 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. My name is Melinda Moulton and today my guest is David Martins. Hi David, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm great. So you are the new executive director taking Earhard Menke's position at the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. I am. How's that feel? You're new to Vermont? Yeah, just since the end of July. So I got here kind of just in time to enjoy the best part of summer and now winter is here and it's gonna be here for a little bit. Well, and you've only been here since July. So you get to get through a Vermont winter which will be really fun for you. Hopefully you'll enjoy it. But look, these are big shoes to fill. So tell us a little bit because our community does not know you very well. And so I really wanted to meet you and interview you for my show to introduce you to the community. So tell us a little bit about who you are, where you come from. Thank you. Sure. So I'm from Rhode Island originally. I'm from a small town called Tiverton is where I grew up. And all of Rhode Island though is like the size of a postage stamp. So like all of Rhode Island is just like one really big town. And so I always ask when people, I always laugh when people say, well, we're in Rhode Island. In my head I'm like, it doesn't really matter where. Everything's 20 minutes apart, you know? It's only 20 minutes across the whole thing. But yeah, so in college, I went into the seminary to study to be a Catholic priest. And so I did college in the seminary and then I did grad school in the seminary. While I was in grad school, I decided to leave because I decided that maybe it just kind of wasn't the right fit for me. I'm gay and it's not, it doesn't always work. Sometimes it can be an additional struggle in the priesthood. So I decided to leave and I went into bartending because kind of what else do you do, I guess, when you have degrees in philosophy and theology? So I bartended for a number of years, had a lot of fun. And then in 2010, I started working in the nonprofit world. I was through a customer. I started working, running a youth leadership program at an LGBT teen center in Providence. And that was sort of my introduction into the nonprofit world. And at the same time, I became affiliated with a church called the Independent Catholic Church. So it's folks who identify themselves as Catholic, but are separated from the formal Roman Catholic Church. And they believe in marriage equality and women's ordination and sort of a number of things that separate them from Rome. And I said, well, this is right at my alley. And so I was ordained with that community and opened a church all in 2010. And so then for the next almost decade, I was pastored to that church community and grew it and at the same time was working in the nonprofit world. And I moved from the teen center to working in substance abuse recovery and worked a bit with folks experiencing homelessness. And in the meanwhile, the church kind of started working with the same communities I was working with so that I wasn't like losing my mind going back and forth between the two roles. And the result was a really dynamic faith community that was very involved in the larger community and a ton of experience in advocacy work and community building. And so we worked a lot with folks experiencing homelessness. We worked with women who are survivors of breast cancer, the LGBT community, the recovery community. It was really dynamic and a busy place. So I did that up until 2019. And at that point, I really kind of felt burnt out because it's two full-time jobs and you're only getting paid for one. And I said, I can't do this anymore. And at that point in my life, I thought, well, I enjoyed the ministry and working with people. So maybe there's a place for me still in the Roman church. And so I encountered the Society of St. Edmund who were over at St. Michael's College. And they also had a ministry near me right over the line in Mystic, Connecticut. And so I got to know them a little bit and that's how I was sort of introduced to Vermont. They hired me to work at one of their ministries in Connecticut where I was the Executive Director of Recovery Ministries and Spiritual Development at Enders Island in Mystic, Connecticut. I was there for a couple of years, got to know the Edmundites and so on. And ultimately, I decided that I wanted to separate myself from formal church involvement and just focus on work. And, but you know, it's really, it's a small community. And so being somewhere where you're only known by an affiliation with church is kind of a lot. And so I said, you know, I want to pack up and I want to move and really start a life for myself, you know, separated from formal involvement with the church. And I was familiar with the area thanks to the Society of St. Edmund. And I said, you know, well, look and see what's going on in Vermont. And here we are. So it's been a, it's been quite a road but it's been super exciting to be here and to, you know, be meeting new people and everyone's been so welcoming and friendly. And I don't know if Vermonters are known for their friendliness nationally, but they should be because it's certainly been a very positive experience. Well, I'm deeply moved by you. You're a magnificent human being. I am just so moved by the story, David, really. And I'm so glad that you came and landed in Vermont and we so need you. And so thank you for choosing Vermont and choosing the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. I want to talk to you a little bit about who might have had the greatest influence on your life to take you into the selfless work that you do. Well, one would definitely be the priest in my church when I was growing up. His name was Father Bert Richmond and he was one of a kind. He was one of these priests who he worked just around the clock, 24 seven. And he was not only about, he was more about living the faith than about shoving it down your throat. And, you know, I remember I was very involved in the youth group. And, you know, he loved every one of us as if we were his own kids. And he just created such a culture there of people who just wanted to be involved. And more than that, he was big on like that we live, that people should live their faith by being involved in the bigger community. And that was just kind of like how we operated. And that's what really inspired me to go into ministry. And then I think, you know, in the once I got involved in the nonprofit world, you know, it was amazing. I started meeting people who kind of have the same mentality just minus the church part. This attitude of like, well, I would never want to be a banker or a lawyer. Not there's anything wrong with lawyers or bankers, but just like I don't want to sit at a desk, you know, like I want to be out there trying to change people's lives. And there was a gentleman in Rhode Island, his name was Jim Gillan. And Jim was like the air hard of the recovery world in Rhode Island. I mean, he just lived and breathed it 24 seven. He defined advocacy at the state house and in the community. And I didn't know him super well, but I knew him well enough. And who I did know very well were the people that he inspired and who he worked with directly. And that was just, if you worked in the recovery field in Rhode Island, like there was no other way to approach it. Like that's, it was just known that this work meant that you're always working and that it's not work, it's just life, it's vocation. It's, you know, really kind of what you, this is just what you do. And that it's the lens through which you kind of look at the world. And that attitude really sort of helped shape my understanding of this kind of work and what it means, you know? Now I think for me, the kind of, you know, I don't think you can spend that many years so entrenched in your faith and not have it impact you. And to me, I think that like, I used to tell the people at the church that, you know, what we do on Sunday morning is an hour. And then there's seven days in the week, 24 hours in each day. So like, you know, if you're pious for an hour on Sunday morning, but jerk the rest of the week, like what's the point? And so really I think that all of that rolled together is like, just really, I think it's a sense of vocation really, like that this is just the kind of work that just feels right. It's your life, it's your life. It's selfless giving of yourself to serve others. And isn't that really what Christianity is all about? Yeah, it's supposed to be. Yeah, right. It's kind of taking a loop here and there. But so tell our viewers a little bit about the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. Tell us a little bit about the organization, the history of it. The coalition is a coalition of 90 plus organizations that basically, I mean, Earhard. Earhard is what the coalition does. You know, the presence of the state house really doing advocacy work. To try to move forward policy legislation that's going to help develop more affordable housing within the state. And, you know, Earhard also did a lot of work with the coalition to end homelessness. Upon him taking over his new role, both coalitions have really sort of taken time to say, well, what do we really, what do we do? And how are we distinct from other housing organizations? How are we distinct from each other? And so a big piece of our focus is really on this idea of affordable housing and that while homelessness is certainly involved in the issue of affordable housing, there are in fact two different issues in that if folks can't find affordable housing, they end up homeless. And the only solution to homelessness is affordable housing. So we're really kind of distinguishing ourselves and yet also making sure to point out the intrinsic relationship between the two, if that makes any sense. This does. And poverty. I mean, poverty is a big issue too. If you don't have money and what's happening today in Vermont, especially in Burlington is the housing costs have gotten so high that people can't afford to live here. Yep. There's been a gentrification. And so how do you address that? It's an issue of, you know, it's a multi-layered issue. It's an issue of, you know, for sure poverty. Also just that we have such an old housing stock. I mean, that's the to start with, right? That the properties we do have that are available that people are renting is old and it needs upgrades. And then, you know, we have this low vacancy rate that we have, of course, all the folks are sort of colloquially saying the COVID refugees, right? The folks that kind of came up here during the pandemic and all of these things just drive that market higher and higher and higher. And it makes it, it just, it's like layers of an onion that just further complicate this issue. And so there's really no one solution. It's a multi-layered, it's a, you know, multi-faceted situation. And the, you know, even for that matter even just to end poverty, right? Like we have, there's organizations all over the world about ending poverty. There's no magic wand. There's no button. Cause all of these issues are multi-layer and all of these issues are intertwined. So a lot of your job advocacy, are you gonna be like, I know Earhard was down in the legislature a lot. I mean, a lot of your job is advocacy to find the funding and the support to be able to do the work of these 90 organizations that, I mean, there's right now there's 1500, you know, homeless families in Burlington. I think somebody told me recently, there, so is a lot of your job advocacy too, because it has to start with where do we get the money to create the housing? And in many ways, I think, I think housing should be, I mean, this is me, but I just think that people should be given places to live for free. I mean, at the end of the day, if they can't afford it, that at the end of the day that, so what, how do you feel about that? I mean, if people can't afford to, you know, to rent a house or to own a house and the affordable housing rates are too high, we should be building buildings to put people in so that they're warm and safe and they're getting the services that they need. And I know that Cox is doing this other organization, but where do you fall on that? Yeah, I mean, safe decent affordable housing is a right. It's a human right. And we have to, we have to provide that for folks who can't access that. And so how do you do that? Yeah, I mean, cause now the whole Sears Lane debacle folks had to leave Sears Lane and there was a lot of, you know, uproar on both sides of that issue, but where do people go? And it's sort of like, you know, like with Sears Lane, I mean, like if your neighbor was, if they found out that your neighbor was, you know, manufacturing drugs in his basement, they wouldn't evict your whole street. They, you know, they would deal with the person who broke the law. And, but I think that the, you know, all of what we do really is advocacy because advocacy is more than just the presence at the state house. It's also, I think community advocacy. It's giving voice to the folks on Sears Lane who have been displaced. It's giving voice to the folks, you know, in the Motel hotel program. It's giving voice to the folks that we, they're on the streets. And giving voice to the folks who also sort of what, you know, what we're calling the missing middle, folks who are not qualified as low income and don't live in any kind of subsidized housing, but can't afford housing. Like there are nurses who can't afford housing. Like, you know, folks that, but also folks don't qualify for assistance. And so sort of end up in the same kind of nightmarish situation. And it all goes back to this multi-layered sort of multi-layer and multi-intersectional problem. Well, I mean, and then you have to add mental, you know, mental illness too, that we don't have enough therapists to serve people who need care. Yeah, addiction, there's not enough addiction. So there's your onion. Yeah. So in your new job, this is a big job. And you're kind of like at the core of that onion, at the root of that onion, to help deal with this issue. And it's happening all over the country. And so talk to us a little bit about some of the things that your organization is doing to help alleviate this problem. Sure. So as we come into the new legislative session, so in about a month, a lot of my time is going to be absorbed in multi-layered, this, you know, advocacy for legislation that would help alleviate some of these problems. You know, some of the complications around the housing issue is that, you say, well, he's just put a house, he's put up a building. But like, you know, there are zoning things that get in the way. There are complications over folding with Dr. 50 that get in the way. There's, you know, I mean, you name it. And so some of that solution is legislative. And so, you know, some advocacy around that stuff, advocacy around rental housing safety. We know that last year, the rental housing safety bill was vetoed after it was passed. So a big thing we'll be doing this year is working on, you know, finding another solution to that. There's some legislation around recovery housing that will be working on and a lot of legislation around money because right now, because of some different funding that came in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there's an unprecedented amount of money available right now, which is fantastic. But all of that money is still, even if we spent every single cent of it on housing, it's still not enough to solve the problem. But it's a down payment. It's a down payment on a decade-long investment. It's down payment. Yeah. And it's a down payment on our future, I think really as a state because, you know, I mean, these are our neighbors and not only is it our neighbors, it's us, right? It's because all of us are paying for housing. So like it's an issue that really and truly does impact everyone. So that legislative piece is one big part of what we do. Another big part of what we do is trying to have this conversation about affordable housing with as many communities as possible to shed light on the fact that this impacts all of us, particularly communities who we may not often think about. So like for example, in October, we did some programming around how the housing crisis impacts early childhood development. In November, we did some stuff around how veterans are impacted by the housing crisis. This month you'll see some stuff coming out from us about folks living with HIV and AIDS and how the housing crisis impacts them in a particular way. Vermont has one of the best systems of care for folks living with HIV and AIDS. So people come to Vermont for that and then can't find housing. And so there's many communities as there are people, right? Like that that we could point to and that's what we really wanna do to really highlight. And that's an important piece of advocacy because it's a two-way street. It's us helping folks see the average Joe who works a decent job and makes a decent living but having that missing middle piece, right? He's paying twice as much for rent than he should and happens to be living with HIV and AIDS or AIDS. Like for that person to be like, this issue impacts my community in a particular way. And also for us at the state house then to be able to give voice to that reality to lawmakers to say, people living with HIV, the housing crisis impacts their health in this way. It impacts only childhood development in this way. It means that our veterans are experiencing this or that. It means, right? So it all goes together. Trauma, trauma. Yeah, yeah. And another piece we're doing that we're really excited about is really trying to bring together young people, particularly like college age folks and recent grads to bring them to the table really in an organized way as much like we really wanna kind of build I don't know what you wanna call it a group I guess of collegiates who would be members of the coalition and therefore would have voice in shaping our priorities. And then once we get past this legislative session, we'll move out and I'll have almost a year under my feet. So we'll then sort of be more involved with legislators, hopefully in the crafting of policy and in looking over what we did this year, what we accomplished this year in the legislature, what needs to be done, bringing all these housing organizations together so that they can inform us. Well, there are some gaps and this is what we would need to do this and how do we work towards solutions? And hopefully through all of our conversations with these other communities like the HIV community veterans, I'll just get to that. The disability, the disability community. Yeah, folks disability, right? That hopefully in doing that, we also can help build those intersectional solutions. Now, one of the things that we've done down here of course was inclusionary zoning where Burlington requires 25% of your project to be affordable housing, which we did back in the 1990s. It would be great if all communities adopted an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require people doing housing to make sure that 25% of the homes that they're building are affordable. Yeah, and there are so many, it's interesting that I think that it's a uniquely difficult problem in Vermont just because of the nature of, so we have like Rhode Island for example, Rhode Island's the size of a postage stamp and a million people live inside that postage stamp. Vermont has a half a million people and it's way bigger than a postage stamp and distance between communities sort of the vast difference in density. The farm worker housing, that's a unique issue here. Like, so you have these big old farms, right? And the farmers are not doing as well as they once were. They have housing on the farm for the farm workers because it's sort of part of their compensation but that housing needs to be upgraded or the farm workers live off the farm but aren't making enough money to be able to afford the housing and there's not affordable housing options in these towns around the middle of nowhere where the farms are. It's not like there's farms in the middle of Burlington. Well, we have the intervail. We do have a big intervail center. But so we only have a few more minutes here. I'm just fascinated. I could talk to you forever. I am so thrilled. Erhard Menke deserved to have David Martin step into his shoes. That's all I have to say. Thanks. Thanks. I'm so enjoying talking with you. I could talk to you forever. I wanna remind our viewers that we're talking to David Martens who is the new executive director of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. You can go to their website at vtaffordablehousing.org. I encourage you to make a donation to this organization and to go to their website and see what they're doing. You're doing remarkable work. So what can we as Vermonters, what can we do to help you in your work, David? What can we do? A donation at the website certainly wouldn't hurt. We are, all of our work is funded through donations and through the dues that are paid by our formal members. So any help in that regard would be great. However, housing is everyone's issue. And so everyone can be a part of the solution. And I think that one thing that every single Vermonter can do is to be aware of, what I've been saying to people that we talk about affordable housing, really that means that when I pay for my housing, rent, mortgage, utilities, that it is 30% or less of my income. That's true for all of us. And so when you're tempted to think a certain way about a person experiencing homelessness, like everyone from the poorest of the poorest of the richest of the rich, what's 30% is 30%. And I think that that concept is very unifying and reminds us that we all sit at this table together and that we're all working on this issue together. And the other thing is that when people, I think sometimes people hear the phrase affordable housing, they automatically think of homelessness or they think of the poorest of the poor, but it's everyone. And so a big part that every Vermonter can do is to key into that. And no one should think like, well, this issue doesn't, this isn't my issue, this doesn't apply to me, because it does. And as we all know, all it takes is one small tragedy and your place on that scale can easily change. Well, in every conference I've been to, the number one thing that pops up is affordable housing. Number one, it's been like that for five years on the poverty council, it pops up all the time. And folks who really want to kind of go the extra mile, I think shooting an email to your legislator or a phone call to your legislator, if you're comfortable with that, telling them the importance of, especially around rental housing, rental housing safety that we need to do work on rental housing safety on providing an avenue for assuring that housing is safe. It's not just affordable, but safe and decent. Getting a roof over someone's head isn't the whole answer. Have you read the book evicted yet? I have, yeah. Yeah, you have, okay. I'm part of the Williston Restorative Justice Center. So we're immersed in all of this right now, talking about how do we create. And I think we all do probably move towards primarily to homelessness because that's where the suffering is, but you're absolutely right. And we do not want to lose the middle here in Vermont. We do not want to become a gentrified state. So, and also- And we don't want to think that, you know, I mean like the housing, the hotel motel program, fantastic. Like we took all these folks experiencing homelessness and gave them shelter and safety during the pandemic, but they are still experiencing homelessness. Those hotels are not a home, it's a shelter. And so it's very easy though, attempting to sit back and say, oh, we solved this. No, we did not. We put a band-aid on it. Of course we didn't solve it. That's not the way to solve it. And I think we really need to look at our property taxes too, because we're putting people out of their homes. And we have to look at our healthcare because healthcare, I mean, you get one, you know, one major medical illness and you don't have the insurance to cover it. You can end up on the street. I mean, like you said, all of us are just a step away from not having a home. So we're coming to the end of my show. And I've been very moved by you. I, when, as soon as we can get out in public, I want to go have, or whenever you want, I would love to have lunch with you. Yeah, for sure. I need you face to face and really get deeper into some of these issues and these subjects. I want to thank you for coming to Vermont and for choosing us. We're so delighted to have you and I'm so happy to learn more about you. And again, to my viewers, the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, visit their website at vteffortablehousing.org and make a donation. And David, let me know if there's anything I can do to help. If you need somebody down, I mean, I am, you know, I have created buildings and so if you ever need somebody down in the legislature to speak at a committee or whatever, and I've been immersed in this for a long time, but all of us in this community, you put our arms around you and want to have you succeed in the work that you do because it's so important. And so thank you. Thank you, thank you so much. And I add your name to my list, my go-to list. Please do. All right, and to my viewers, I'm going to say goodbye to you. This moment with Melinda has been fabulous with David Martins and I will see you soon.