THE NEW YORK TIMES – As his few remaining hours with a place to live ticked by last Thursday, Scott Alexander panhandled near a McDonald’s in Brattleboro, in southern Vermont, while running through a mental checklist of the supplies he would need for a move back into the woods nearby.
He had a tent and sleeping bags for himself and his wife, a propane stove and a heater. But he needed tarps and propane, and in two hours of holding his battered cardboard sign — “Any Act of Kind Greatly Appreciate” — he had made only $3.
“It feels like a countdown,” Mr. Alexander, 41, said as he eyed the storm clouds gathering overhead. “I’ll be up all night, trying to get ready.”
In the progressive bastion of Vermont, it was a point of pride that the state moved most of its homeless residents into hotel rooms during the coronavirus pandemic, giving vulnerable people a better chance of avoiding the virus.
But this month, the state began emptying hotels of about 2,800 people living there — most of them with nowhere else to go.
Driven by the recent end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing, the expulsions have spawned a state budget standoff and, in some quarters, painful soul searching about Vermont’s liberal values, and the limits of its good intentions.
The situation has also highlighted the growing importance of hotels in the housing crisis nationwide, for people whose other options are tents or sidewalks, and for local governments stymied by a paralyzing lack of affordable housing.
Between March 2020 and March 2023, Vermont spent $118 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and $190 million in federal money altogether, to house people in hotels, according to the state, broadly expanding a program that had long provided shelter in motels in snowy or frigid weather … READ MORE [subscription may be required].
