Life on the Edge: What's Pushing More Vermonters to the Brink of Homelessness?

Mary Elizabeth Fratini and Margaret Michniewicz

Each year Melissa Roy traditionally alternates with her parents in hosting holiday dinners: Thanksgiving at their house in Holland, Vermont; Christmas at her apartment in Lyndonville. But this year she'll be driving north for both days - provided she has enough gas money for the roundtrip. "I'll still make the cake, but I can't afford to [provide] a dinner," she said. "I discussed this about a month ago with my parents. Now, to pay for the gas to get from here to Holland, that will be the challenge."

Roy shared her story shortly before attending a local poverty forum at the Northeast Kingdom Community Action (NEKCA) Parent Child Center in St. Johnsbury. She recalled attending a seminar last year called "Bridges Out of Poverty" and realizing, "I'm still in poverty even though I have a full-time job. And I don't think I'll ever be out of poverty - ever […]. If you go to my house right now, there's no food. It's a day-to-day thing with that. The kids will ask, what are we going to eat? And I answer, 'I don't know, I don't know'."

She shares a two-bedroom apartment with her teenage son and daughter - "they have their own bedroom; I sleep on the couch in the living room" - and feels blessed to have landlords who understand the financial crunch she is under every year, particularly from September through April. "I'm really behind on my rent right now, as of September," Roy said. "Everything has gone up, just like everybody knows, but our paychecks don't go up. So it's hard, it's really hard."

Housing Crunch

The increasing scarcity of affordable housing is a constant burden for Vermont women and families at risk of becoming homeless. According to the New England Homeless Continuums of Care, Vermont has the highest rate of homelessness per capita in all of New England. Their 2006 report used a point-in-time (PIT), or one-day, count to estimate the number of homeless people in 45 communities across the region and found a total of 28,586, of which 2,143 were Vermonters - or 3.4 percent of the population. The report noted that PIT counts are often lower than annual rates of homelessness but can "provide a useful measure for comparing the extent of homelessness across the states."

Although calculations vary, housing is generally defined as affordable if a household is paying no more than 30 percent of its income for rent and utilities or for mortgage, taxes and insurance. Stagnant wages, an (until recently) out-of-control real estate market, and vacancy rates among the lowest in the nation for both rental and owner-occupied units have combined to stretch Vermont families even further.

According to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, the median purchase price of a single-family home in Vermont reached $197,000 in 2006, a 97 percent increase since 1996. That requires an annual income of $66,000 to purchase, a figure reached by fewer than one-third of all households in the state. The numbers for renters are equally bleak: according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the wage necessary to support a three-bedroom unit in Vermont in 2006 was almost $20 an hour or $42,000 a year - almost three times as much as the state minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and twice the average per-capita income recorded in the last federal census.

Federal support for housing subsidies has declined by 66 percent since 1978 and recent changes to the method HUD uses to distribute funds for the Section 8 housing voucher program, assisting very low-income Vermonters with their rents or mortgage, have further undercut the program. According to the most recent report on housing and wages released by the Vermont Housing Council, just over 6,100 Vermont households currently receive Section 8 assistance.

There is also a shortage of affordable units in the state. A 2005 state housing analysis found that Vermont needed 21,000 more affordable rental units and 12,300 more affordable single-family homes. The same report also noted that more than half of all low-income households in Vermont carry high housing-cost burdens.

The Burlington-based Committee on Temporary Shelter, or COTS, runs the largest of Vermont's 22 homeless shelters. Founded 25 years ago with a single site, it now offers 36 beds of emergency shelter for individuals and up to 15 families at three sites, 51 single-residency units and two apartments of permanent affordable housing at three locations, and a daytime drop-in shelter with a health care clinic and substance abuse counseling. COTS also offers outreach and support services to help prevent homelessness.

Janet, a 46-year-old originally from Pittsfield, has recently returned to Vermont after having spent most of the last decade or more out of state. She had stayed with COTS twice between 2003 and 2005, and currently uses their Daystation services during the day and the Waystation shelter at night.

"I've made some decisions that weren't always wise and left the shelter on my [own] accord," Janet said of her earlier experiences. "It's cold out there and you have to find a place to wash. It's not an easy way to live and it makes... I think it could make one more weary and tired of the burden of not knowing where to sleep."

In the last ten years, Janet has used shelters nine times so far, in several states including Vermont. "My mother couldn't believe it happened to me. She said to me, 'are you crazy? What's wrong with you?' Because I was living in my car and I was a college graduate and I wasn't raised like that, but it can happen," she said. "When I first had to ask for help and go to a shelter I was very humiliated. I never thought I'd end up like that."

Janet cited ongoing mental health issues as an underlying cause of her employment difficulties, but added that services in Vermont were more helpful than any other place she has lived. She comes to the Daystation almost every day. "I like to come and get coffee and my husband calls me usually every morning," she said. "I wait until 11:30 a.m. for my mail and then, if they are serving lunch I wait for [that]. Sometimes I stay on weekends. Sometimes I go up to the library and just sit by myself. But it's nice and warm here at the Daystation. That's nice."

The New Face of the Homeless

Janet falls into the category of the "chronically homeless" - defined by the federal government as individuals who experience homelessness for more than one year or more than four times in three years. Although Vermont has averaged about 4,000 homeless people annually for the last several years, accurate data is notoriously difficult to find. For example, while the New England PIT report found 2,143 homeless Vermonters, a different Vermont PIT census on another day that same winter found a total of 1,850.

The discrepancy underscores not only the day-to-day variability in the numbers of homeless but also recent trends, including an increase in the number of homeless families and, therefore, children. The New England report found that families represented 45 percent of the homeless population in the region compared with 41 percent nationally. Vermont's PIT found that children under the age of 18 represented more than 30 percent of all homeless individuals.

"The fastest growing segment of the homeless, by far, is families with children," noted Rita Markley, executive director of COTS. "We opened on December 24, 1989 and there is still 'no room at the inn'."

On any given night, COTS houses 15 families in its emergency shelters, as well as another 13-15 families in overflow motels. Combined with the space provided by organizations such as Women Helping Battered Women and estimating an average of two children per family, "that's 60 children who are getting ready for school in the morning from an emergency shelter or washing up in the bathroom at a fast food restaurant on Route 7," Markley noted.

Last year, COTS provided shelter, outreach, and other services to 150 homeless families with 246 children, including 30-year-old Elizabeth Baker and three of her four children. Baker just moved into her own apartment in April after spending five months at the COTS Family Shelter at 278 Main Street in Burlington. For two years prior to that she moved between her stepfather's and friends' apartments, comprising part of the "hidden homeless" population who are often missed by both point-in-time and social service counts.

"I had an apartment for five years in Barre but had a lot of problems [there] with mold, and chose to deal with it the wrong way and just abandon my apartment and move in with friends," she recalled. "It was a downward spiral from there. At one time I was in a household of 12 kids and four adults and taking care of everybody - it was too much for me to handle so I just picked up and moved in with my stepfather." Baker finally landed at the COTS shelter in order to retain custody of her youngest daughter. "[Her] father said 'you need to either straighten up or I'm going to take her'," she explained. The transition was difficult at first, in part because she was trying to comply with house rules while taking care of three children aged 4, 3, and 1. "You had assigned bathrooms and it was hard when you had the 3-year-old potty training! My kids were having a hard time because they were used to running around... and of course they had to be careful what they did there."

Studies routinely document the negative impact of homelessness on all aspects of children's lives, especially education and health. According to a 1999 study by the Better Homes Fund, homeless children are four times as likely to have delayed development issues, and three times as likely to require special education programs. They are suspended twice as often as non-homeless children, and they attend an average of two different schools in a single year. Homeless children also experience four times as many respiratory infections, five times as many stomach and diarrheal infections, twice as many emergency hospitalizations, six times as many speech and stammering problems, and have four times the rate of asthma as non-homeless children.

"My oldest suffers from post-traumatic syndromes from all the stuff that's been going on," Baker said. "She's constantly saying, 'Mom, is this for real, are we going to be [staying] here [in our new apartment]?' She has a hard time getting friends because she's afraid she's going to be ripped up and moved again. It's just... it's hard."

As a group, preschool-age children represent almost half of all homeless children but reap the greatest benefits from early intervention. Last spring the Vermont Department of Education awarded COTS a $10,000 grant through the Early Education Initiative to support a pilot program in collaboration with the Greater Burlington YMCA. Beginning in early March, the Y was able to immediately place up to five children from COTS' two family shelters at a time into their existing preschool programs.

"One of the keys in working with children from families that are homeless is making sure they aren't showing up at kindergarten without the skills other children have," Markley said. "When families are under the worst imaginable stress, they often don't have the time or are too depleted to do things like read to their children, so the five slots at the Y are a wonderful thing."

Looking Ahead

Markley emphasized the ongoing need for preventive support to keep families on the brink from becoming homeless. "We'd rather help a family hold onto their housing than become homeless," she said. At many points it is purely a matter of resources. "We've been doing financial counseling for 25 years, but you can't make the numbers work [now]. When the rent is $875 and the paycheck is barely $1200, there is no margin, no buffer for anything that can go wrong."

COTS Prevention Fund, which receives no monies from the state or federal government - in part to preserve more flexibility in dispersal, but also because neither body is currently fully funding its own prevention efforts - currently disperses about $36,000 a year. "So much of this escalating tragedy - 247 children; think how many school buses that would fill! - doesn't have to be this way. If we can intercede with resources at the right moment, we could help half of the families who became homeless last year," Markley said.

Despite reductions in Section 8, including a freeze on almost all new applications, 18-year-old Casey Richardson of St. Johnsbury recently found a subsidized housing placement for herself and her one-year-old daughter. She described staying in an efficiency apartment - with her then-boyfriend, his mother and sister, and the sister's boyfriend - pregnant and sleeping on the floor. "The wait for getting an apartment after [my daughter's father and I] broke up was awful. It did happen relatively quickly, but during that month and a half I had nowhere to go so I kind of bounced around," she recalled. "Her father was really, really helpful with her as far as making sure she had consistency, because I didn't know where I was going to be, let alone trying to help figure out a steady routine for her. It was really difficult."

No longer homeless or among the "hidden", Richardson is pursuing her GED, spurred on by thoughts of her daughter. "You [earn] 60 percent more by going to college than not going to college," she says, filled with hope. "I have my little dreams and stuff. I don't care if it is a trailer, in the middle of nowhere, as long as it is mine and it is something that I can leave for my daughter. I just want to be able to leave her something."

Editor Margaret Michniewicz of South Burlington and Assistant Editor Mary Fratini of Barre can be reached at editor@vermontwoman.com.

Stories From the Edge of Homelessness

A New Path

If it hadn't been for family, friends, and then the COTS Family Shelter, Elizabeth (Betsy) Baker would have been on the street with [four] young children. Today, she has an apartment in Winooski, and is working for COTS through a PATH grant (Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness), assisting people now in the situation she was in as recently as last year. "I help families if they need anything, [for example] I take them to the grocery store because I know the barriers of being in a shelter and not having a vehicle - most of the people do not have vehicles," she says. Baker is a "military brat" who was born on a base in Germany; after much moving around her family settled in Vermont where she has now been for 20 of her 30 years. Of her transition out of homelessness, she describes the determination she felt to improve her situation: "I knew that if I did it on my own [instead of falling back on family] it was going to be better… it was time to get my stuff straight, and get movin'." Baker points out, however, that for women who find themselves in similar situations, with nowhere to go, that they should not hesitate to seek out the help of local services: "There's always ways out," she says, "even if you feel you're down at rock bottom - that's where I was when I hit that shelter." Baker smiles as she describes the inspiration one of her sons now has to pursue a culinary career, thanks to his interaction with a local ER doctor and his wife who have volunteered their time at COTS, leading cooking classes for kids. As a result, Baker says her children are "totally into healthy food."

It Can Wear On One

A college graduate originally from the Rutland area Janet, 46, became chronically homeless two decades ago while living in Virginia. For a time, she lived in her car; at one point, the steering wheel caught on fire from the small propane heater she was using to keep warm and cook with. When the car died, she had to abandon most of her remaining possessions, keeping only what she could carry. Among other items, she has had to pawn her wedding ring - "I know people need food and shelter and possessions should come last, but [those things] did mean a lot to me," she admits. She returned to Vermont and has sought shelter at the COTS Waystation. She describes life on the street: "It's cold out there, and you have to find a place to wash; it's a burden not knowing where to sleep. Sometimes I haven't had food stamps or money… They're very nice at COTS - they've done a lot to try to help us." Janet carries a backpack, with the following items: an extra jacket, hat, gloves, medicine, an extra shirt and some underwear, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap. A fellow "roommate" at the shelter gave Janet a wool hat because she already had one. "I always try to make sure I have an umbrella but I keep misplacing it," Janet smiles. About the upcoming months she says, "I've gotta make sure that I dress warm, like have boots for the snow and warmer socks, maybe a change of socks and maybe some winter underwear on… 'cause it can get so bitter here."

Getting By, Somehow

Margaret Masure, 41, of St. Johnsbury is co-coordinator of the Kingdom Recovery Center, a drop-in center, and of the Aerie House, a transitional residence for women addicts who have been released from prison. She herself is in recovery from alcohol and drugs, is a single mother, and describes herself as "blessed" because she does have an apartment. In her assessment, "If [people] don't have a roof over their head and food in their belly [everything else] is irrelevant," and without access to these basic needs, she adds, people who've been incarcerated are increasingly more likely to re-offend. Of her own tenuous experience with secure housing, Masure says she has an apartment she can afford, but is subsequently left without enough money to consistently cover all other living costs. "I'm $2 over [the amount to qualify for] fuel assistance… my children get Dr. Dynasaur - thank god!" She ruefully laughs and says, "I ought to give a class on how to rob Peter to pay Paul. I don't even budget, because I would realize - there's not enough money…"

Struggle in the Kingdom

In their roles with the Northeast Kingdom Community Action (NEKCA) in St. Johnsbury, Randi Gosselin and Rita Kenyon have witnessed first-hand the challenges facing individuals on the brink of homelessness. The problems are exacerbated in the rural Northeast Kingdom (NEK), given the dearth of public transportation. While St. Johnsbury offers many social services in a centralized location, the nearest emergency shelters are in Newport and Barre. Gosselin describes the paradox faced by their clientele: people are dependent on the support services that are based in St. Johnsbury, which essentially has no affordable housing available.

She describes the situation for a single mother she recently helped pay off a utility bill of $300: the utilities had been in the name of the woman's boyfriend, who took off on her, leaving her and the kids in the lurch. NEKCA assisted her in making payment arrangements for his old bill because there was nowhere else for her to go. "She didn't even have enough money for food," Gosselin adds. "And being a single mother, they want to try and work on their own, they want to try and let people know that they can do it… sometimes I think they just don't know where to turn."

Kenyon tells how something as simple as obtaining a birth certificate can be problematic. In order to receive health care benefits for children, for example, a birth certificate must be provided. "It's a big deal for the families we work with - just that $15 is $15 that they may not have. And unfortunately it stops them from getting benefits."

Gosselin adds, "For the people we work with, what will happen is somebody gets sick and they have to go to the hospital; they don't have any medical insurance and then they get these medical bills - they don't pay, they have bad credit so that snowballs; so then trying to find things like subsidized housing or anything based upon credit is difficult."

As Kenyon sees it: "I think [a number of] people's housing issues start when they just let everything snowball - they don't look for help right away. And then their rent just accumulates and [then] it's beyond the help that they can really get." She urges people to ask for help sooner rather than later.

Good Will Toward Men

Diane Rochefort is a Peer Navigator with NEKCA. She recalls the situation of a man in his 40s with serious mental health issues who has been homeless for years, wandering around the country. Having come to St. Johnsbury, he was living in a tent, while on a waitlist for Section 8 housing. He was trying to stay near enough to St. Johnsbury's downtown so that he could access services, she says, but was regularly uprooted by the police despite the fact that he wasn't doing anything wrong. Rochefort and her husband ended up inviting him to set his tent up in their backyard until his housing came through. Rochefort acknowledged that in her role, she only works with families; "I worked with him just as a human being helping another human being."

Helping Matters

Jessica Morse-Demons never intended to end up homeless, but she counts herself lucky for the time she and her four children spent in the North Bennington Coalition for the Homeless "Housing Matters" program. The Coalition was a 2007 recipient of a grant from the Vermont Women's Fund (VWF), and at the VWF's 3rd Annual Holly D. Miller Awards Celebration in October, Jessica shared her story of how she was helped by the Coalition. "I didn't want to go there because I'd heard a lot of stories about those places, but I was treated like family," she said. Jessica arrived at the 6 Bank Street Transitional Shelter after all other support failed. She had left her abusive husband and moved in with her mother in rural Florida. When her mother moved and took the car, Jessica was stranded with no way to get to work or even to the grocery store 23 miles away. Eventually she made her way back north to Bennington where she'd grown up and where her brother still lived. When housing with him fell through, she was forced to move into the shelter. Once there, however, she took full advantage of the three month "Housing Matters" program that helps homeless families learn the fundamentals of household care, budgeting, and other essential life skills. With support of the shelter staff, she went back to school and is on her way to getting her high school diploma at last. She found a good job and eventually transitioned into her own apartment- a permanent home for her family. The staff helped her buy furniture, get a car loan and still provides support when she needs it. "These people aren't just in it for the money, they really care about the people they help, like me and my kids. I'm really proud they have a place like this in North Bennington.