Brenda Siegel is executive director of End Homelessness Vermont. If you or someone you know needs shelter, email endhomelessnessvt@gmail.com or call 802-489-6534.
NEWFANE-Vermonters living with developmental disabilities, Vermonters on oxygen, Vermonters in wheelchairs, babies, and young children are being turned away from emergency housing and left outside.
If the law was being followed many of them would not be. Not to the level we are seeing across Vermont towns.
It is happening because the administration is not following Act 143, the law the Legislature passed to create Vermont's Homelessness Response Continuum. The consequences are being felt in our communities, by our service providers and, most importantly, by those experiencing homelessness across the state.
If this situation does not change, Vermont will see catastrophic outcomes like we never have before. Already we are seeing this devastation. We cannot accept suffering of this magnitude, especially when the law says otherwise.
Every day our organization's phones ring with calls from the people the state has turned away. They call us because they don't know where else to call. We answer every one. We do everything within our power. We push.
But the law is not being followed. What we are watching is broad systemic failure at best and intentional harm at worst.
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These are our neighbors. These are our community members.
In one of Vermont's small towns, a man ran a local business for decades and gave back to his community at every turn. Today, he lives with a disability and without a home. The barriers standing between him and a safe place to sleep are not written in the law. They were put there by the administration, which is putting up walls the Legislature never built, and he is the one paying for it.
Another person spent their career teaching people living with disabilities. Now they themselves live with disabilities and without a home and asked for an extension of emergency housing, as allowed in the law. They were denied.
A man living with multiple disabilities and insulin-dependent diabetes is fighting severe infections and is at risk of losing his legs because he is living outside, due to an unlawful requirement of an assessment that he cannot complete due to his disabilities. His request for an accommodation was denied despite the law, which insists he be accommodated.
Another man has been in the hospital for the past week because he was forced to stay outside. The Department for Children and Families created a barrier that his disability makes impossible to get around, and it would not make an accommodation. Despite him being eligible for emergency housing, these arbitrary barriers have left him getting sicker and sicker.
This is what is happening to hundreds of our neighbors across Vermont. In every community, people are being left to struggle despite a law that was built to help them.
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Act 143 was written to protect these Vermonters. Disability protections are not a footnote in this law. They run through nearly every section of it.
The Legislature defined disability broadly, made people with disabilities a priority for help, allowed people to attest to their own disability so paperwork would not become a barrier, and required full compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504, which provides access to education for students with disabilities.
Lawmakers wrote accommodation as a requirement to each section, expected people to fulfill requirements only to the extent of their ability, protected them from being removed from housing due to their disability, and named medical necessity and the lack of an accessible alternative placement as reasons to extend a stay.
The Legislature could not have been clearer that this law was meant to protect and accommodate people living with disabilities. Yet they are the ones being run over by this implementation.
I fought for this law. I believed it would protect people. Watching it be used to hurt them instead is one of the hardest things I have lived through in this work.
This crisis is not coming from the statute. It is coming from choices the administration is making not to follow the law, and those choices must be changed today.
Our communities and nonprofits are being left to pick up the pieces of this humanitarian crisis without the tools to do so. People in Vermont are outside right now because of state policy and a lack of housing, not because of a moral failing.
Our neighbors deserve so much better. We call on our fellow Vermonters to demand that the law be followed and that our neighbors be treated with the dignity they deserve.
No one should be without a safe place to sleep. The law should have supported and protected those most vulnerable among us. Our hearts are broken.
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