 Good morning. Welcome to this joint hearing and thank you for being here for Homelessness Awareness Day. This is an annual event that really starts our legislative year off with a reminder that at this time of year it is not a good time to have the stress of homelessness in your life. This is never a good time but given that the temperatures are where they have been this is a visual reminder that not everyone in Vermont is thriving in a way that they are capable of doing if the rest of us were able to survive. So I appreciate everyone who has signed up to talk today. I'm going to start with introductions. We have many of us have been here before but many of us haven't so you have two committees here. My name is Tom Stevens. I'm the chair of General Housing and Military Affairs. And the other committee that's here is... I'm Anne Pugh. I chair the House Human Services Committee. I'm from South Burlington and I think what both committees being here represents to all the leaders to know that there are at minimum 32, if not 33, if not 150 people House members who are concerned about affordable housing and homelessness and making sure that every Vermonter has a home and a place to put their head at night. And maybe you could just go around and quickly say who we are, which committee and just your town because there are people here from across the state so that they know who you are. And we have people also here. And while Cherokee comes from a single town district of South Burlington I represent Waterbury, Bolton, Huntington, and Bealdscore. I like to say a few streets in South Burlington. And let's go this way and around and introduce ourselves. I'm Chip Troiano and I live in Standard and I represent Harvard Standard in Walden. And I'm Vice-Chair of General Housing. I'm Tiana Gonzalez. I represent the Musique and a few streets of Burlington. Quite literally on that. And I'm one house general. And I'm John Colacchi. And I'm the second representative of South Burlington that I'm on. I'm Jerry Howard. I represent Rutland City District 539 House General. I'm Tally Walls. I represent Mary City and I'm on the House Cabinet Committee. I'm Arianna Kamash. And I represent the Towns of Swanton and Sheldon in Franklin County District 4. And I live in Swanton. I'm James Gregor, Fairfield Fletcher, Bakersview, Human Services. I'm Dan Noyes. I live in Wilkette, represent Wilkette High Park, Johnson and Belvedere. And I'm on the Human Services Committee. I'm Jessica Roestan. And I represent half the streets in Sheldon and St. George. And I'm on the Human Services Committee. I'm Mary Guthriech. And I represent Essex Town. And I'm on the Human Services Committee. Over here, Cole. I represent Bloodlow, Mahaul and Shrewsbury. And I'm on the Human Services Committee. Emily Long. Barbara O'Hueng and Talisman in Lincoln County. And I'm on the Mahaul. Hello. My name's Theresa Wood. I live in Waterbury. And I represent Waterbury, Bolton, Hewelscore and Huntington. And I'm on the Human Services Committee. Matt Barrow. I represent Perkins, Harrisburg, Waltham, Pinn and Addison. And I'm on the House of God. Kelly Fayella. I live in London Dairy. I represent Weston, London Dairy, Stratton, Wauw, Jamaica. I'm Reddill Zodd. I'm on the Hill Streetville. And I represent Carter, Lothred, Fort Kitching. And I'm West Hartford. I'm Tom McFawn. And I represent Barry Town. I'm the Ranking Member on the Human Services Committee. I'm Sandy Haas. I'm from Rochester. I also represent Vendell's Doctorate in this field. And I'm Vice-Chair of House of Graces. That's us. And I think everyone is here. We have one baby sitting on the committee. So we have a list of folks who are here to testify or to share their stories. And I will do my best to be a traffic manager, but feel free to settle in and listen to this stuff. And again, I do want to thank all of the advocates who are here who do all this work and the folks who work for the state who really do this work. It is, in my experience, some of the hardest work that we do. And I really want to appreciate you coming out. And I'm glad that we have a bombing 28-3 day to talk about this issue. So thank you. So we'll start with Sarah Phillips. Thank you. Sarah Phillips, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department for Children and Families Agency of Human Services. I am tasked today with providing a very brief overview of the homeless assistance landscape in Vermont and how we work together in Vermont to end homelessness or to make homelessness rare and brief. I am also in front of House General this afternoon and House Human Services tomorrow. So I would offer that I'm happy to speak more in depth this afternoon with you all and tomorrow about OEO and about the work that we do specifically around homeless assistance. And I'm also always happy to come back and speak more in depth because I know you have a lot of folks this morning. I just want to briefly say that at the Agency of Human Services we recognize that housing stability is a really important and fundamental factor and across all of the work of the agency. And today I'm really only going to focus on homeless assistance housing. But of course across the agency we support a number of housing initiatives to support clients. So homeless assistance landscape can feel rather complicated sometimes. We have a variety of state programs and resources. So just to highlight a few of those the Housing Opportunity grant program is administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity and provides funding to support core funding for emergency shelter and service providers, homelessness prevention, rapid housing and some other initiatives. Of course we have the General Assistance Emergency Housing Program that provides motel vouchers for folks when there is no safe available shelter space. We also have a lot of supportive housing also through the Office of Economic Opportunity provides long term housing supports for families who have experienced homelessness. The Vermont rental subsidy provides rental assistance and then there's a lot of other state funded AHS housing programs that aren't homeless specific. So those are some of the state programs and resources that come into play. We also have a lot around structure and process so there's a lot of different funding sources not through the state that also support homeless assistance. The Vermont Council on Homelessness, that's our interagency workgroup that comes together and sort of owns Vermont's plan to end homelessness. It's how the agencies across state government work together. We have the Continues of Care and you'll hear about those this morning I'm sure from folks. We have two Continues of Care, the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness and the Chin and Homeless Alliance. Coordinated Entry really is the way that we're all working together within our homeless Continues of Care and our homeless system to connect people to housing resources quickly to match them to the appropriate resource. And then you might hear about HMIS or the Point in Time Count. And HMIS or Service Point is the management system that we use to track and collect and understand data around homelessness in the state and services. And the Point in Time Count is the annual census that we use to understand who's homeless on a given night. So just some brief highlights. The Point in Time Count is next week, two weeks or it's coming up very shortly. Now the 2018 Point in Time Count is from last year then so we don't have this year's new count. This is an annual census count of who's homeless in Vermont. So there's some limitations around that but it's sort of one of our best understanding around what homelessness means in Vermont. The Point in Time Count looks specifically at who's literally homeless. And by that I mean someone is staying in an emergency shelter. They are staying in a motel paid for by a charity or paid by the state or they're unsheltered meaning that they're camping and they don't have somebody else to go or they're living in a shed or living in their car. And that's who's counted on the Point in Time Count. So one night last year our Point in Time Count was 1,291 people. I broke out some of the different information for you here because I think sometimes when you think about who's homeless we have sort of a specific image or understanding in our mind but who's homeless and why they're homeless is very diverse in ways that we approach ending homelessness for those people and families is going to vary depending on their needs, right? So I think it's worth noting that 6% of people who are homeless on the Point in Time Count were actually unsheltered. Significant, right? It's worth noting that anywhere from this Point in Time Count is 23%. You'll see from the emergency shelter stays it's roughly 25%. People who are homeless are kids under 18. 40% of the total people are families with children. 10% are youth ages 12 to 24. So, you know, chronically homeless veterans, there's a lot of ways that we look at who's homeless and we try to understand and intervene based on the different population. There are two jurisdictions, HUD jurisdictions, Continuum of Care in this state that actually have some funding that comes from the federal government through the Continuum of Care. One is the Chittenden Homeless Alliance and the other is Vermont Coalition and Homeless. Some of you are wearing the coalition stickers today or you will see them around today, right? So the coalition is actually made up of 11 different local continuums of care. So what is a continuum of care exactly? So this are our local planning bodies. These are groups, stakeholders, not just service providers, but a range of folks within communities working to make homelessness rare and brief in their communities and they come together to identify what their gaps are, to understand and plan, to advocate, to identify what resources are needed and to coordinate and link. And so we have active continuums of care across the state that are working to address homelessness. We can also think of a homeless continuum of care as really being the range or the continuum of services and interventions that we have within our homeless assistance system in order to make homelessness rare and brief. So really is our housing crisis response system and we think about how all of those pieces come together to address homelessness, right? So we have outreach, assessment to make sure we understand what a household needs are, prevention and diversion, emergency shelters, one piece of how we address homelessness, but then also housing interventions like transitional housing or rapid rehousing or permanent supported housing. So I'm going to talk about each of those interventions just briefly to give you sort of a little bit deeper understanding, but the reality is within our homeless assistance system we have really limited resources. We target those resources to the folks with the most severe service needs. Those most likely to become homeless again. We have gaps in our system of care. We have waiting lists. We have waiting lists for housing. We have waiting lists for services. We have waiting lists for shelter. We also exist and do this work within a housing market where the housing costs compared to wages are very challenging and have vacancy rates across the entire state. Vacancy rate problem, very low vacancy rate, sorry, let me clarify, very low vacancy rates in our rental housing market across the whole state. So emergency shelter, this is John Graham in Virginia. That's what the picture is. So emergency shelter by design is intended to be temporary and help guests move quickly onto permanent housing. Emergency shelter, we typically think of it as being like a congregate facility like this picture of John Graham in Virginia, but we also know that we meet emergency shelter needs through motel vouchers when we don't have shelter beds or shelter rooms. We have a variety of seasonal warming shelters that only operate during the cold weather months. We also for families are sometimes using scattered site apartments that are temporary stay apartments. For youth, we sometimes use host homes or transitional living program. And we also have a variety of domestic violence and sexual violence shelters around the state. Just some brief numbers around who's staying in our publicly funded emergency shelter system. So last year, 2018, we had 3,872 persons staying in our shelter. I think I like to give the year round numbers because if you just look at the point of time count, you think, oh, there's only 1,100 people in Vermont that are homeless, but that's just one night, right? That's just a snapshot. So looking at the whole year, we see that that number is just much higher. And this is just folks staying in homeless shelters, right? The number looks like it went down, but you'll actually see in a couple of slides that the number of persons have went down. But the length of time folks were staying in shelter was higher. And so if we have a limited number of shelter beds and rooms available and people are staying in them longer because they can't exit to permanent housing as quickly, then the number of people we can serve in those beds goes down. The number of kids in shelter was about 1,100 last year. So that's about 25%. We know of those kids that about half of them are under the age of six. And then this is the average length of time in shelters. You can say this is a longitudinal view. So you can say going back to 2002, we've looked at this in the same way consistently and it consistently gets higher and higher, longer and longer in terms of how long people are staying in shelters. Our office administers the HOP funding. We collect the reports from emergency shelters on the state. We roll it up into this number and then we say, what does this mean? Why is this happening? And we go back to our emergency shelters and we ask them for their understanding. Consistently, we heard that it's just hard to find housing. It's just hard to find housing. We also heard that it's hard to just find a unit. We also know that there was a temporary freeze on Section 8 subsidies and that our Section 8 vouchers that had an impact on how quickly people were able to exit because they need rental assistance. They need the unit that they find to be affordable. So when we think about how do we intervene, what are the housing interventions that we use when people are homeless? There's a variety of ways that we can support people. So we have supportive housing. This is evidence-based. We have long-term wraparound supports and long-term affordable housing for folks who need that support in order to live independently. We have just our sort of mainstream affordable housing resources that are supported through our affordable housing providers across the state and also through public housing authorities that just make rent affordable for Vermonters. We have rapid housing interventions. These are time-limited rental assistance like the Vermont rental subsidy. So in other words, you get some rental assistance for a few months or a year or even up to two years and then that rental assistance goes away and you either exit that program because you bridge onto like a Section 8 housing choice voucher or you exit that program successfully because you were able to increase your income. So it's time-limited rental assistance. And then we have some initiatives that support homelessness prevention. Homelessness prevention and eviction prevention are definitely interconnected but they're not exactly the same thing. So part of what we do with homelessness prevention funds is to support eviction prevention and provide people with funding for rental arrears. But homelessness prevention is also when we're thinking about families and individuals who may not have their own regular home, they might be couchsurfing or staying with other folks and we want to prevent them from becoming literally homeless and so we might help them with a security deposit or some rent assistance to get into their own new home. Rapid rehousing, I mentioned, and this is really a combination of helping people define and get housing really quickly. We have a number of providers that are doing more and more work around landlord liaison work. This is reaching out to landlords and engaging with landlords directly to make their housing available to people who are experiencing homelessness and supporting those landlords and doing that through creative work like risk bulls or housing mitigation funds to sort of help them take that chance. Time-limited subsidies I mentioned but I think the other piece around any sort of helping families in housing is the ongoing housing support services or housing retention services to help them. Once they're in that housing, help them to maintain and be successful. And I mentioned permanent supported housing which is long-term, home-based, individualized, but intensive support services and affordable housing for folks with higher needs. When we talk about services connected to housing, we think about it in two ways and so I just want to mention this. We think about there's a set of services around housing that's housing navigation, right? That's helping people to find housing or transition into housing, filling out all the applications, finding a unit, getting the funding together that you need to get into that unit because it's expensive to move into a new unit, right? And getting connected to services. And we do a lot of that in our housing crisis response system. And then the other piece that is equally as important is the housing retention is how do we help people sustain their tenancy and so we need to make sure that both of those pieces of services are available for people who are homeless. And I mentioned the housing opportunity grant program and I'm not going to go into depth about Hop today, lovingly called Hop, but this is a blending of state and federal funding to support housing crisis interventions across the state and it supports more than 40 organizations in the state working on to address homelessness. And Family Supportive Housing is the other program our office administers. This is long term supportive housing, case management and care coordination for families with multiple episodes of homelessness, very young kids and child welfare DCF involvement and it provides, it helps place those families into affordable housing provides long term support services for them. Coordinated Entry is something you might hear. Coordinated Entry is the way, again, that we're working together within our homeless continuum of care to get people connected to housing to understand what their needs are and to match them to the appropriate intervention. And that's it for me. Thank you. Well, I don't think on public areas we'll take too, too many questions, but I just want to ask one bubbling up on our newsfeed are the fears of both landlords and tenants for section eight and HUD for old school stamps and others that are affected by the shutdown. What is the state doing very quickly right now about, while the rest of us are freaking out about whether or not we're going to open up? That's a good question and some of that might be outside of my scope, so I'm happy to follow up more specifically. Perhaps a quick answer related to homelessness. I can tell you about what's happening with food stamps and the other things. Yes, so I know we're working fast and furiously at DCF and Economic Services Division to have SNAP benefits issued early for what would be normally the February 1st, but to issue those early. And that should happen, I think on the 20th. But Sean Brown, Deputy Commissioner and Representative Pute can say more about that. I would say the homeless assistance, HUD homeless assistance funds aren't impacted by the shutdown. So we're able to continually, we have some HUD funding for homeless assistance that comes through OEO and our grant partners have all been informed and know that their ability to operate programs is not impacted by the shutdown and their ability to access funds is not impacted either at this time. So as far as section 8 in the housing authorities, I think I would have to defer to, for instance, Richard Williams at the Vermont State Housing Authority would be more an expert in terms of what it means for them on a day-to-day basis. But as I understand it, they have funds available to operate through February. Thank you. And Rebecca, Lawrence, Gomez. And if you could just identify yourself in your title. Definitely. Good morning. My name is Rebecca Lawrence Gomez. I am the Assistant Director at Pathways Vermont. And I am also here representing the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, which was referenced by Sarah, but we're a coalition of providers, persons who have experienced homelessness, persons who are committed to homelessness no longer existing in Vermont, that meet and work together to think about what are the needs of our communities, what are the needs of our state, what are our solutions, how can we advocate and educate folks about the experience of homelessness. So I wanted to meet with you today and just highlight that homelessness is an issue and a problem that can be solved. And in fact, every single one of us in this room knows the resolution to homelessness. I think a lot of times we're faced with struggles in our communities and we're all kind of like, oh, I don't know, we'll maybe try this or this might help or this might bring us to where we need to be. But homelessness has a clear stopping place. You know, if you have a house, when you go home this evening or when you go home at the end of the session depending on how you work, you know, you're not homeless. You're not in that status. You're not a person in need. At Pathways Vermont, we practice a system of response to homelessness called Housing First. And if you hear nothing out from me today, I hope you hear that every Vermonter should have Housing First. Every Vermonter who is experiencing homelessness should go into a permanent, safe, secure home. Whatever we can do to minimize the length of time, the duration during which people are in the system, in hotels, you know, experiencing instability, really I think that's all of our jobs is to resolve that and to move people into permanent, safe homes as quickly as possible. Pathways specifically serves and works with the population of folks who have struggled the most in our communities, individuals who have serious mental health challenges, individuals who struggle with substances and the whole range of them, individuals who have experienced what we call chronic homelessness. So folks who have been homeless for a year. You know, and individuals who have been homeless for periods longer than I've been alive. You know, we've worked with folks who have never even had a roof over their head that was permanent, secure, and 100% theirs. And the model of Housing First, again, finds folks, meets with them, and then supports with moving into an apartment as quickly as possible. We partner with community landlords to find units and to identify appropriate housing for people, and then we have a supportive service team that wraps around and provides assistance. And that can't be understated, the value of these support services and these teams that assist with everything across the board, right? With accessing housing subsidies, so funding for housing that support with moving, as was noted, that's, you know, a major part of the transition. But also who can give feedback and support around being a neighbor, right? Like there are lots of things you can do if you're camping out that you can no longer do if you have a roof over your head and someone who, you know, just shares a thin wall with you. Within the model of Housing First, we have ended homelessness for over 250 Vermonters who were sleeping outside, sleeping in their cars, in and out of shelters, lacking that permanence. We've also worked with over 200 individuals exiting our correction system. We have lots of people who have reached their maximum time for corrections and yet can't return to the community because they lack housing and or they lack support to be successful in housing. You know, they really need some intensive assistance to be there. There are federal housing subsidies that was returned last year for a lack of capacity for service providers such as pathways. The Housing First model, although we work with a population of persons who have really struggled, have really had challenges, we have an 85% retention rate. So 85% of the people we serve tonight are sleeping with a roof over their head. The 15% are struggling and might be really loud and you might hear a lot about those people in your community, but 85% of those people who were considered inappropriate for housing who had spent years as, you know, that alcoholic in your community or that person who's struggling, in fact, can make it. Can be your neighbor, can be my neighbor, can be part of our communities. Housing First and getting people into housing as quickly as possible, as immediately as possible is cost-effective. The cost of a night in a psychiatric hospital in Vermont is somewhere in the range of $1,500 a day. We have the cost of our housing and services, and mind you, the housing is oftentimes covered through a federal subsidy, is around $60 a day. It's also less than the cost of a shelter, certainly less than the cost of incarceration as well. And I think I can just kind of wrap up there. And again, just highlighting and focusing on homelessness is a solvable problem. And in Vermont, it's tangible, 1200 people, right? That's like literally we could probably learn the names of maybe 500 people. We could probably actually name who those people are. Even you as a representative, you probably could know the names of the people in your community who are struggling with homelessness. So whatever we can do to really focus our resources, our energy, our attention on getting people out of that status and as quickly as possible in a housing, I think is really our role. Thank you. And I think you're underplaying it for time. It will have you back in later, but I want to just re-emphasize that the fiscal sort of being accounting portion of your testimony basically said for a fraction of the costs of what it does for general emergency room, psychiatric ward, and union services, that this particular program is geared to be infinitesimally less in terms of those kinds of resources. Definitely. The money that you had to return last year was because... So it wasn't within my agency. Again, I represent kind of a larger coalition also within the state. It was federal housing subsidies. So when we talk about how does someone afford housing, it's federal dollars that go towards paying rent every month. So, yeah. Okay, thank you. Yes, representable. I have a question about that 15%. What is the final rate for those costs? Try, try again. You know, and work with your community. We work with back to the coalition model and these groups who get together. Sometimes we have to as a community say, oh my goodness, what can we do? And ultimately, many, many folks find something that works for them. It might not be pathways, it might be with another partner, but I really think as communities, as homeowners, we really are committed to seeing people all the way through. Thank you. Thank you. Jessica Radward. Jessica's coming up. What time do we need to stop this at 11.45? Is that the last, the latest we should stop at 11.45? Good morning, everyone. Thanks so much for having me today. My name is Jessica Radward. I'm an attorney at Vermont League of Lades. I've been there since 2010. And in the past eight years, I've done hundreds and hundreds of housing cases. And I can tell you that personally for me, they're so hard. It's so hard because of what's at stake. It's a basic need. It's shelter. It's having a roof over your head. And the stakes are just so high. And so many of my clients come to me in a complete and utter panic. They don't know what they're going to do if they end up losing their housing. Are they going to end up being homeless? Will their kids be able to stay in school? Will they end up losing their jobs? The human costs of eviction are really immeasurable. But there are some things that we can measure, right? We can measure the number of evictions that happen in the state of Vermont. How many people end up becoming homeless as a result, what it would have cost to try to resolve those eviction cases. But the thing was, until the summer, and now, when we've published this report, Eviction in Vermont, we really didn't have that data available to us. And I read the book evicted by Matt Desmond. It was published in 2016. And I saw a bunch of articles that Mr. Desmond had started an eviction lab that was going to have data from all over the country about evictions and what was going on. And so I was really excited. I looked up Vermont, and it said that there had been 39 eviction cases in 2016. And at Vermont Legal Aid, we've done more than 39 eviction cases in 2016. I knew it wasn't right. And so we talked to the eviction lab folks, and it turns out they just couldn't get data for Vermont because we don't have online filing in our judiciary where they could actually look up the records. So we decided, you know what? We're going to get a couple of interns for the summer, and we're going to send them to the courthouses to look at those actual files to see what's going on. Because without good data, how do you come up with good solutions? And that's what we really want to do. So the two counties that we picked, because we couldn't go everywhere, were Windsor and LaMoyle, and in our report you'll see why we chose those counties. We thought they reflected the demographics of the state as a whole. And now in the report you'll see that we're talking about a lot of data-driven solutions to the problem of evictions and the homelessness that can result. So looking at some basics, there are around 1,700 eviction cases filed in Vermont every year, and in 75% of those cases, the tenants end up losing their housing. But, you know, I think a lot of the times when we talk about evictions, we talk about tenants as being like the losers. 75% of them do lose the cases, but they're not the only ones who lose through this process, right? For the landlords, they're taking a lot of time to have to go to court. They're having to pay for a lawyer. They're having to pay attorney fees and court costs. And a lot of the time, even if they get a judgment for nonpayment of rent, they're not going to be able to collect it because the tenant is so low in income. And for us as taxpayers, we're losing out too when people lose their eviction cases. Because we're paying for shelters. We're paying to run the judiciary to hear all of these eviction cases. We're paying for the higher costs of educating kids who are having to get shuffled from one school to another because they're having to move all the time. So is there a better way, right? Can we turn this from a scenario in which everyone's essentially losing through the eviction process to one where we're all not necessarily going to win, but at least coming out a little bit more ahead? So we talk about a lot of data in our report. But what you'll see is that most of the eviction cases, when you look at those files one by one, it's not huge tales of drama that are going to make the nightly news of bad tenants and bad landlords. Instead, we see that 70% of the eviction cases are just based on the tenant's inability to pay the rent. They just can't afford it. The median amount that the tenants owed was $2,000. Not really extreme. Most of the cases involve private landlords, not the subsidized housing providers. You'll see in our report we talk about Champlain Housing Trust having this repayment program that really helps people stay housed. Private landlords don't really have the resources to be able to do that sort of thing. When the cases get to court, another thing that we see is that in 75% of the cases, the landlord has an attorney and the tenant doesn't. We only see 1% of the cases where the tenant has an attorney and the landlord doesn't. So what happens with all these unrepresented tenants? The things that they're filing in court make it very, very clear. They do not understand the legal process at all. They don't know how to represent themselves. Time and again reviewing these files, it's really heartbreaking. They're actually begging for more time to be able to pay their landlord. It's not that they don't want to pay, they just don't have the money right now. So let me just tell you one thing that you'll find in our report. This is something that someone actually filed in court. I'm going to read it to you. So this is an unrepresented tenant and she filed a document with the court saying, I fell asleep during my ride home from work, totaling my car due to lack of sleep from working a full-time overnight job and being a full-time mommy. Unfortunately, I lost my job due to injuries and I lost my family from going to work. We always pay late or not, and we will catch up. And when I look at the court file, I see that this tenant paid rent during the pendency of the case, but she was never able to fully catch up and she got evicted. And we tried to find all these families in the data that we were studying. We tried to find out what happened to all of them, but wow, it's really hard to find people after they've been evicted, so I don't know whether or not that mom ended up homeless with her kids and had more help. Was there something that we could have done? What did she owe so that could she have gotten hot money to be able to pay that off? Or did she need even more resources? Could this have been prevented? I could tell you a ton of anecdotes. I'm not going to do that right now because we have limited time, but what we are seeing, even with just providing a lawyer for the day, is we're able to resolve a lot of these cases. But sometimes, because of limited resources, we still come up short. So the data that we have in the report shows that most evictions are caused just by poverty and they create even more poverty in their wake. As you know from the Affordable Housing Coalition data, to afford a modest Q-Veteran apartment, you have to make $22.40 an hour in Vermont. That's around $45,000 a year. And so if one thing goes wrong, a brief period of unemployment, damage to the unit because they're a domestic violence victim, we had one case where the police had to kick down the door and Tenen couldn't get help with that anywhere. A costly vehicle repair. Even I recently had a client who wasn't able to pay her rent because her daughter was finally going to break the cycle of poverty. She got into college and she paid for her books and so she didn't have the rent money left. But a lot of her mentors, these are good people who are just one paycheck away from disaster. And it really could happen to so many people living in Vermont. And we need more affordable housing and we need more supportive services for their hardest to house. But what we're really talking about in this report is that affordability gap for low income families. They can hang on, they can pay their rent going forward. Something just happened and now they need some rental assistance and a little bit of lawyering and a little bit of case management. So in our report we're proposing some sensible solutions to reduce the number of evictions in Vermont and thereby hopefully reduce homelessness. What we saw Sarah talking about that population, a lot of those 40% of families who are homeless are these folks, right? Who are getting evicted based on that bump in the road. Won't solve every case but it could solve a large number of them. First, by increasing funding for rental arrearages and giving more flexibility to those programs, we think that evictions could be significantly reduced. Based on our data of the actual amount that people owed when they were getting evicted, we see that $800,000 spent wisely could probably reduce the number of non-payment evictions by half. That's kind of crazy, right? We spend, I think, $367,000 of hop dollars on rental arrearages and there are small little, you know, $75 right here or $75 right there. But I can tell you, even for me as a lawyer, it's a nightmare putting together all those little grants of money and payment plans to try to keep someone housed when they owe more than what Hop can provide and also that flexibility part. Like their county is Franklin County, you know, last year, I remember there was a period of time when they just run out of money to help people with back rent at all. So some people just from being in the wrong county, you know, ran out of luck because there was no money left. So another way to think about this too, right, is if we look at a family spending 84 days in emergency shelter, the average cost there through the GA program, the average cost there is $75 a night, right? And so at 84 days, that's over $6,000. If they only owe $3,000 in rent, I'd much rather keep them housed in the same place than have them end up homeless, living in a motel, potentially doing their jobs, the kids having to switch schools and all the other costs that we just can't even quantify. Another thing that we're looking at that we're advocating for is legal strategies to reduce evictions as an upstream homelessness prevention tool, having more lawyer for the day programs, which we haven't been able to offer in all the counties just due to lack of staffing, and also trying to partner with social service providers to bring them into the courts with us. You know, I'm sure if Rita Markley from COTS had funding availability, she'd like to have her staff there so that if we see someone who's about to get evicted or in a small amount of rent, we can just write them a check, write the landlords for the most part just want to get paid, right? So we acknowledge that spectrum of solutions is needed to fully address the eviction problem in Vermont and homelessness, and some tenants are going to need a lot more than financial support. But for many families who've experienced a temporary financial setback, funding for a brief period, arrearages, an attorney even if it's just for a day and some small community supports is often enough to prevent that family from ending up homeless. And I think if we took a chance, right, and put more money into rental arrearages, maybe we would see in the next couple of years that we're not spending as much on GA motels. There might be savings in our future. And again, then the landlords are getting paid, they're being made whole, the tenant gets to stay house, and for us as taxpayers, if my theory is right, we're all saving the money in the long run. Not to mention that intangible, people get to have a roof over their head and stay in their home. And that's huge, especially for families with kids. So we encourage you to read our report, Infection in Vermont, a closer look. I'm happy to come back and give you more information about our findings or talk about solutions at a future date. And we look forward to working with the legislature this session to come up with solutions to the problem of evictions in Vermont and homelessness. Thank you. And next up, we have Stephen Marshall. And just as a service announcement, if you were interested in seeing any dominance that have been shared with us, they are on our respective websites under today's date. So for future reference, since we don't have papers, Good morning. Thank you very much for coming to hear the community speak about homelessness and housing. This is my friend Jesse Tipton. He's a homeless man who lives in Burlington. He will give a presentation after I've had a few things to say. I've been homeless intermittently my entire adult life, but five years ago, when I joined Vermont Associates, a federally funded program to help people to return to employment, I began working at COTS. It was my first formal engagement in the homeless community. I moved from there to Community and Economic Development Office of the City of Burlington, where my supervisor invited me to join the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance as a person with lived experience. I've now been... Sorry. I've now been with the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance for three years and helped to lead the Chittenden County point-in-time count. That's my background. I want to say about the point-in-time count, just this is parenthetical, that where it's relatively correct for shelters, we estimate that about a quarter of the people who are not in shelters but are homeless are counted. That we need to think of homelessness not as homelessness being without walls, but being housing insecure. And I want to say here that I really admire the word that Jess Radboard has done. Because the HUD PIN count doesn't allow us to count people who are couch-surfing, people who are living in old trailers that are leaky and cost $20 a day to heat. That's from a story that I got when I was working at CDOEL. I forgot to mention the last year and a half I've been at CDOEL finishing a development project for them. They asked me to talk to their clients, our clients, the homeless, the indigent, the people having difficulty keeping their housing. So I want to go on to my formal statement. I was recently attending a meeting of the Vermont Council on Homelessness which provides a moment for the public to speak. And I made a plea for more and better shelter. I've been asked not to undermine the idea of housing first. And I couldn't agree with that more. We need affordable housing. But I'll get back to that. I want to make really clear that I do not see this as either or that we need better shelter system because people today are suffering. So there are several reasons that we need... Okay, I'm sorry, I'm going off script here. After the meeting, a leader in the public housing development field confronted me with a sincere concern. Why wouldn't we spend money on shelter when we could spend it on housing? I've had to cause, therefore, to find answers to this question. And there are many. So here they are. Because no one should have to live in a 28 people in a room with bunk beds cheap by jowl. We should long ago have built shelters where there are rooms with four persons each the way they do at the GroundWorks shelter in Brattleboro. Because we should long ago have created shelter for people with social anxiety disorder. We should long ago have created shelter space for people with dogs and cat companions. Because we should long ago have created shelter for families without children. Because we should long ago have created a night shelter that people can use during the day. They don't have to use it in the morning. Because the stream of homelessness is constant. There are always going to be new people arriving to homelessness. No matter how much housing you have, because bad luck will always happen. Because a number of people homeless are not soon to be zero. Pit counts are not showing a steady decline, they're showing a steady increase. Because the need is now. There are more people who are homeless than there are spaces in the shelters. Because the last tenant of a shelter, if you've built that shelter correctly, before it closes will be the person who rents the room from the shelter owner. So the shelters can be built to be affordable housing when we don't need them as shelters anymore. I feel that because enough housing would cost orders of magnitude more than the same capacity of shelter would cost in the short term, we can shelter people now and we must. Because homeless are members of the community upon whom you would not wish the agony of sleeping in a doorway at risk of theft attack being rousted before being rested. We need shelter because the economy is not just. It does not provide enough housing at affordable prices and it does not provide a livable wage. Until you, the legislature, the state of Vermont, the people of Vermont, the community that we are unless we until we, let me get back to script, until we elect to create structural changes in the economy the poor and the homeless will be a feature of the social landscape and shelter will be needed. The argument is made that housing is cheaper to build and operate in the long run so of course we want to house everyone and I don't want to undermine housing first but there are people suffering today because we don't plan and build housing for when today would be in the long run. We didn't do it then so now we need help, now we need shelter I don't want the money taken away from housing I want shelter to be created that provides a short-term dignified transition for people who are now left to feel that the community does not care about them and trust me there are a lot of very cynical angry people who feel like the community does not care about them because social services are really hard to navigate it all kind of involves a tough life when you're poor a lot of very entrepreneurial people who can't make it and I will Jesse will talk a little more about that my message is very simple homeless folks are homeless for a wide range of reasons including drug addiction, mental illness bad financial decisions, relationships gone bad and sometimes criminal behavior and there are still members of our communities there are people who need support sometimes just to hand up people are sometimes heard to talk about homeless folks as a nuisance even people to be feared the answer is not to chase them out of the bank the park the ATM they have found to sleep in or to persecute them in their camps the answer is to work to ensure safety and dignity for everyone wherever they find themselves as would any other member of the community the answer is to embrace them as members of the community with the services they need to be restored people, agency and dignity here is one more reason because the community owes it to themselves to itself to be safe for any of us the community must be safe for all of us because by taking care of its most vulnerable members the community takes care of everyone it gives care to the entire community so the last two points you can see I'm close to the end here's where I would start the two things that poor people need more than anything, even more than housing is a way to get to appointments and the money to pay for identification I learned this at CDOEL where that was the prominent need that was expressed to me as a researcher this is what I would do I would propose to put bus passes on EBT cards the number of rides being proportional to the benefits given or gas money for folks who live where there is no public transit the security of having a certain number of bus rides each month or the ability to fill a gas tank would enable poor and homeless people to plan their trips go to appointments with doctors employment offices and seat probation officers and to get to jobs that they have the ability to get identification is the difference between getting housing getting employment picking up medication picking up mail at the post office and doing banking and check cashing and none of that identification is required by the community for participation in the community if it is to be that barrier the community is obliged to help us to help those who are poor to overcome that barrier we are as always confronted by the choice of whether to build security on wealth or to build security by sharing wealth security through wealth condemns many to poverty and insecurity security through sharing which is what I ask of our community elevates the entire community to prosperity I would like to share with my really good friend Jesse hello my name is Jesse thank you for giving me one of your time today as Steve said I'm currently homeless I live in a tent in Burlington with my best friend she's an 80 pound mixed dog named Sadie six years ago I was like most of the people in this room I had a good job I baked bread I was married I had a good apartment our son was fixed in a graduate high school I even got a new puppy during his efficient buddy fast forward from that point and the bakery closed it lost my job we couldn't pay rent so we decided to move into our station wagon which was really fun for about a minute and then it wasn't anymore and we were heading for kind of a bitter divorce and right after that I found myself in my tent with my dog Sadie I got a motel room for a little while to the state lasted a little while until one of the motels reported that they had a dog and the back outside we went I went through a bitter period I kind of felt the injustice I thought if I could change my dog to a tree and go inside a motel room negative 10 in the morning the cops would come arrest me for animal cruelty so how could these people not be charged putting me out there with her I looked for help in all the usual places but they couldn't help me I want to say that they wouldn't help me I soon became very embittered that my community would not help me help myself and my best friend we just didn't fit in any of the normal pre-determined boxes and there's so many others out there like me not usually for the same reason but always because they don't fit in the usual boxes there's a lady I know I sometimes have dinner with her until Sunday night dinner at the red door church she's bright, she's smart, she's funny she's got a beautiful smile until there's a crowd around her putting her on a shelter with a bunch of strangers in the beds next to her would drive her a social anxiety so high that she would have to leave she would force a leave so she just stays outside the people out here have adapted in many ways there's a couple who couldn't stay in the shelter because she had social anxiety and depended on him for comfort and support but the shelter only accepts adults as singles so they could not stay together some folks that know where to recovery can't stay in the little barrier shelter meanwhile there's no room at the regular shelter where they can be safe from being confronted by people using drugs then there's the folks that no one wants to work with the inveterate drunks they develop me hobbled develop a mentally hobbled who belong in a group home the sex offender and those who have been fighting for so long and turned down for so long and turned out that they've just become embittered and given up on caring or trying anymore there are dozens and dozens on the streets in our communities that I can name who do not have my respect or my empathy yet they need help and I believe they deserve help from us all of us here have heroes and idols that we look up to for me most of the people on that list are the men and women everything to fight for us to keep what we have these people my heroes have a motto they live by and often times die for and that motto is no one left behind as to the question what should we do I'm just a guy who struggled for four years unsuccessfully to get out of this mess so I obviously have not found answers but just like all the others out here I know I can't fight them alone so the answer I must give to that question is the same that my heroes would give we must do whatever we have to thank you next up we have Renee Weeks my name is Renee Weeks I grew up down in Manchester, Vermont and I now live up in Orange County, Vermont and I've been working for the past 20 years in our state in the field of mental health substance abuse correctional treatment and the housing service sectors now I'd like to thank the testimony that was just given I see that story in my work all the time and I appreciate what you're going through and know it's difficult thank you so the past eight years I've been the director of shelter and clinical services at the upper valley Haven in Vermont the Haven is a private non-profit organization that provides shelter food educational services to children adults and community members and service coordination both within our shelters and to community members that are not housed and community members that are housed supportive housing we're open 365 days a year we don't charge for any of the services that we deliver we serve more than 14,000 people in our area which is about 45 mile radius around White River thank you for all the support that you have provided in funding programs to create opportunities and alleviate homelessness in our state so next week Sarah had pointed out that we have the point in time count here in Vermont it's a week from today the Haven and the Hartford Police Department have created a partnership where we go out and provide outreach services to those people that are out camping in tents it helps give us an accurate count more than that we've decided that over the past two years it's really important to do this outreach effort on a regular basis so the intent is to check on people to make sure that they're safe number one number two we bring them any necessary supplies flashlights are really popular warm socks hand and toe warmers food personal hygiene products so we're out there with big packs on snowshoeing through the snow hand sites probably the most important thing that we do is establish a relationship and connection with the people that are out there so that eventually they feel safe enough I know where to go to get help and shelter and we have seen that be very effective last year and most people coming in out of the tents into our seasonal shelters and then just two weeks ago we went out and we were able to check all the tent sites that we were aware of and there was no one in the tents and no footprints out to them suggesting that no one had been out there recently so that was good news but we'll keep checking we know how things change so I wanted to also re-emphasize the value of the three-legged stool approach to even getting as close to ending homelessness here in Vermont we really need more housing stock I know in the upper valley our vacancy rate fluctuates between one and a half percent to two percent we need affordable housing options and voucher opportunities for those that are living under certain income thresholds we also need more supportive services some of the other partnerships we've developed with our local housing developers Twin Pines Housing being one and Bill Bittinger who spearheaded the bridge in Maine Project in White River they were able to get the bricks and mortars to speak to build additional housing and the upper valley haven had offered to provide supportive services to those units that were dedicated to homeless populations we've had that partnering has been really successful the people that we've housed through both of those projects that have occurred this year remain housed there successfully the family supportive housing program is also a hugely successful program in the state of Vermont Sarah from the Office of Economic Opportunity referred to it earlier in their most recent report they've shown that stable housing among families in our state was clearly linked to their engagement in supportive services in addition 90% of the families served in that program statewide moved on from the program successfully which is huge so we need more programs like that I'd like to highlight two important trends that service providers are seeing across our state one is that when people do acquire housing vouchers for housing subsidy it's very difficult for us to help them find housing that falls within the range of the market rent guidelines we need more housing we need more affordable housing and then perhaps some more realistic maximum rental cost guidelines set forth by the voucher programs number two is that many of the vouchers that we have in our state require a support or service match they require some connection to supportive services which are typically not funded examples include the Vermont rental subsidy program our shelter plus care and rapid rehousing vouchers and more and more providers across the state have no capacity to be able to support people even when the vouchers exist so being able to fund and increase capacity and service coordination and housing supports is really important I think that every Vermonter deserves a home and every child deserves the stability of a home and a home is more than a house it's a place of safety and connection and look at the numbers of the homeless people and households that we count through the point in time count the numbers on the shelter stays and the hotel stays but these are really not reflective of the true number of homeless people that exist in our state I know through working at the shelter many people become homeless after couch surfing for a period of time from family or friends and that is just so widespread so we have children out there that don't know where they're staying tomorrow night when they get home from school and they endure incredible stress a lack of predictability in their life and trauma so we may not count them as homeless in our accounts but they are homeless I'd like to thank you for your time and your consideration and your service to our state thank you Next up, we have Deb Zach as the manager Hi everyone I'm Deb Zach and I work at Wyndham & Windsor Housing Trust I've been there for 18 years Wyndham & Windsor Housing Trust is an affordable housing developer based in Brattleboro we have a satellite office in the landfill we have developed over a thousand apartments and homes across two counties and we've done that over the past 31 years we're also the second largest community land trust in the nation Last February our Executive Director Elizabeth Bridgewater spoke to you about our first permanent supportive housing project Great River Terrace we took a dilapidated motel and received funding from the housing bond to among other sources to help actually help leverage additional funding so that we could turn that dilapidated motel into Great River Terrace Great River Terrace has 22 units of permanent supportive apartments we have efficiencies in one bedrooms it's supportive housing for the chronically homeless and very vulnerable individuals so we started this process as Sarah referenced in her presentation at the community at the local community of care committee about three years ago a little bit more than that I think we had never done permanent supportive housing in our region before and we invited Champlain Housing Trust down to talk to us about their project and it really created a momentum and a vision to really figure out how we could stave off some of the homeless problem in our region and from that from those first beginnings we formed a pretty strong partnership with Groundworks Collaborative who is the local shelter and Health Care and Rehabilitation Services who's the local mental health provider in our area and our agency we formed a partnership we have a very structured memorandum of understanding it defines funding, staff how long we do that for what each of our roles are and what our vision for the property is we have so we've taken that vision to reality and excuse me I just have to pull that chair up here so what reality looks like today at Great River Terrace we finished the project finished construction in July not without its hurdles we had a flood at the last minute in one of the buildings and so that delayed our occupancy for about a month which was really hard for some of the people who had applied with us they were chronically homeless but we all made it through we started moving people in in July and we reached full occupancy at the end of October we had one left that we someone mentioned in testimony about IDs and finding identification and so that was our hurdle with this one homeless person is really trying to figure out how to get identification for that person in the application process so we're full now and we have we have a full time housing support coordinator on site in offices in our community building we have a full time case manager from GroundWorks Collaborative on site in an office and we have a part time mental health case manager from healthcare rehabilitation services on site all three of these staff work together every day to engage tenants to talk about their ongoing needs and to really build what we see as a caring, cohesive community at Great River Terrace it's a great project I could really go on and on and on about it but anyway so how does it work well we have a service plan we worked hard on one of the biggest hurdles we had as a partnership as a permanent supportive housing team which we still work on today we meet every month and we work through all these challenges and see where we're at with outcomes and see where we've got to improve and what successes we've had we developed a service plan in addition to our memorandum of understanding that really details how we collaborate with the service providers and property management how we work together how we deal with anyone from a rent standpoint we have a whole how not to evict someone policy and we work really really hard with everyone on rent payment housekeeping mental health issues addiction issues trauma is a big factor for these folks that have come into this housing and lots of times what happens is when people get their apartment they're all glowy they're not in the woods anymore they have housing for the first time for some people in many many years and that suppresses a lot of the trauma these folks have been through and so a couple months down the road it starts to bubble up again and so our case managers and our housing support coordinator really work hard to help people fight that and and so I can't say enough about the hard work in the long hours that the staff that our three organizations have committed to work to bring stability to this population so we're very excited about this project we think it's a model that really works the three-legged stool that you've heard about that it wouldn't work without any of those legs the funding is what you advocate for us to bring to bring to us so we can build affordable housing the rental subsidies we've been so fortunate to have 21 rental subsidies from Vermont State Housing Authority we were very very lucky and then the third piece are the supportive service piece and so we've all made that commitment that if we're going to have this project in our community it has to work it has to be successful for the long term so we have a very active community room activities going on all the time therapy recovery groups art crafts we have a tenant council that's forming just after three and a half months of full occupancy it's kind of amazing where we're at so at this point the only thing I can really add is a thank you thank you for your work for your service to our state and to help bring more funding into building more affordable housing and certainly to help us bridge this gap that we have in housing so homeless I'd also just like to end with some words of our housing support coordinator and she hasn't been on the job very long she's been with us since May but she works every day with this population and she sees the needs and she basically has said that permanent supportive housing which is largely missing in Vermont is so far proving to be an essential piece in helping our most vulnerable community members re-stabilize and resume building the foundation of their lives for years to come to me this is real wisdom and I'd just like to leave you with that and thank you again thank you congratulations thank you we have three more folks who have student houses next and then just one point out of time it's 11-23 we're still on time I think today it's 11-45 good morning thank you thank you for the opportunity to speak today my name is Susan Howes and I'm a housing case manager for CEVCA which is one of five community action agencies in Vermont I work out of Brattleboro and my position as housing case manager is funded by the housing opportunity grant program or HOP under HOP I work with people experiencing homelessness and also with people at risk of losing their housing funds are designated as rapid re-housing funds or homeless prevention funds although the re-housing usually isn't rapid and the prevention doesn't always prevent housing insecurity in one capacity or another I've been working with people on their housing for over a decade since 2006 what I somehow want to convey today is how the world and especially the housing world has changed in 12 years 12 years ago when I was pretty new to human service work I had a bizarre meeting I was in the office and it was Friday afternoon four o'clock and we had a walk in so this was already not a good thing a woman with her adult son came in looking for emergency housing and their son were driving a U-Haul truck full of everything they owned and the truck was already a few days overdue they had left housing in New Hampshire and I'm not really clear why and they were traveling to her brother's house somewhere in the Midwest they didn't tell them they were coming until they were already on the road and he told them not to come so they came to see me instead there was very little I could do we didn't really do a lot of housing back then we made a call to the U-Haul company to negotiate a late return because I didn't want them charged with grand theft auto the state offices were closed and this was before community action became conversant with GA emergency motel stays and before 211 had contracted with the state for after hour calls about emergency housing I never saw them again we ended up contacting a church made for a couple nights in a motel but I never saw them again I have no idea what happened to them no idea but I remember that Friday afternoon how appalled I was thinking what the hell were they thinking I was so struck by the randomness of their situation flash forward 12 years and if those two walked into my office tomorrow driving the same U-Haul I don't think I would blink an eye so our state and our communities experienced the great recession and since then we have enjoyed ARRA the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act HPRP also known as Homeless Prevention Rapid Rehousing which then became CHG Community Housing Grant and is now HOP we have created and cultivated housing vouchers and subsidies of all shapes and sizes transitional rapid rehousing statewide we have multiple seasonal overflow overflow shelters low barrier shelters for the winter months in response to critical life-threatening need and with all of these resources and the will and minds of some of the best people in the state why are we still having these conversations homelessness is complicated something I didn't understand 12 years ago and it's progressive a gap in tenancy is not the same as losing housing or not having a place to live in the last year or never having had a home just think of the words we use tenancy, housing those are very sterile words place to live, home or just shelter recently I had the experience of working with a 67-year-old woman with multiple health problems physical and mental who had been living in her car for over a year her list of ailments was long she couldn't go to the shelter because of mental health issues her income was $7.70 a month which is typical SSI and it was usually gone by the 10th of the month between gas, car insurance and a storage unit where she kept her worldly belongings she didn't have a phone so often she would just show up at my office I seriously thought she was going to die but she got her housed well she didn't die and we did get her housing it took seven months she had been homeless for six months before we initially met and seven months after we started working together she got a place she got a shelter plus care voucher we emptied her storage unit helped her move into the apartment we got her connected to medical but still need to get her new glasses and teeth I still see her a couple times a week but after a month in her apartment she told me that she still feels like she's homeless just not sleeping in the car and I'm still processing that but I wanted to share it I'm very proud of the state of Vermont in the past twelve years we've done so much to support this three-legged stool that we keep talking about we've created more affordable housing we've increased and gotten pretty creative with rental assistance we pay lots of people like me to support people who have no place to go but we need to continue to throw everything at this because we don't know which thing or combination of things is going to keep someone safe and restore his or her dignity twelve years later I still wonder what happened to the woman and her son in the U-Haul and I hope they're okay thank you did you share that testimony with Haan electronically? no I didn't but I'll be happy to if you could send us that one if you share testimony that you may not have shared electronically if you feel we're sending it in then we can include it in our record along with the audio Ronald Burns how are you? good, how are you? hello, my name is Ronald Burns I prefer to be called JR I am a part of the Vermont Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project's Youth Action Board it is a mouthful the demo project is a two-year initiative to increase capacity in Vermont to make youth homelessness rare brief and one-time the Youth Action Board is a committee of youth ages 16 to 25 with lived experiences advising the demo project in my experience of being homeless I learned that youth homelessness is sadly happening far too often sometimes depending on the situation youth who are homeless and have the courage of experiencing it have the ability to get assistance either from the state or youth shelters slash organizations that work specifically around housing homes youth however there is a surprising amount of youth that are unaware of the assistance that they could be getting and we need more resources for outreach more outreach can help youth who need help identify where to get it and help youth who are at risk by connecting to the resources they need earlier for youth peer-to-peer connections are the way we learn about things we need to create more opportunities for youth peer outreach I feel that youth the youth approach would create a better understanding of resources because it would be coming from another young person for youth to youth I think Vermont could also help youth currently experiencing or at risk of homelessness by providing more drop-in or teen centers to give youth a place to feel comfortable and welcome and where they can learn learn about accessing resources including educational and employment supports food and connections with peers I was homeless for about a year before I was aware of some of the key resources that could help me including Emancipation and the McKinney-Vento Act during that time I was living in a homeless shelter in Maine and attending high school it was my school guidance counselor who informed me of these resources a year into my experience let me repeat I was informed by a school guidance counselor before the shelter specializing in serving homeless youth did not to talk ill of them without them I wouldn't be where I am today but I say this to give a further example of how homeless or at risk youth can potentially not be well informed in regards to the services they could be receiving or how they could be helping themselves we need more resources for well trained staff in housing programs and more cross training between service providers to youth so they get the information they need I became homeless shortly after coming out as gay and today with the support I received from transitional living programs designed specifically for young people I'm happy to say that I'm going on 11 years of being a proud openly gay man I'd like to thank them for housing me during my time of most need but the best help I received was from staff helping me learn to not only love myself but be proud in doing so while I was gaining confidence in my sexuality and myself being homeless it was still hard and stigmatizing and I didn't want people to know I found that the best way that I could hide the fact that I was homeless was by always wearing a smile regardless of the situation at hand always smiling in the face of adversity isn't exactly the healthiest thing to do but for some homeless or at risk youth it's the easiest thing to do unfortunately made youth feel different for not having a home or not living with their parents or family or it has made us out to feel as if we're homeless and we are beggars the harsh reality of this situation is that most youth are just trying to understand and accept what's happening to them for some this is too hard and they resort to self harm or substances to make themselves feel better or make themselves believe I would like to say that I am not speaking from experience but at 16 years old homeless and unsupported if I felt that my life had lived up to its purpose and I was no longer wanted or needed so I attempted to take my own life I spent two days in the crisis unit in Lewis and Maine and was released back to the youth shelter I was currently living at at that point more than anything I needed a friend on a professional level to help guide through the tough times youth really need to have someone there to say I'm here for you through thick and thin someone that's not a therapist someone who they can relate to and who can offer life perspective youth housing staff are so important as they offer not just housing support but whole life support they have to be well trained to do their work and can't be too busy that they only have a little bit of time for meeting they also need to be available to communicate on all levels because some youth have trauma or disabilities that make it hard to relate to others it's not an easy job and making sure these workers are paid livable wages is important because we need them to stick around housing systems also need to look at policies that may come off to service users not caring or strict granted in order to run an organization you have to have guidelines and rules set in place but in order to help youth you need to be talking with them not at them and have enough flexibility to meet their needs which will be different from person to person and doing so more times than not people will achieve far more things in life in a far easier manner youth who are experiencing homelessness need more than housing I feel that Vermont could be better with providing more educational and transportation outfits I needed help with transportation to and from appointments doctors visits and therapy some if not most youth don't have access to cars or even bicycles and live in places that are spread far apart so shelters or appointments are out of walking distance sometimes local buses are too early or too late to make crucial appointments or curfews or even school hours and nobody should be should be subjected to standing out in the dead middle of winter or the heat of summer for hours while they wait for the next bus and education is key some youth have never finished high school or currently enrolled but don't function to their fullest potential in public schools and need individual attention and education I only know of two alternative schools in the area I've lived in almost 14 years now one being in a GED program and the other being the high school completion program I graduated from at the age of 24 which to break it down for you means that I did not finish high school at a normal rate like others I dropped out and graduated six years later completing high school while being homeless was hard but also critically important to my future we need more alternatives and more support for homeless youth enrolled in school lastly I feel that Vermont could create a better safe space for LGBTQ youth discrimination on all levels be they orientation related or racially related still exists in Vermont and we need to create a place for those experiencing not only discrimination but potentially homelessness due to the discrimination to not just fuel but also be safe and cared for thank you for your time and your support for preventing and ending homelessness for all people good morning thank you for the opportunity to speak my name is Margaret Bozik and I'm the director of asset management and special initiatives at the Champlain Housing Trust which like the Windsor Windham Housing Trust is a non-profit developer owner manager we work in Chittenden Franklin in Grand Isle Counties offering affordable home ownership and affordable rentals as of the end of December we had 280 formerly homeless households living in our apartments in a variety of settings some of them scattered throughout our rental portfolio and some of them in single site projects like the Beacon apartments on Shelburne Road we also own a 59 room motel called Harbor Place which offers low cost temporary lodging to people who are without housing including people who have vouchers from the motel program and also the co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance so I want to start with a few bright spots in the last 18 months we saw three households who were homeless when they moved into our rental portfolio become homeowners and two of those households had been guests at Harbor Place with the help of the housing bond we have 176 apartments under construction in South Burlington and when they're finished this summer 25 will become homes for homeless households in St. Albans we hope to have housing bond assistance for 30 apartments that made in Lane with six of them dedicated for homeless households also in St. Albans Northwestern Medical Center is continuing to pay the rent for four homeless households in Chittenden County at the Bel Air Project which was financed by the UVM Medical Center there are both five permanent apartments and three medical respite apartments where people who don't have homes can recuperate after a procedure or get ready for a procedure because it's hard to get ready for something like a colonoscopy when you're living in a tent or shelter if we really want to make homelessness rare and brief we need to start with keeping people housed we heard a lot today about how that's there's a good return on investment there and I want to start by seconding what Jessica Radboard had to say we work really hard not to evict people because of the human and financial toll on the tenant but because it's costly to us a non-payment eviction averages us around $8,500 when you add up attorney's fees uncollectible rent and damages, vacancy loss and that's not counting the cost of staff time so we found that it saves us money when we have a tenant that falls behind on rent to offer them financial counseling and a repayment plan and we pay for that in large part out of the operating budgets of our properties we set aside money out of each property to pay for that service money is a big challenge but it's not the only reason why people face challenges to housing stability there are behavioral issues and I would really urge you to think about when we have people who are Medicaid eligible because of medical necessity and may need intensive housing support services to remain housed we need to make sure that our Medicaid plan is able to offer those services to all of those people Medicaid can't be the only funding that we have and we need to have resources for support services obviously especially when there are more episodic challenges like hoarding and so agencies really need to have some kind of sustainable noncategorical funding that's going to be flexible enough to allow them to provide support without arbitrary time limits you know I think there's some really great models around the state to help up against financial and programmatic constraints and because I know we're short on time I'm actually going to stop there and just thank you again for the opportunity to speak well thank you and I will be discussing I'm not sure if we will share my housing trust but we used to be discussing what you were talking about the percentages of the number of homeless apartments outside which was a directive from several years ago so we'll follow up on that can I make one comment about that yes please I want to say that that directive has been helpful in kind of focusing our attention but it also has created a barrier for a certain group of people and that's people coming out of transitional housing especially victims of domestic violence who don't meet the homeless definition under the executive order which means that they're not qualifying for a preference for homelessness thank you I want to thank all of us all of you all who have communicated shared your story and informed us of what is happening in the community both in the housing and service the coordinated the state and the folks we've lived experienced so if we can move to outside and from the state house there will be a rally and speak out and it's a good place to both celebrate what we've done and where we've come and to shine a light on what we still need to do so that everyone has a place to work there at night thank you