Before coming to the Hilltop Inn in Berlin this February, Rebecca Duprey and her two sons were living in her car. The three slept in park-and-rides, relied on public Wi-Fi for the internet, and usually ate pre-prepared gas station food for dinner.
The stress and instability of their lives sent Duprey and one of her sons — who, like his mother, has chronic health conditions — to the hospital multiple times a month. School attendance was erratic.
But over the last two months, Duprey and her children have found some measure of normalcy and comfort at the motel.
“I’m not going to lie — it’s still a struggle,” she said during an interview last week. “But we've only had one hospitalization since we've been here, versus every two weeks. So there's a plus. There's been improvement in other areas; my kids have been enrolled in the schools around here, and they're doing better going to school full-time.”
That stability is very likely to end July 1. Duprey’s family has been staying at the Hilltop thanks to a pandemic-era emergency housing program funded mostly by federal aid — now gone. Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has argued that Vermont cannot afford to pick up the tab in the absence of federal cash, and the Democratic-controlled Legislature has basically agreed.
The House and Senate have not yet reconciled their plans for next year’s state budget, but both chambers have advanced spending proposals that would provide shelter for only some 150 households in any given month. Currently, 1,800 households — roughly 2,500 people — live in motels.
And so Duprey, who had been using her newfound stability to look for housing full-time, has pivoted into frantic advocacy, collecting testimonials from fellow motel residents and blasting them out to lawmakers in regular emails.
Two legislators on the receiving end of Duprey’s missives actually know her well. Duprey, a former nurse, cared for the mother of Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, until her death in 2017. And Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, met Duprey, whom she calls “Becky,” about 20 years ago, when the two worked at Project Independence, a program in Barre for adults with disabilities.
Duprey said she lost her housing in 2018 after leaving her abusive husband for good, and has been struggling to regain her footing ever since. They would find shelter, and then he would find them. Even in the “boondocks of Eden,” where she and her boys found housing in a trailer for about a year, he tracked them down, she recalled. (She says he is now under house arrest.)
Over the years, both Donahue and Cummings have offered help — Duprey even stayed at Donahue’s home for a period, and Cummings has provided pillows, blankets, and occasionally money. When the two lawmakers learned that Duprey was back in Washington County and spending cold nights in her car, they did not reach out to administration officials or state workers, but instead to Brenda Siegel, an advocate and former gubernatorial candidate, who took over Duprey’s casework and found her the room she currently lives in.
And despite having helped, indirectly, connect her to shelter, the two lawmakers have now signed off on the very spending proposals that will likely doom her to lose it yet again.
‘I wouldn't be able to live with that’
Donahue sits on the House Human Services Committee, the first legislative panel tasked with crafting a budget recommendation regarding the people living in motels. And she insists that — as she understood it — what came out of her committee would have provided help to people like Duprey.
“I felt the pieces were there, yes, to make sure that Rebecca, that people in her situation, would get the help they would need so that they would, you know — so that she would not be ending up back sleeping in her car with the boys,” she said.
Donahue pointed to $10 million for support services, which the House borrowed from child care in its budget, and which the Senate later took out. But she struggled to explain how the funding included in the House plan might provide for what Duprey needs most of all: shelter.
“I can't refute what you're saying,” said Donahue, who added she hadn’t worked directly on the matter and was relying on secondhand information from her committee-mates. “I don't have the knowledge base with the information.”
Both chambers have set aside $26 million for shelter in hotels through the state’s general assistance program, which serves low-income Vermonters and predates the pandemic. The Agency of Human Services estimates that’s enough money to pay for wintertime shelter in motels for most people who need it. But year-round, in any given month, that cash will be enough to shelter only about 150 households.
That’s not even enough to provide year-round shelter to all of the 550 children who currently live in motels, according to the latest figures from the Department for Children and Families. Nor is it enough for the 600 adults who receive benefits because of a disability — never mind the additional 80 residents who currently qualify for shelter because they are elderly.
But Donahue is not the only lawmaker to hope, despite pleading testimony from advocates and the state’s own data, that present funding proposals might somehow avert the worst outcomes.
“Some people are talking about how this budget leaves thousands of people homeless. I presume that that's not actually the case,” Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, told Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, while the latter was explaining the Senate’s budget bill to her colleagues during an all-Senate caucus last week. “But could you kind of just go over what's happening with people whose present arrangement is ending?”
Kitchel, the chamber’s chief budget-writer, never actually denied that thousands would, in fact, lose shelter. Instead, she pointed to the tens of millions being invested into affordable housing in the budget, as well as additional money earmarked to expand shelter capacity. And she argued that Vermont’s general assistance program would retain the ability to make exceptions in cases that “represent significant need or health risks, depending on the individual case.”
For Duprey, such assurances are divorced from reality and deeply upsetting.
“It’s inevitable. People are gonna die if they don't continue the program,” she said. “I don't see how they can live with that. I wouldn't be able to live with that. But it's on their hands.”
‘Don’t even bother’
Nicole Tousignant, the head of DCF’s economic services division, said the department is working to connect with motel residents to figure out alternatives, including friends and family they might double up with. And every day, she said, some do find permanent housing. But she acknowledged there will be people who simply go unsheltered when the program winds down this summer.
It’s unknown how many motel residents will end up sleeping in their cars or a tent. Given that people enter and exit the program each day, Tousignant said she wasn’t even sure it would be feasible for the state to conduct such a survey.
“Trying to determine where exactly everyone's going to land on July 1 isn't something that I'm sure is even possible,” she said.
Whatever outreach has begun, it has not yet reached Duprey, who said last week that she’s been on her own to figure out what comes next.
“It's me. Solo. Single. One. That's it. So no,” she said. “There's nobody from any agency. There's no social worker.”
In addition to the money for shelter in the budget, language in S.100, the Legislature’s omnibus housing bill, would make it harder for local residents to use zoning codes to block shelters from opening or operating.
But those new shelters won’t be online for a while, and what’s in the pipeline won’t cover the anticipated need. Shelter operators up and down the state, meanwhile, are unequivocal: Even with most unhoused people currently sheltered in hotels, the shelters that do exist are already at capacity.
“Don’t even bother,” replied Rick D’Angelis, executive director of the Good Samaritan Haven in Barre, when asked about available shelter beds in Washington County compared with the number of people in area hotels. “There's nothing available.”
The Barre shelter is “hoping for the best and preparing for the worst,” he said, and is fundraising for camping supplies. Local advocates are also talking to the area’s municipal leaders about making some sort of emergency declaration.
In her search for housing, Duprey is, in some respects, luckier than some — she has a federally funded Section 8 voucher, which would cover her rent if she could find a landlord to take it. But so far, she hasn’t.
In a state with one of the lowest rental vacancy rates in the nation, precious few apartments are affordable, and landlords are hesitant to call back a prospective tenant with a spotty rental history.
“Our biggest challenge in finding a place is the landlord references right now,” she said.
The federal government will also take back a voucher if a recipient can’t locate housing within a certain period of time. Last Thursday, the same day she was speaking to a reporter, Duprey was awaiting a decision about her latest extension.
The odds are not in her favor. Increasingly, Vermonters who qualify for Section 8 are forced to give back the federal aid because they run out of time.
Currently, a stunning three out of every four Vermonters who come off a waitlist to receive a Section 8 voucher ultimately have to return it, according to Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority, which administers the vouchers. The impediments are predictable: “lack of housing stock and high rental prices,” she wrote in an email.
It wasn’t always this bad. In 2016, for example, someone who received a voucher was successful at finding a place 70% of the time, Berk said.
The same pandemic-era federal aid that underwrote Vermont’s expanded motel program also paid for a set of wide-ranging supports, including more robust food stamp payments and emergency rental assistance — all of which expired this spring. But as Vermont’s social safety net steadily retracts, the number of people who need help is only continuing to climb.
Excluding Chittenden County, Vermont had a 20% increase in homelessness this year, according to as-yet unpublished data provided to VTDigger by the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, which takes the lead on a federally mandated point-in-time count each year. There were 2,537 people experiencing homelessness across 13 counties in January 2023 — up from 2,112 the year prior, according to Martin Hahn, the coalition’s executive director.
He emphasized that the numbers are preliminary for now, although the coalition is preparing to publish them in the coming weeks.
Figures for Chittenden County, which conducts its count separately, are not yet available.
‘Not chump change’
Unlike Donahue, Cummings isn’t optimistic about what’s in store for Duprey come July 1. She predicted, point-blank, that Duprey would be back in her car.
“I know she would spend most of her day on the phone calling about apartments, on the internet looking into apartments, trying to find them — they're not there. And we're getting them online, but not fast enough,” the senator said.
That hasn’t led Cummings to advocate for spending more money on the motel program. She noted that another lawmaker, Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham, came up short in his last-ditch effort to find cuts in the budget to make room for more emergency housing.
“I don't have the solution to finding $50 million,” she said, referring to the additional funds needed to keep the program running as-is. “I mean that's not chump change.”
If lawmakers want to spend on an initiative, they can also raise new revenues to do so. And Cummings, as the chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee — one of the Legislature’s four powerful “money” committees — enjoys an enviable post from which to lead the charge on such a proposal. But she dismissed this scenario outright.
“How much would you like your income tax to go up?” she asked a reporter rhetorically, before adding that the governor would veto it anyway.
But Democrats in the Legislature are preparing to raise a slew of taxes and fees this session for other initiatives — despite Scott making clear he is ready to whip out his veto pen. The session’s major push on child care, S.56, for example, would require over $100 million in new revenues a year. And Cummings' panel recommended funding it in part using a payroll tax, which Scott has specifically pointed to as his line in the sand.
Pressed as to whether this was simply about the governor’s objections, Cummings finally replied that “you don't tend to spend your time doing something that you know isn't going to go anywhere or solve the problem. We can spend all kinds of political capital and Rebecca is not going to be any better off in the end than she is now.”
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