 Hi everybody, my name is Dave Martens, and I am the new director at the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. And I'm here with Liz Currie from, and the- Common Land Solutions. Common Land Solutions. And joining us on the phone is Sarah Teal from Voices for Vermont Children. And so we're here tonight to talk during our time slot tonight about housing and how it relates to children and to early childhood development. And just to sort of say a word about how this came about is that at VAHC, we've decided to kind of roll out, I guess you could call it a program, a new program, where we talk each month about housing in light of a particular theme. And so in September we were talking about how housing impacts the recovery community because September is National Recovery Month. And so we decided that for October we would go with children's health. And the reason for that being because yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before yesterday was National Children's Health Awareness Day. And so the end of the month of course is Halloween, which is a children's day, right? And so we thought that this would be a good theme to kind of talk about. And part of the reason for that is also that, I don't know if you know this, I think Sarah knows this because we talked about it on the phone the other day. But Children's Health Awareness Day was established by Calvin Coolidge in 1928 who is from Vermont. Say not Fairfield, Vermont? That's right, from Vermont. And the reason why he established the day was because children's health care at the end of like the 19th century was disastrous. It was nothing like we knew it today. And children, sick children were literally being just kind of left. And it was really an awful situation. And he wanted to really raise awareness about this. But the first few hospitals that opened directed to children's health care were not like we would imagine today, like Boston Children's Hospital, or it was their mission was to provide food, clothing, and shelter to children. And I feel like at the heart of that is a concept that today we would call housing as health care, right? Because they understood that these children needed a home in order to get better and to be well. And so really I'd like that to kind of be our topic for discussion is housing as health care, what does that mean in the lives of children? So we've already talked, Sarah and I have talked a little bit about this concept a bit and how it plays out a little bit. What do you think about that, Liz? Well, first I want to thank you for the invitation and tell you just a little bit about myself. As a consultant that incorporated common land solutions, I am not charging. This is volunteer time, but I spent 20 years in the affordable housing development community, in nonprofits, and specifically developing a lot in Franklin County, in rural Vermont, and managed a housing rehab loan program and did some other things that were all kind of grounded in way back when I was in university studying, actually, housing zoning, which grew right out of health threats and health conditions. So this is a really nice tie-in. And then it's nice to have voices for Vermont children on the phone because I spent seven years on the school board in Burlington and worked with people who worked for Vermont, voices for Vermont children. So I appreciate participating in this conversation. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack around housing, how the impact of affordable, safe, decent affordable housing for children, especially in their early formative years. And as you mentioned, early in the 19th century, there was a recognition that children were at risk. Their health was at risk if they weren't a minimum fed and sheltered. And those were probably in the form of orphanages or something like that. But that was also the same time our zoning laws came into being. And that was because there was rampant, there were pandemic conditions in overcrowded housing, and so people were getting really sick. So that is also part of the underlying architecture of housing as healthcare. Florence Nightingale was a big proponent. And also I do want to recognize that we, as a society, were founded on the enslavement of Africans and we took land from indigenous, we colonized land from indigenous tribes. And so automatically we created a land in a real estate system that put people out and failed to provide their basic needs for them. And so our real estate system itself is just on these pillars of a cast system that never delivered what is needed to have a healthy quality of life. And so I just think important to recognize and hold ourselves responsible and accountable for that. I could go on and on about housing and healthcare because I spent a couple years writing a playbook for how energy and efficiency and weatherization improves indoor air quality, and that contributes a lot to minimizing the effects of asthma and for children. That is especially important and leverages huge gains and positive impacts over time. So there's also just the physical aspects of developing affordable housing in Vermont is accomplished through a framework of funding agencies and technical assistance that delivers healthy housing, healthy indoor air quality, and there are studies across the nation around the health outcomes of children and families who live in housing that's been weatherized and made more energy efficient. So that's another dimension of the topic. You know what I love is just in that, just kind of in those few thoughts, we touched on equality, right, racial equality, racial justice, like weatherization, climate stuff, health care, right. And I think that all too often, sometimes I think when we work kind of in the nonprofit field or in some kind of advocacy work, sometimes it's very easy to end up in your silo and not kind of move out of it. And I think that if there's any issue that we all can come together around, it's housing. And I mean, it crosses all political lines. It crosses all everything that you're not going to find anybody who says, you know, no, you know, no, people should just not have homes. Like no one thinks that. Exactly. And so that's why we're really trying to be real intentional about bringing that to light and talking about housing in light of these different themes to kind of, you know, make people comfortable to step out of their silo and talk about how this fits within the bigger system, you know. So I'm so glad that you're that you're with us today. So glad you were with us today. And Sarah, I just love the name of your organization. That that in and of itself does it for me. Voices for Children, I love it. Why don't you kind of tell, tell the folks who are watching a bit about yourself and your work and and a bit about voices for voices for children for decades. And we have always worked holistically across sectors, across the whole state to really try to I really am appreciating these comments because it's so clear that all of the systems are connected and all of them impact each other. And also all parts of children's lives affect the rest of their lives. And housing is an example of that. That's just very salient. Not only is it incredibly common sense, but it's also really researched and backed by research in terms of health, especially as a researcher who's pretty well-known in Vermont. She's become well-known in Vermont. Megan Sandel out of Boston. She's a pediatrician and researcher. And all of her work has basically shown the direct connection between housing and health to the degree that she has a phrase where she says, housing is a vaccine. And it's really interesting coming out of, well, hoping to soon come out of this pandemic year and a half, when it really was immediately obvious to everybody that housing was directly protective of people's health in that moment in pandemic conditions. But really, it's that way all the time. And especially for kids, the highest rates of homelessness are actually in the youngest children. And not only does it have direct effects on their health, which we all can understand in their well-being, but it also just has really long-term cumulative potential effects on all sorts of things like their education, in terms of like ACEs, long-term health impacts way far into adulthood. Those things are hard to calculate, but I think we all know that they're there. And I'm also really appreciating your comments, Liz, about the underlying system, because I think many of us who work in various areas are just really ready to think across those silos in a really transformational way. Recognizing that the system that we have right now doesn't actually, at all, guarantee housing for children. In fact, it works as a principle of scarcity. And the roots are discriminatory of so many things, as we know. And I think it's really a good time to think about how we can actually make this a guarantee and actually address the correcting for those oppressive systems. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that we're in such a, everyone talks about or everyone uses these days the phrase unprecedented. We're living in these unprecedented times in this unprecedented crisis. And everything is unprecedented. And that's very true. I think something else that's unprecedented right now is the attention that affordable housing is getting at the legislative level, certainly in terms of funding, in terms of, I mean, there's sort of all these positive dynamics that are coming out of the crisis that truly is unprecedented. And maybe something else that will come out of that will be unprecedented work to get even more intentionally together towards working towards a solution to this whole situation. Sarah, do you want to say a word about the kind of advocacy and the kind of stuff that Voices does? Sure, we work primarily on state policy, like I said, across all areas. Economic security and economic justice are a very core principle. And housing is right in there with that. And we also work in communities and with communities and various grassroots organizing initiatives as well. Super. And were you guys involved with the rental housing safety bill stuff? Not as a lead, no. Sure. Yeah. But I guess we're members of the housing advocacy community, definitely. There's a lot of conversation right now starting to happen about the rental housing safety bills. We move towards another legislative session, right? And we know that the bill had been passed by the House and the Senate and then was vetoed kind of surprisingly. And I think that it's important, I think, that we continue the conversation though about how that we need a rental housing safety bill. If we've got to start over, whatever we've got to do, but we can't give up. And we've got to see the importance behind that piece of legislation. And I think that the tie is so obvious in with children. I think, in particular, the two pieces of this. It's interesting when you talk about the bill. It's always interesting to me what people call it. Some people call it the registry bills. Some people call it by S79. But I feel like we have to talk about just a rental housing safety bill, because that's what it is. That's what it was. And that's what we still need. And that's what's going to the fight that has to continue or the work that needs to continue. Yeah, and on that point, actually, rental housing codes were an outgrowth of zoning codes. And so there's a whole body of health and safety codes that go along with housing. And all of our codes are related to health and safety. So it's interesting that people are willing to tolerate zoning codes. But then the minute you go to regulate housing, which and housing is incredibly regulated in many ways people don't realize, usually to the benefit of the owner. But when we talk about regulating multifamily building, there's a strange reaction that is, again, rooted in that concept of ownership and proprietariness that our real estate system is based on, because we don't recognize multifamily property as a business, which it is. Speaking as a multifamily property owner, it's a business. And it should be expected that multifamily property owners who don't live in the building and those who do have a business that needs to be regulated for health and safety reasons, the same reason we have liquor control, the same thing. We want to make sure the public is safe and healthy. And we're not putting that public in harm's way. But that's not a common way of thinking about multifamily housing. We think of it as like, oh, it's just your other house. And you get to control whatever or not or put people at risk. And I think there is a lot of opportunity to educate the public about kind of that fundamental concept. But we also, for the first time, have contractor registration. So there was finally a recognition that contractors go into your home and could cause health and safety problems for you if they're not skilled and qualified. And so now we have a registration for contractors requirement, and that's along the same lines. And we have fire codes. And we have energy efficiency codes when you're building new constructions. So leaving out the rental housing code is just a huge missed opportunity. And it actually puts children in particular in harm's way. Vermont has one of the highest fire rates in the nation from the old property that hasn't been reinvested in, it hasn't been kept up, and it hasn't been maintained. The energy burden is huge for families, which takes food out of kids' mouths. And other basic needs aren't met because we have these very old, dilapidated buildings where people pay exorbitant amounts for utilities every month. So yeah, there's a lot to talk about there. I remember I was, you know, I'm new, so I'm new to Vermont, and I came from Rhode Island, well, Rhode Island via Connecticut, but really I'm a Rhode Islander by origin. And I worked there in the course of my career, I worked in, well in the early days of my career, kind of in direct care with youth, at-risk youth, and their families. And, you know, with what we call the DCYF there, not DCF, but DCYF. And I remember kind of upon reflection one day, after I'd been doing this for I think two years, two or three years at the time, and it just struck me how so many of these families who were just stooped in poverty, and they would get sort of linked up with, you know, DCYF involvement, because here you had like, they were caught in that system that's not a liberating system at all, right? And so, it's constant crisis management, and mom can never, or dad or mom and dad can't, just get ahead, you know? And the primary, you know, they're looking at their kids and thinking like, well, we have to sacrifice for ourselves till we get to put the kids first, but sometimes there's nothing left to sacrifice. And it really is because of this, and I think a large part, because of that system that instead of liberating and empowering and freeing, can instead really drown the person, you know? And I think that it's sort of a, you know, I have a friend who does some Uber driving part-time, and it was commenting on how the amount of money that people spend on Uber, why don't they just get a car? And it's like, well, because that's not the way the system works, right? Because the system doesn't allow us to save, it's the same kind of thing. Or get a loan. Yeah, or get a loan, or like, so, you know, we end up caught in these systems, and I think to a certain degree, all of us in different ways, in smaller ways for some than others, but that in that system, it's the kids who are ultimately always, always the victim, and always the one who struggle. And we gotta work together to get out of it. And I think also I wanna just bring up that, you know, the Let's Grow Kids was just able to move forward a significant bill on childcare. And Sarah, you probably know more about this than me, but, you know, now that they have finally achieved a pretty heavy lift, a big goal, you know, when you think about actually implementing that, and you have families who are constantly moving around, and in and out of homelessness, it's like what happens when kids try and go to school, if they try and go to childcare, you're gonna, you know, create a situation where they don't get consistent care, you know, and you'll see significant academic losses and, you know, just brain development losses, and that sets them up for failure. And then we as a society will spend more and more on meeting their needs in a disjointed, fractured way because our systems are not aligned. So, you know, that stability that affordable housing brings in addition to having safe, decent, healthy affordable housing, just having the stability of housing allows a family to access subsidized childcare or school in a more consistent way, which avoids costs for us as a society down the road. But that prevention concept is, I think, still has a ramp to go up before people, you know, really support spending now to prevent costs later. So maybe the pandemic will, you know, there's just a larger societal kind of psychological shift that would need to happen in order to really be successful. Like Vermont has universal healthcare for children and it is possible to calculate all of the savings from that. But for whatever reason, that has not happened and it could be demonstrated that the same outcome would happen if we had a more affordable housing for everyone, guaranteed. For sure. That's a great point, it really, we can either protect the investments we're making in all the other systems, which are and should be significant childcare education, right? Like we really generally commit as a state to like having those systems be strong. And Dr. Dineswar, right? So and healthcare for children. So we spend a lot of money in those areas, as you're pointing out, if we don't have stable housing, we're actually undermining those very investments at the same time as we're making them. It's a, there's a cost shift there to all of these other systems. And it could be calculated, you're right. Like how much, how much of those, how much money would be saved by having stable housing for every family? For sure. We're coming to the end of our time together. So I would throw out the one last kind of thought for maybe if we could, I'd love to just get a word from both of you about it. At the end of last summer, at the height of the pandemic, we had 2,000 Vermonters, living, homeless Vermonters, living in motels through the Motel program, 400 of which were children. We know that this program is getting extended, some people have to gossip it, right? We all know the, we see it in the news. But those numbers strike me, 2,000 Vermonters, 400 children, we need answers because this can't go on forever, but a thought maybe from each of you about kind of the part of the answer. Well, from the kind of housing development side, like creating housing, I actually opened the first COVID hotel in Vermont for CVOEO, for the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. And the transformation, I think was phenomenal in terms of people just having that privacy, a place to go every day, no matter what, even though there was a lot of chaos around. But I do wonder about the opportunity for the medical community and the hospitals and to become more engaged in this conversation and this issue, and that is happening. Certainly, UVM has subsidized a motel for Champlain Housing Trust. I worked on a project, Rutland Housing Authority was able to get a huge gift, around 225,000 or more from Rutland Regional Hospital. So the engagement of hospitals in providing capital because it will bring their costs down, they are beginning to see that and then they are seeing those savings and that is more data, more financial data to demonstrate that that partnership can grow and grow. Sarah, one minute. Yeah, I think that. I'm gonna offer us a good closing thought. A good closing thought. It's a continuum, right? The unstable housing is a continuum all the way from being unhoused to having unaffordable housing where you're vulnerable to sudden economic shocks, shock loss, et cetera. And that's an incomplete thought. I was just gonna say that number of unhoused people during the pandemic was much higher than that count in previous years and all of the housing advocates kind of said, oh, we told you this was the case, right? Like there have been all along people who are not being counted. Like as an example, in the 2018-2019 school year there were a thousand students that schools counted as qualifying for services for homeless students under the McKinney-Vento Act. Some of them are doubled up. Some of them are living in cars. Some of them are in shelters and some of them are un-sheltered. So in any case, there's this whole continuum, but I think what we would like to see is a system where there's much more democratic control of housing and where it's permanently affordable and not then like subject to the market. It's just way too important to be just at the whim of the broader economy or it's just market cost is what it is. Like it needs to be rooted somewhere else. For sure. Well, on that note, it is a continuum and so is our work, all of our work together that I'd like the picture of a continuum because it keeps rolling and that's what we're gonna do. Keep rolling, keep working together. Thank you both for joining us today and everyone at home, join us again for our ongoing conversation about housing from a slightly different perspective with each show. And if you have any questions about the work that we do, you can find out everything you wanna know and more at vtoffordablehousing.org. And thank you for joining us and Sarah and Liz once again, thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you, David.