When Mary Mojica’s Waterbury apartment flooded last summer, all she could take with her was a few boxes, clothes and her dog, Bella. Since then, Mojica, 59, has been living at the Days Inn in Colchester with the help of a voucher from Vermont’s emergency housing program. Her efforts to find a rental apartment she can afford on her disability benefits have stalled. And her days at the Days Inn are almost over.
One recent afternoon, Mojica stood in the hotel parking lot and peered up at Bella, who was sticking her nose through the blinds in Mojica’s balcony window.
“It’s hard for them to be in a room,” Mojica said. “But it’s better than being outside. That’s what scares me.”
Last legislative session, lawmakers passed new caps on the emergency shelter program to contain costs while the state scales back the program’s expansion during the pandemic. Those caps will mostly go into effect in September. As of July 1, participants’ stays were limited to 80 days per year — except for the winter months, when the cap is lifted. For many, including Mojica, that 80-day limit will be reached in early fall.
The new law also sets a cap on the total number of rooms the state will pay for this fiscal year: a cap of 1,100 rooms goes into effect on September 15 (which will also be lifted in the winter). There is currently no such cap. A month before that date, the program is oversubscribed: As of August 12, the latest date available, there were 1,416 households left in the program.
By definition, all households currently housed through the motel program meet the criteria for being at risk. This includes families with children, people with disabilities, and people fleeing domestic violence.
Officials had speculated whether program participants would spread their 80 days throughout the year or use them all at once – potentially allowing the state to use turnover to meet the new room cap. Current data suggests that most motel program participants have stayed put since July 1.
That poses a timing issue. If they don’t move out within the next month, about a third of households in the program will have used up their 80 days by Sept. 19, Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department of Children and Families’ Division of Economic Services, said in an interview Thursday. More households will have their deadline expired later in September and early October; because they spend a portion of their income each month on their motel and hotel stays, they’ve essentially bought themselves more time before their 80 voucher days expire.
As of September 15, DCF expects that there will be more people currently in the program than it can legally accommodate due to limited room capacity.
“There would be some households that would still be eligible after the 15th but might not have access to a room,” Gray said.
DCF has issued a prioritization policy to determine which households will be accommodated in available rooms. Whenever the number of eligible households exceeds 90% of hotel and motel room capacity, certain households will be given priority access to available rooms: families with children ages 19 or younger, pregnant individuals, individuals experiencing domestic or other violence, and individuals over the age of 65. Individuals over the age of 50 who also meet additional criteria—such as a disability, natural disaster, or eviction—will also receive priority.
When asked how the department determined those priorities, Gray acknowledged that all of the people currently in the program have “significant needs.” DCF considered who might have the most difficulty living without shelter if they couldn’t stay with someone else, Gray said, and concluded that older people would be a priority.
But the prioritization scheme will put younger people with severe disabilities at risk, said Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont.
“What happens when someone gets oxygen and is taken outside?” Siegel asked. “If the oxygen can’t be hooked up, those people end up in the emergency room. And if they stay outside, they basically die. And that’s the reality of what’s being done here.”
Siegel argued that the new law does not give the department any opportunity to create priority categories. But Gray responded that she “met with several attorneys and that this is within our purview,” noting that the law requires the department to create 1,100 rooms. The prioritization policy “will get us there,” she said.
The motel room cap became a contentious issue in the final weeks of the legislative session, with lawmakers and members of Gov. Phil Scott’s administration pointing fingers at each other when asked who came up with the idea. DCF Commissioner Chris Winters expressed a wish that lawmakers would provide more clarity on who should be prioritized in the motel room shortage, but the law itself ultimately offered little guidance.
When asked what she expected from DCF as it prepares to scale back the program, lead budget author Rep. Diane Lanpher, Democrat of Vergennes, emphasized that lawmakers had laid out the criteria for vulnerability in the bill. But the lawmakers’ new criteria were nearly identical to what the state had already used to decide who needed a room.
As the state prepares to scale back the motel program, there are signs that the need for shelters is outpacing current capacity. Since July 1, over 300 additional households have contacted DCF for a voucher, Gray said. Even without a cap, the department does not have hotel and motel rooms for those households.
At the Days Inn, Mojica counts the days until her voucher expires.
“Hopefully something changes,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t think I could survive a single day in a tent with my dog right now.”
This story by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
