, Rick DeAngelis, Frank Knaack, Stephen Waclawik and Mary Mojica.

Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Is Vermont’s motel program a ‘magnet’ for out-of-staters experiencing homelessness? .