Today was moving day for 16 residents of a group home formerly located in a single-family home at the former diocesan property on North Avenue.
Their new home is on St. Paul Street, in a newly renovated building next to Smalley Park. The building is owned by Champlain Housing Trust and has been under extensive renovations this summer.
Earlier this year, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington asked a Vermont judge to expedite its eviction process in hopes of getting the residents moved out of the North Avenue home by June.
Renovations to the St. Paul Street home began in May. Michael Monte, chief operating officer of the Champlain Housing Trust, said workers from the project's lead contractor, Lakewind Construction, worked weekends and holidays to get the residents into the home ahead of schedule. "They are the real heroes in this story," Monte said. "They were on a very compressed time schedule and did just an incredible job."
The total project's cost topped $840,000, according to Monte.
"When we saw HowardCenter was struggling with finding a place for these folks to live, we thought that perhaps this is the place where they should be," he said, recalling the events of earlier this year.
All but a few of the residents from Lakeview had taken a tour of their new home, which is slightly smaller than the one on the former diocesan property, said Debra Clemmer, the on-site psychiatric nurse. Clemmer has worked with the home's residents for the past 12 years and will have an office inside the new home. Many of the residents have been diagnosed with acute mental illnesses.
Clemmer gave Seven Days a tour of the property as final preparations were being made for their tenants. One of the advantages of the new place, she noted, is that all but two residents will have their own bedrooms. At the North Avenue home, most residents slept two or more to a room.
"They are really looking forward to the move," said Clemmer. "They are also glad to be staying together; it was important for them to maintain that sense of community," she added. Some of the residents have lived together for more than 30 years.
Clemmer said residents like being closer to downtown, a park, and the HowardCenter's main offices on the corner of Pine Street and Flynn Avenue. In addition, the new home has more windows, and thus more natural light.
What the residents will miss, though, is the garden and two acres that came with the property on North Avenue, Clemmer noted. The building on it will become a residence hall for Burlington College students.
Neighbors on St. Paul Street have been welcoming to the project and some attended an open house last week, according to Monte and Clemmer.
The home has two staff members 24 hours a day, in addition to Clemmer, during the daylight hours. Overnight, there is one full-time awake staff on hand, and a cook who comes in to prepare meals for the residents.
The new home has a shared dining space and living room with a wall-mounted flat-screen TV as well as newly equipped kitchen.
The new home comes after more than a year of legal wrangling.*
In May 2010, Burlington College bought the 32-acre North Avenue property, which included the diocesan headquarters — formerly home to St. Joseph Orphanage — and a smaller house that had served at different times as a retirement home and a Catholic prep school for teenage boys. The college paid $10 million for the property.
The proceeds of the diocese's sale are intended to help pay off portions of a $17.85 million settlement with 26 victims of priest sexual abuse that occurred during the 1970s.
In September 2010, HowardCenter questioned the legality of the diocese’s notice in hopes of buying extra time to find a new group-home location. The initial deadline eviction deadline was November 30. The diocese and college allowed HowardCenter to remain longer, but did not want the group home to remain indefinitely.
This March, the diocese filed suit in Vermont Superior Court in Burlington, asking a judge to rule on the legality of its eviction notice. The diocese claims it issued a proper emergency lease-termination notice in May 2010, giving HowardCenter six months to vacate the property.
In late April, the three parties sat down and worked out a deal to allow the HowardCenter clients to remain in the group home on North Avenue through the end of August.
* this post has been updated to re-order the timeline of events
As housing advocates converge on Montpelier today for the Governor's Summit on Housing for the Homeless, newly released data offer a ray of hope for Vermont's vexing homelessness problem.
The 2011 Point in Time Homeless Survey, a 24-hour count of the homeless conducted every January, shows that Vermont's homeless population on that day dropped 12 percent as compared to the January 2010 count — from 2782 individuals to 2450.
The count was conducted on January 26, 2011, but delays in getting Chittenden County totals stalled the report's release until last week. (To download the report, sans Chittenden Co. data, click here.)
In Chittenden County, the number of homeless and precariously housed individuals — people who are couch surfing, bunking with relatives or sleeping in garages and basements — fell from a record high of 907 last year to 707 this year. The number of homeless children age 18 and under also decreased in the count, from 256 in 2010 to 182 in 2011.
Rita Markley (pictured), executive director of Burlington-based emergency shelter provider COTS, sees an unmistakable trend — one she attributes to the modest economic recovery and money pumped into homeless prevention programs over the last few years.
Others, like Burlington Housing Authority executive director Paul Dettman, see "spin" and numbers that "don't pass the straight-face test."
COTS began counting Chittenden County's homeless in the mid-1990s, long before the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began requiring the annual census. In 2008, Markely saw the start of what became a "huge upsurge" in the number of homeless counted in Greater Burlington.
Last year's high of 907 homeless or precariously housed in Chittenden County meant that families and individuals were also staying longer in emergency shelters, Markley says — often six months or more rather than three or four months.
"What we have here is how the Great Recession affected Vermont," Markley concludes. "We may not have the same type of housing foreclosure rates [as other states], but there was real pain."
Markley credits this year's decrease to 707 homeless and precariously housed, in part, to the efforts of the COTS Homelessness Prevention Fund. That provides emergency, one-time grants to prevent people from losing their housing.
In 2008, COTS pooled $250,000 in privately raised funds and $120,000 in state money to create a fund that would help people in danger of losing their home because of job loss, medical bills or major car repairs. Markley says the fund averted homelessness for 351 households during the first year and 450 households in the second year. On top of that, the legislature and governor this year agreed to dedicate $1.7 million toward homelessness prevention.
That's the good news. The bad news, for people who do fall through the cracks, Markley says, is that finding new housing is a "long, difficult road," particularly in a college town like Burlington, which has one of the lowest vacancy rates (1 percent) in the country.
"There are so many college students and others who can easily pay rent and have good credit," she says.
Dettman, the Burlington Housing Authority director, largely discounts the homeless count numbers, arguing that the data are "really poor."
"A point in time is a point in time. Even a good point in time doesn't tell you a lot about what your programs should be," says Dettman (pictured with BHA staffers Kelley Newall, left, and Janet Green). "This is being done because HUD mandates it. It's not being done because the community decided it would be good to collect this information and then use it to determine which programs were working and which weren't."
BHA staffers say the figures raise several red flags. According to the 2011 count, the Bennington homeless population skyrocketed from 304 last year to 521 this year. "That doesn't pass the straight-face test," Dettman comments, suggesting that some people may have been double-counted.
Asked about the homelessness surge in 2009, Dettman believes it had less to do with the economy that with how hard volunteers looked. "There was an aggressive attempt to increase outreach in 2009, so that's part of why you had this sudden increase. This decrease is inexplicable to me. If you look objectively at the number of dollars being spent on homeless folks, the number of dollars being spent on homeless families is up dramatically."
Homelessness is more than just economic, Dettman says. Often, it's linked to substance abuse and mental health issues.
Additionally, Dettman says BHA staffers found individuals counted as homeless who should not have been. Among them: 12 women housed at domestic violence shelter Sophie's Place in Burlington who have guaranteed, transferable Section 8 housing vouchers.
"They live there with Section 8 vouchers," Dettman says. "When they finish their time there, they can take the voucher and go somewhere else. They are not homeless. They're not at risk of homelessness and yet they get counted as 'sheltered' because HUD has weird definitions of who can get counted."
Dettman says reliable and complete data are the key to forming good housing policy, but he admits that finding the money — and the will among some social service providers — to make that happen will be difficult.
"The Point in Time should not be taken as gospel and we should be very careful about conclusions that one reaches from it — either that the problem is in crisis or the problem is being solved."
Melinda Bussino, co-chair of the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, says better counting is certainly a factor in the uptick.
"Some of the increases that we see are because we do a better job of finding the more hidden homeless people," says Bussino, who is executive director of the Brattleboro Area Drop In Center.
For her part, Markley says the Chittenden County team is extremely careful about how it counts the homeless to avoid duplication. Since each county coordinates its own counting efforts, Markley says she can't speak to the accuracy of other figures. And while the homeless count might not be comprehensive, it's valuable and important as a "snapshot."
"It's a snapshot that we have taken over many, many years. So if the number jumps consistently, it means something," she says.
Bussino callled today during a break in the homeless summit. She says the group is batting around some creative solutions for homelessness. One idea involves creating "risk pools" for landlords — essentially insurance against damages from high-risk tenants who might otherwise be homeless. In fact, just last week COTS won a $75,000 grant through the Vermont Community Foundation to do just that. Markley says the money will create a "risk guarantee fund" that will provide "insurance" for 10 families whom landlords would consider high risk.
Policy aside, Markley says there's a more compelling reason to do the homeless count.
"These are people the rest of the world doesn't see and often get walked by," she says. "And this is a way to make them real, and their lives real."
As if University of Vermont's outgoing president, Dan Fogel, doesn't have enough on his plate to give him indigestion: On Monday night, members of the 11 religious congregations represented by Vermont Interfaith Action will call out the UVM prez for his failure to deliver on a promise made four years ago to build more affordable housing in Burlington.
And rest assured, those VIA members, more than 3000 strong, will be anything but quiet as church mice.
As Seven Days reported back in June 2006, a broad cross-section of Vermonters in Chittenden County, including seniors, the disabled, low- and moderate-income families and people transitioning back to the community from prison, have a very difficult time finding affordable housing in Burlington. And each fall, that problem is only exacerbated by the Queen City's enormous influx of UVM students.
Housing advocates consider a home "affordable" if its residents spend no more than 30 percent of their household income on the rent or mortgage. By that standard, roughly half of all Burlington residents live beyond their housing means.
Four years ago, some 250 members of VIA showed up at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington to call on UVM to take a more proactive and urgent approach to addressing the city's housing crisis, and commit to a speedy timetable for future meetings and new housing projects.
At the time, city and university officials were already well aware of the problem. In 1998, UVM commissioned an economic study which found that students occupied nearly one in five of the city’s 8100 rental units. At the time, about 2566 UVM students were living off campus — or 90 percent of all students in the rental market.
But even four years ago, that data was already out of date. At the time, VIA called on UVM Vice President Tom Gustafson to commit to a new study on the impact of the university on Burlington's rental market, expressing concerned about UVM's stated goal of enrolling 9400 students by 2013. At the time, Gustafson declined to make any such commitment, though he did agree to sit down and talk about the affordable housing issues with VIA members.
But talk is just about all that's happened to date, VIA charges. Since that initial public meeting, and subsequent ones attended by Fogel himself, UVM has broken no ground on new affordable housing units.
So, on Monday night, June 6, VIA and other community members plan to meet at the College Street Congregational Church from 7 to 8:15 p.m. to hear an updated report on the state of affordable housing in Burlington and what has — or more accurately, hasn't — been done to address the problem.
WIll anyone from UVM even show up tonight? Not likely, say university officials. But a June 3 letter to VIA from Richard Cate, UVM's vice president for finance and administration, explains that because the university is in the process of developing its student, faculty and staff housing master plan, it would be "inappropriate to discuss future plans or make future commitments for faculty/staff housing in a large public setting until that process is complete."
In his three-page letter, expected to be read aloud this evening, Cate acknowledges Fogel's 2007 commitment to pursue the construction of more affordable housing but notes: "As you are well aware, the economic climate across the country and for UVM has changed dramatically since 2007. UVM's resources are very limited at this point in time and consistent with our University mission, our priority is to focus on the housing needs of our students."
Cates goes on to report that, according to the Brooks and Allen 2011 Residential Report, colleges and universities in Chittenden County have added 1581 new beds in the last five years and plan to build another 1300 in the near term. Should all those new beds be built, Cates notes, the total number of beds available will increase by 16 percent. More importantly, he adds, the rate of housing development will outpace the growth in student enrollment, easing some of the pressure on an already tight rental market.
Whether Cates' letter, and not his tush in the chair at the front of the church will assuage the VIA's ire, remains to be seen.