Okay, welcome. Welcome to a joint public meeting between the House Human Services Committee and the House General and Housing Committee. We are happy to be here today with individuals who are going to help us understand the depth. Somebody's watching YouTube. That's okay. Thank you. Thank you. So today we're going to hear about essentially what it is that would be necessary for us to really make a dent in the... I'll use the administration's language. Unit generation for availability for people of very low income. So people who are essentially living on SSI, SSDI, or very modest incomes. So we are happy to have a number of people here today and we're going to start off with Chris Donnelly from Champlain Housing Trust. I think it might take too long. I think everybody, is everybody in the room familiar with both of our committees pretty much? Yeah, I think we're good. Welcome. Have you, yes, you have signed in so you're able to share your screen. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. My name is Chris Donnelly. I'm in the Champlain Housing Trust. And I really appreciate being here today with both the committees and that you're coming together to collaborate. Solving our housing and homelessness in the state that I very much appreciate it. I also, I really valued the time I was able to spend with the Human Services Committee last week and some of the feedback I received afterwards. Very gratifying as well. So I thank you for that. And what I heard was that you thought that I gave you some hope. And that's what I want to come to you today and hopefully give you a little more, more help. And Chris, can I just interrupt for a moment? How would you prefer to take questions at the end of your presentation? Would that be easiest for you? Mostly, yes. You know, people are going to be going through a series of numbers and spreadsheets. And it's always a danger doing math in the public. I want to warn you, but I also, so if you're confused or if I'm just going too fast or you don't follow my logic. I'd be fine to take a question in the middle, but what I'd rather do is if you have questions about the specific numbers to wait until the end and we can kind of have that conversation. Thank you. And if you could hear to that, that would be great because that's part of the asking question with numbers is the tangents that can go up on those. So yeah, we can just make copious notes and ask Chris when he's when done. And people will find this on the presentation on both of our committee pages. So if you want to look on a little bit closer, I will put it up on the screen and what I recommend you can do what you want. Of course, but what I recommend is I'm going to walk you through screen by screen by screen. And it'll create a narrative for you as I as I kind of go through. And just just a second, I normally when I come to you, I normally have pictures of buildings or people with inspirational quotes. This one is so much different. So when I was here when I was with the services committee last week, I asked you to take a look back 10 years. And we started with talking about how the Champlain Housing Trust had stepped in and purchased Harbor Place in Shelburne at a moment where we were spending a lot of money on motels. We weren't sure if we were any better off. And we said, maybe we have a better way. And so we purchased a motel and that was 10 years 10 years ago. And then we did a series of other types of interventions in the soon years. Today, what I want to show you is what 10 years from now they look like. So I've done some some modeling. I'll share the screen and we can start to walk through it. And I will say that anybody who's going to be coming up after Chris, if you plan to share your screen, if you would make sure to sign into the meeting before you get up there and that would be helpful. So this is back in December. I think our organization is a member of the, the home, the housing and homelessness alliance of Vermont. It's a coalition of both homeless and housing organizations, obviously. We, we came to some leaders, some committee chairs, both in the house and the Senate with our legislative priorities. And we said, here's what we think we should be doing this coming year. And we, we get challenged to be frank. We were told, what is this going to buy us? You're asking for a lot of money. It's a tough budget year. What is this going to, it's going to buy us how do the long-term vision? Are we going to be moving people out of motels with this money? What's your plan? And so we took that to heart and I raised my hand and went back and I've been talking to people for the last month and a half or so to help develop a model that hopefully is a framework for you to think about what the next 10 years might look like. So, again, I want to, this is a framework. It's not necessarily a, it's not a housing needs assessment. This is not based on, we need 6,000 homes of this type or 2,000 homes of this type. Next 10 years, this is just a framework that I've used of assembled about 18 different data points and variables put into spreadsheets to explain to you or show to you what we can, what we can accomplish with the resources. It's based on structurally, it's based on what the Oracle Housing Network can, what the capacity of the Oracle Housing Network is to move capital and we have been blessed and appreciative of the support that the legislature has offered us in the last several years, between 110 and 150 million per year, plus 3 years and capital to develop new housing. This, this model suggests continuing that level of investment and I work, I work through what that looks like in terms of the number of homes being created, who may be created for so forth. We have focused on the early years of this 10 year model and really addressing what the chair would suggest it and that's really focused in on moving people out of motels and people with the lowest income and really trying to identify some new initiatives to address those needs right away. But I do want to say that I feel is critical that we can't just do one or two things we need to do. The whole housing system is is just not working for people. So I think we need to take a holistic approach to do this, this modeling that I did suggest that we could create 7500 homes over 10 years, 300 shelter beds or some other types of service enriched beds, and it will cost about 100 million per year. My, I'm going to try not to have my advocates had on too much today, but I will say that I think the biggest risk we can take is not acting. I think that I don't think that should be on the table. I think we need to act. And that's going to be more than just permit reform more than active 50 reform. I think we're going to need resources to really address the needs of low and modern people. So this is the framework that I'm going to go to the next slide. It's going to. It is small. Yes. Let me see if I can. We're enlarge it here. So. If it's PDF, it's going to be. Yeah, that's very. Yeah, there we go. Better. More. More if you can. That's better. So just give her the mic. Thank you to the human services technology team. You can see my screen. Okay. Sorry about that. So I am going to bring you through a series of numbers. What I mentioned just a bit ago is that early investments. This model get at some of the needs of the lowest income of the monitors. And really kind of moved some people out of the motels, but they need just not as an apartment. They need something a little bit different. So permanent supportive housing is housing with services embedded in it. We are suggesting that we do 200 of those over the next two to three years. We. There's been suggestions for new shelter beds, so non congregate shelter beds 200 of those and then with the work hopefully with collaboration with the human services. This is other type of specialized service better medical respite or something that doesn't quite exist right now. That we need about 100 of them. And I think you've probably heard Paul drag and talk about. Just the lack of ability for his staff to cope with a lot of the needs of the people that they're serving. And so we need something a little bit specialist. It's somewhere between a motel. And impatient or they're single. So those are the priority new initiatives and you'll see these flow throughout my my modeling in the next few pages. Below, as we're doing that really kind of initial targeted investment. We also need to be investing in for housing for the network and for the for the community. And so this is just a 40,000 foot level of what the next page of the going to show you. And that with investment this 200 million that's both capital and services. We will create an average of close to 400 apartments or farm worker housing and manufactured homes per year. We'll invest in homeownership selling mobility. The v hit program has been successful at a lower cost. And then this manufactured homes. I'm sorry, but I know that people are wondering why the red at the top. It says total over 10 years and. Yeah, yeah, so I'll explain that. So I just the red I these are these are created in the first couple of years. So that it's just the same number in the second column. But I made them read so that when we go into some of the next pages, you'll be able to track them. So that's not the total over 10. 200 is not the total over 10 years. 200 will be the total next 3 years. Right. It'll be it'll be over. I mean, it's 3 years is within the 10 years. So. It's a front loaded front loaded effort. You're going to do those first and you're going to have an annual goal for the numbers down below. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. Thanks. Good friends of both sides. Thank you representative. And when we get deeper in this, I may need, I may need to phone over. I have been, I've been looking at these, these sheets for a few weeks and I've been talking to people about this. So, I may, I may get a little lost in some of the details. So I apologize. But certainly questions like that, please. Please. So, the numbers down below are a result of investing in the housing. The housing programs that we have existing, but it's new, new funding for those programs. And we'll generate roughly with the permanent support of housing that's above as a permanent apartments and the numbers down below about 7500 homes total over 10 years. Yes, follow me. Okay. Okay. The next page. This is where I will go back to the first page when we take this is a 40,000 foot level. These numbers. The next page breaks it up per fiscal year. Okay. So this gets a little deeper in to show you a little bit more detail. Fiscal year 24, the one that we're in is gray on this because that's the year that we're in. We're not going to fund. We're not going to ask you for appropriations for this year for these. So these are, these are an estimate of what's online this year. So I just wanted to show you that we have actually been, we have the capacity to do this kind of. Move this, this kind of money and develop this kind of housing in the network right now. This is what we're doing. When we look out to fiscal year 25 through. 34 those that's a 10 year period, but I put in in this kind of plumber purple color. This year 35, that's a year 11 in my modeling, because when we put money in the system, it usually takes 12 or 18 months for the housing to come online. And so I just showed that in there because the money will be supporting those, but really thinking about those 10 years. Let me move back over. So these are the, these are just broad categories of housing that we're creating on the top. These are permanent housing. You'll see, as I mentioned before, the red permanent support housing is there. I just wanted to link back to these. This is one of those new initiatives. And then down below, these are beds that are being created. Again, non congregate shelter beds. And it's kind of medical respite specialized that's a newer thing. And put them into the next couple of years. One of the things that I want to caution. People about is trying to go too fast. Because I think it was stress stress the system. I know we have urgency and and I have. Not a lot of patients sometimes I'm not a very patient person. But I do think we need to do this in a methodical intentional life. If we're going to have success. Yes. Okay, with this sheet, this makes sense. Okay, thanks. The next sheet that I'm going to bring you to is actually how. These numbers these total is total unit generation. Oh, I don't like that word either, but this is the total number of homes that we're developing. How they are used for resource, how they're resourced for people that are experiencing homelessness. Okay, what I have and take a look at that. Let me just show you as an example of fiscal year 25. The rental line where it says 377 people see that. I go to the next page. New construction. 25% of new construction. We dedicate to people coming out of homelessness. So 25% of 377 is 94. That's in fiscal year. Got that. So, those numbers go across those numbers track from page to page. The next line down is a Vermont housing improvement program. This is that rental rehab program where members may have vacant homes or not to code so forth. We provide funding for them to bring them up to code. Historically, this program has served 100% or close to 100% of people through the coordinated entry program or exiting homelessness. That program is shifting this year to have 2 different options for property owners. They can either take a 5 year grant and I'm sure other witnesses will talk about this later. 5 year grants and they will have to take someone out of court entry or a 10 year forgivable loan. That they just have to set the rate, the market rent at the fair market rent. And they don't necessarily have to bring someone out of court entry. They can if they want. So this number here, this 50% target of those of those apartments being rehab. Is a guess it's it's we don't know the program hasn't hasn't actually hasn't actually launched. So that's a target and that's so that's the conversation. I'm sure. You all can have with the department and you can bring others into. These lasts are here. I can see the numbers are in red. I'll subtract back to. Those are those new initiatives. And so these are both housing and how you hire these beds. So that middle line where it says total new apartments or beds dedicated. That's white versus 444 fiscal year 25. Those are the new either apartments or beds that are coming online through the model. The line right below this is actually a really interesting one that I want you to focus on a second. This is the existing nonprofit permanently affordable housing rental stock that we have across the state that the state has invested in. Over 30 years. It's a permanently affordable and they are actually right now a really valuable resource. For the situation that we're in because when we have a turnover, when someone moves out and someone else moves in. 35% of the time we're bringing someone in from coordinated tree. So as you see, we're almost housing as many people. Coming out of homelessness with no new capital dollars going in in the existing portfolio as we would be in my projection in this 1st year. And that's an ongoing benefit that the state has because you've. Invested in permanently affordable housing. Is that 4, 20, the 35% so is the real number. A larger number. I'll show you the assumption that the at the end, but roughly 100 homes. Turn over statewide in the portfolio every month. So that's based on. BC has provided you with the act 81 report. I don't know that both committees have been receiving those. That's based on that. The last 6. Of numbers. I see. So it's 1200 a year and 35% of that's 4, 20. And that would be presuming that we maintain a 35%. I mean, so. Statute would need to be changed in order to put that. Yeah, this is not in statute. This is just we are we're mission based right now. Yeah. In fact, I think the number in the last 6 months has been 38%. But it fluctuates per region because. It's just it's. It's better to take a look at over time with this summer. The stress that the. I'll just say this out loud because it's it's challenging for the affordable housing network. With this, the 25% up top of housing that many people coming out of homelessness. Plus the 35% turnover. Our, our organization has invested. Charitable dollars. Into some resident services so that we can intervene because. People really need some added level of support. That maybe not. You know, clinical or that, but they just need like. Someone to someone to support them. As well as a go along. So we've actually invested. In some of that stuff because we're the. You know, our property managers and our maintenance folks are the ones that are. In the buildings. They see what's happening. We can, we can step in and provide a little bit of support to get them to the next place. So that's just. So. So if you looked out at the bottom over over the next several years. We're really generating. You know, close to 600. The first couple of years or 800 or 800, 900. Available beds or. Apartments for people coming out of homes. Get that. I'm hoping that if you look at this year, 29, 30. I think we should be doing that. I think we should be doing that. I think we should be doing that. I think we should be doing that. I think we should be doing that. I think that's in here 29, 30. I think we should be getting to a point where. Homelessness is really rare in brief. And when I was with the Human Services Committee last week and I put that picture up with the family, the first one of the first family that went into. Harbor Place. That was three weeks. It was just an economic issue. And we were able to solve that issue. So if we create the housing as we go along, we can create these opportunities for people. is not crisis-driven and that's really providing support when people need it, right? Just went offline. Oh, I went offline. Okay, sorry. That's okay. Take your time. Do I have to? Sure. I'm doing that right now. Kind of interesting that you bumped off when you're just getting to the dollar figures. This is actually... I didn't know. There are little dollar gremlins in your computer. We wanted to hand on magical thinking. Yeah. This is actually my favorite slide. Because if you know me, I like to... Yeah, great. I like to hang around the appropriations committee. You're represented here today, so it's good.  So here's how the money flows. And this is, again, as I started the beginning, I had 18 different sets of criteria. And what I focused this modeling on was the capacity of the affordable housing development sector to move money through. And so as you see at the top, the first chunk of things, items are money that flows through VHCB. And you see 110 is actually level funded across the board, across the 10 years. And then the next one down, and I should have put this in red because it would have tracked back, but those specialized needs beds, medical respite, and those numbers are there. VHIP is the next slide. This, I'm making the assumption, maybe others will have different assumptions that there may be a little bit of the low hanging fruit has been picked and it may be harder to move as much money through that program in the future. So I had 10 million in the first couple of years and ended scales back, but it continues to be a resource support for manufacturer home communities because that's really important to make sure that people are supported. And then there's a home ownership program so that people have mobility, all right? So that's how when I do my modeling, this is what it costs, the capital side, services side, because we know we can't do this without services. And this contemplated a new resident services fund to support folks coming out of homelessness that are existing in existing services programs that starts at 6 million. And then it goes up as we add more units on, as I add more of harbors in, and as well as we, as a coal inflationary number. Inviction prevention, I know. Yeah, I'm sorry. Chris, in your chart, do you figure that costs, like per square foot costs remaining the same over the 10 years or is there an inflation factor built? There's an inflation. I'll show you the assumptions in a second, it's about 5%. So the resident services fund goes up as we add more homes into the system but also as disinflation costs. I did 3% for these three bottom numbers. And so there's a eviction prevention. And I supported that in the Budget Adjustment Act. That's really critical. If we want to create the system, we also don't need to stop having a leaky bucket. This does, I cannot, I thought about it, but I can't really model how many people are falling into homelessness and what the churn is here. It's really, it's beyond my brain power to do that. I can give it a try if people want it to a better than it's difficult to do. So as you see the new, in the bottom four lines of the bottom section here, these are those new special initiatives that I talked about in the beginning. And so we have, end up with about between 20 and 40 million, 20 going up to 40 million in services over the next 10 years. And then the total package is roughly $200 million. Oh yeah, for 10 years. You have a large page. I could show you one more, one more quick page. And this is the one where I can't really go down too deep in, but you can look on your own. And I'm happy to talk about any of these with people privately or we want to talk about some of them now, but these are those 18 assumptions and data points that I put into a lot of formulas and models and so forth that come up with the earlier sheets. So two things that are less questions. I'll look, questions should be for the group, but just to be clear, the $110 million or even $177, that's our, that would be the state's investment, which represents really just a smaller percentage of actual costs that it would take to build these units. So while the number at $110 million, that's the same as saying that that could represent X% of what the actual costs of this housing is going to be, but this would be the state's investment. This is the state's investment. And there is leverage with federal tax credits that we get when we invest in rental housing development that bring in anywhere between 30 and 65% of the costs of the housing. So there is leverage. So not all the programs have leverage. And I think Gus has talked to you about shelters. It's 100% in with state money because there's no other leverage nor resource. It's so, somebody can leverage others, but not all the time. So can I ask for a clarification of Tom's question? So in other words, this represents for the state share, someplace between 40 and 60%, so sort of reversing the numbers that you just said, 40 and 60% of the unit development would be the cost is projected here to be state funds. Just for that rental production line. Okay. All right. And there may be some, and the homeownership has some, so I can get some more clarification in terms of which ones have more leverage. Yeah, try to figure out sort of like if we make this investment, what are we leveraging? Yeah. And again, I think it's different levels at different projects. So getting, we need a clarification of what a 4% deal is what a 9% deal versus the 0% deal is. So what I didn't give you is all my other spreadsheets that I have that create these numbers that incorporate those other sources of funds in it. So I didn't, that would have been, it's still in months of really nerd out with me. I'm happy to sit down with a number to fake into this. Excuse me, we need. So this is. Representative Hyman. Representative Small. Thank you, Madam Chair. Question for you. What is incorporated in a fiction prevention? What was it? What programs are in there? These are the three programs that, and maybe the chair can identify them better, but there's two and a half I believe for back rent. The proposal was for two and a half million dollars to reinstate the CRF era background program, which was estimated to prevent over the course of that grant up to 346 evictions. So while Chris can't compute what the churn might be 346 per eviction prevented or they're prevented, you know, so they're not like they can't be counted as evictions if they're not a certain amount of money was going to go to have a rental stability program coming out of CBOE in Burlington, which has had a statewide program. And then a million dollars roughly of that would have been for what we felt was an incredibly important full representation pilot program. We found that seven, we took testimony that said 70% of all evictions could be avoided if the tenants had equal representation in the eviction courts. And we were going to the first million dollars was going to a pilot program in two counties that had been used as eviction counts several years ago for a study done by Legal Aid on eviction prevention and what it would cost. So that was a total package of roughly $3.9 million policy passed in act 47 last year. We proposed the house passed that money to be in the BAA and as of yesterday or so. Yeah. It's not, it's still in process. Thanks for that. Representative Hyman and then Representative Elder. Thank you, Patrick. Just for clarification about the federal monies, those monies are already baked into these numbers. So the rental number of 47.2 million is the ask from the state because the federal monies already assumed to be in that number. Correct. Okay. I'm just looking at just trying to square some of the numbers. We're talking about 7,500 new units of housing kind of in aggregate, but then we get some different, slightly different numbers throughout the presentation. So just looking at some of the FY 34 numbers, I'm seeing the 7,560 and that makes sense. That's kind of in reference to that. Understanding it takes a year further, but I'll just stick with FY 34. Now when we look at the next page and this is to help people who are unhoused, the 6,034 is in that same year as the 7560, but the difference is the 7560 is all new. And of this 6,034, we actually have to back out 4,200 to account for the existing portfolio. So when I do that, I've got about 1,800. So we're of the 7,500 new units, we're going to create over 10 years according to this plan, about 1,800 of those will go to people who are unhoused when we're just talking about the new stock. Does that track? Yes. With the caveat that 300 of them are not in the 7,500 number because they're shelter beds or the service. Right. Okay. So that number is in there too. So that total number would be 300. So you'd really be talking about more like 1,500. Out of the 70, so the 7,500 has a lot of other things, a lot of other programs and programs in it, but at the end of the day, we're talking about of this 10 year, $2 billion investments. We're talking about 1,500 units at the end of it approximately of new housing going to people who were in coordinate entry previously. Right. I think one of the things, Chris, maybe for you to say a little bit about is that, well, one, this is a model and there's opportunity to, for us here, now that we have this model to change percentages, for instance, that maybe we would want to see, but I think understanding representative elders question, also we'd be looking at the turnover that's happening in existing housing as well to look at how many people who are in a homeless situation would be have access to permanent housing. So I think it is important for us to remember that these total numbers are made up of different types of housing, some permanent, some not permanent. And so we have to kind of like look at each, almost like look at each line. Yeah. With an emphasis, again, to remind that the reason we're here is to talk about low income housing. So that includes any of the more middle income above 80% of area median income housing that we've talked about either. We're just trying to keep this conversation, we will keep this conversation down to this focus because there are other programs out there. Yeah, low and very low income. Yeah. What I'll just say to that and not to disagree with you, right now in Burlington and the Elmwood Community Shelter, we have 120 to 130 people on a waiting list for eight by eight foot pods, a half a mile away to the south. There's new apartments that are being generated, built right now that are going to be going for 4,500 or two bedroom a month. Yeah. And a half mile to the south is a $1.5 million condo being built. So we need, the system is busted. Yeah, I'm not worried about building for those. No, I'm not either. No, no, that's what I'm saying is that I'm not either. I know you're not. I know it's by example, which I think is just, putting an exclamation point behind what you were saying to the students. Yeah, thank you. We need an exclamation point because the problem is wide and we're always afraid of losing the conversation on this particular group in the conversation because poverty is hard to talk about. Any other questions from any committee member in the room, any legislators? Yeah. Just to be clear, again, this investment, you've made estimates on service investments. I mean, this housing won't succeed. And this is just kind of the way that I think all these, the committees feel, simply building four walls and a roof isn't enough to help do the longterm correction that we're talking about here. So simply building units, great, fine, it's very expensive but without the other supports, the other vouchers, the other things that will help people stay in those apartments and create a stable tendency. And this addresses it. You address it with some of the services but that's just the onus on the housing, especially affordable housing organizations. The limit is you can't do it all. Like, we need participation from the DAs, the SSAs, the state, make sure that these other services are there in order to, if we're making this investment, we have to make that other investment. That's my, I think that's the way that personally, we've heard the testimony over the course this session and beyond. Okay, Rep. St. Bromsted, Rep. St. Noyes, and then Rep. St., not Rep. St., okay. So understanding that this is a 10-year plan that you were asked to think about, if we, is it your sense that if we invest the 200 million a year for 10 years, that at the end of 10 years, everything will turn over as we need it and will be sort of, it's all stating. Yeah, it's all stating. Wonderful, like that. Mission accomplished, you mean? Yeah. I can't say that there's a housing needs assessment being done. What I can say is that I'm impatient. I don't think we need to wait for a housing needs assessment to say that we need to build more housing. I need to provide these services. And I don't think we're in danger of overbuilding any time soon. So I can't say in 10 years or eight years or 12 years that that's it. We're absent that data. Yeah, I just think it's easier for people to think about an investment like that when they think, if we, this is why we need to do this today and this is what we can look forward to tomorrow. And one thing I'll just say and stop talking about, when we get the housing needs assessment, if there's some kind of thinking that we need to do some more planning at that point, that's great. I would, being the impatient person I am, I can imagine people wanting to create a stakeholder group going out and doing community meetings all over the summer across the state, getting input, coming back with a report next January to say, we need to build more housing. You're right now today saying we need to build more housing. Sorry. I know, I'm just sorry to interrupt that because it's almost sounds ridiculous now, doesn't it? Yeah, representative Noyes. Madam Chair. So this is 200 million a year for 10 years. What has been our, have you looked at our past investments in housing and a portion of that 200 would be federal dollars, correct? No, that would not be federal dollars. It's 200 million is all state dollars. That's here. In the last three years, when we have had some federal dollars and this has been some state surplus, we've invested between 110 and 115 capital. The new services in my model is new spending. We have nothing to spend on. We've been spending other programs. And one thing I can't just have it in my head around is how all of this would intersect or interact with the current budget construct. That someone else is going to have to figure out how all those things mesh together. I just got with the red sheet. I think that's probably our job to figure out. Follow up. Have you looked at any of location of where this housing could be built like a percentage of urban versus rural or? No, I think that will come through a housing needs assessment. This is really just a model to say if we can run some, if we can put some money into the system that we have the existing capacity in the system, we have add some service capacity, what do we get? That's really the exercise that's to do. I'm just going to check in to see if anybody on housing in general has questions for just four. Go ahead, represent Garfun. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Chris. I'm wondering there was a report last year housing needs assessment for folks with disabilities that reported that 600 supportive housing units were needed to meet those needs. And I wondered if that was incorporated into your model at all. Not that specific need. And I try to stay up high and not get into too many of the specific types of programs. We're actually one of the grantee CHT of this planning grant that's happening. So I think there's this a model that we need to test and build out, but I didn't say, again, it's not a housing needs assessment. Just modeling about how we can run the money. But there's nothing preventing that from happening within this model. Yeah, I get that. I didn't point out senior housing in here or housing or, you know, so those are all things that need to get done. Those will be policy decisions. Yeah, yeah, represent Elder. Thanks, Sherwood. Couple of observations. One, I hope that you'll give, this is an excellent presentation. I really appreciate it. I hope in some fashion, our colleagues on energy and environment can see it since they do have sole domain over Act 250 in this chamber. It is something that I think limits our work, but it is the rules we're currently operating under. So I just hope they can see this because it's a critical part of the housing reform lies in neither of our committees. So that's just one observation. The second observation is that I really appreciate the sort of conservatism in these numbers, but the numbers are so high for an apartment, you know, 475, 500 for a unit, the same as a standalone house. So not trying to dig into that, just trying to say, I'm going to liken this to our school construction conversation where we say, well, we're going to spend 6 billion over 10 years and instead of 2 billion. And our average cost per construction might be $600, $1,000 per square foot. The state of our mind needs to leverage this kind of buying power in the marketplace and demand better pricing, you know? That's what I think. And I just, I'm so appreciative of this work, but I hope that we can continue to make sure that when we put this kind of money on the table, which I do think is a critical investment that we set expectations for the market in terms of value for money, because I'm having seen the firehouse apartments go up in my community, which we're so happy to have, I'm astonished at the cost involved. Rep. Sam Bloomly. Thank you. And thanks for all this work, Chris. I have a question. I asked this question in our committee yesterday when the agency of commerce presented its budget and, you know, the FY25 budget right now contains very little investment in housing. That's the target's new housing development. And I gather from the administration that really they are counting on zoning reforms to pave the way for new construction and that that will contribute significantly to meeting the deficit that we have.  And well, I just, I'll leave it at that. I do not know what the reforms to act to 50 or others will save us, but just to throw a number out, say it's 5% or 10% and the housing still costs $500,000, about $475,000 or $450,000 a house and who is that affordable to one apartment? That's, we still need to figure out a way to subsidize the rents down to a place where people can afford it. It's act to 50 is going to do something and I'm supportive of it, of performing it, but it's not going to solve the problem. So I want to make sure that I understood what you said, Chris, in that act to 50 reforms alone will not solve our homelessness problem without further investment. Not even close. Thank you. Just wanted to be absolutely clear about that. Representative Gregor. Well, I just wanted to follow up on what Representative Elder was saying is that, we have to have some regulatory reform, but also as I said the other day in the hearing that subsidized housing is a temporary solution, but it's not the solution. We need to have affordable housing. And so to leverage whatever we can in order to drive costs down that have skyrocketed is going to be the essential component because if 475 or 500,000 for an apartment or some of these houses that are dilapidated in sector 300,000 isn't sustainable and it's not going to help us get out of a crisis or any other problem, but we need to get those costs down to have low affordable housing, not subsidized housing longer. Just to that, I want to emphasize too that there's many levers of costs that are out of our control. We've had a presentation from the Broad Housing Finance Agency that showed us a bar chart that drywall is now X percentage higher in cost plywood. Labor costs always support having people getting paid better for the work that they're doing for difficult jobs. That's reflected at the price of housing. And so I want to be clear that our work is simply trying to get a handle on what the problem is, how we get there and what we interest rates doubling or doubling the cost of money. So that's just all part of this equation as well. It's all part of the discussion, not this particular equation. So I appreciate you coming in person and actually spending all this time on this presentation. It's really quite helpful. Very helpful. Yes, thank you. We're going to wrap up questions on this section now. And Chris, I really honestly, you took up the challenge when we met this fall and you ran with it. And it's honestly the first time in my nine years here that I've seen actually something that was comprehensible, clear, well thought out. It's not to say that we don't have tweaks that we would like to make here and there or that there'll be additional thinking. As you said, it's an evolving process. But it is, it's more of a roadmap than I use that word on purpose than I've seen in quite some time. So I appreciate the leadership that you've taken on this and appreciate our continuing to work with you. I had a lot of advice with it. So it's an interim process. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we have a little adjustment in the agenda. We're going to invite Commissioner Winters up next. But then Fadi, who is going to join him, you might need to bring a chair with you. This is the low cost version of a state house hearing. Bring your own chair. B-Y-O, she's a local person, so I want to hear him first. I hear you. Thank you. Good morning, good morning. Thank you for, thank you all for being here.  And we're interested to hear from the Department for Children and Families. And we'll be followed up by ACCD. But the floor is yours. Welcome. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, everyone. And Chair Wood and Chair Stevens, thank you for having us here today. I thought that we could start with kind of laying out the landscape of the general assistance housing program and the status of our shelter system across the state to kind of give a picture of what we do have for beds right now in this space. Some of the information that we know about the populations, we are temporarily housing. And how we start to match that up with the unit generation conversation the unit needs across the state kind of paint the big picture. A lot of this is going to be very familiar to the Human Services Committee and the Housing and General Committee, maybe not quite so much, but we have a slide deck. There's quite a bit of information in it. I can jump through some of these slides fairly quickly. And of course, up to you whether you want to ask questions as we go or take them at the end, but I do hope that we get to the UNIS conference. Why don't we wait on questions until the end or until there's a space where you think it's good to pause? And can you just clarify, Forest Commissioner Winters, is this representing what the current policy is versus what the state's proposed policy is for FY 25? So what you'll see in this slide deck is current policy and current work that we have done. And there is also some information in there about work that we could do if there were more units available. And I'm sorry, I did not say for the record, my name is Chris Winters, the Commissioner of the Department for Children and Families. And joining me today is Deputy Commissioner Miranda Gray for Economic Services Division and Interim Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Lily Sojourner. So it would be helpful as you go through the things and you're pointing out current services, if you could highlight the things that are changing or have been, excuse me, have been proposed to change in the governor's budget. Because I think it's important for people to understand what the administration is proposing, as well as what it is that is currently being provided. Absolutely. Thank you. Right, and Lily is running the slide show. Thank you, Lily. And we have it up. So we're good to go. Thank you. So the very first slide is just to give you a demographic of the current households that are in our shelter system, that are in our GA program, which is approximately 500 shelter beds and approximately 1,600 hotel rooms across the state. And you can see there are categories of eligibility, catastrophic, that's fire, blood, death of a spouse or minor child, domestic violence and sexual violence, constructive eviction, for no cause, court ordered eviction. And that currently is an 84 day stay in a shelter or a hotel under the proposal for FY25, that would be reduced to 28 days, same as the next category, which is currently 28 days would stay at 28 days for the vulnerable population. Those are folks who are an SSI, SSDI recipient, age 65 plus, pregnant in third trimester, children under 18 or 19 if attending school. I'll just say children in general and children up to age 19 if still attending school. And then there's also a point system for different categories and accumulation of points qualifies you as well. Things such as disabled bed, open family, services case, SSI, SSDI applicant, discharged from a hospital recently or discharged from DSD, CF custody within the last three years, reach up recipient or probation or parole. So it's accumulation of some of those things that makes you eligible. And then there's adverse weather conditions. And that is dependent, it's what we call a hybrid model for adverse weather dependent upon weather from November 15th to December 15th. And then also dependent on weather from March 15th to April 15th. And then it's non-weather dependent from December 15th to March 15th for homeless households and also ineligible for the GA program if you refuse to shelter bed or other alternative housing. So it's kind of the demographic of the 1600 plus households we currently have in GA housing and hotels and motels across the state. And another 530, I wanna say shelter beds that we currently have what we call the traditional shelter bed system. So those are connected with services of course and the GA housing and hotels really are not connected with services. The next slide is just a quick, visual of the timeline of the GA housing program in FY from May 2 to present. We have our traditional emergency housing program that was in place that had been kind of opened up post COVID to allow us to have non-congregate settings for especially our most vulnerable Vermonters and Vermont's has done a really good job of housing the unsheltered during that time. We had our transitional housing program start in July 1st, 22 when some of the federal funding was changing in November of 22, we went to adverse weather conditions with relaxed rules and just kind of a reminder here that it used to be that night to night weather dependent adverse weather was what we had pre COVID. And we had lower numbers of homelessness but it just to kind of point out historically that we have always had to make difficult decisions about budgetary policy and looking at the humans involved as to who gets shelter and we've never said we're gonna shelter every single Vermonter. So there are always difficult, difficult choices to make and that's what we were living with in the past prior to my time here as DCF commissioner was that night to night through the winter. Adverse weather conditions were extended until June 1st of 2023 and in March last year. And then as of June 1st, we had those adverse weather conditions folks were no longer eligible. That was 800 households. You all I'm sure remember very well, June of last year when those folks were exited from the program. And then in June of 2023, Act 81 passed that kept us what we refer to as the cohort in until that law has them in until April 1st of this year. And that was about 1300 households that's now down to around 600. And we have more specifics on that and show you in just a minute. Here's some of the information that we have to kind of understand who it is that needs housing and is being temporarily housed are being temporarily housed. We have households by district. We can show you by our district offices are 12 district offices, the total eligible households currently in that those households are 1,628 as of the 5th. And you can see the distinction here between cohort households that 600 plus that I was talking about that used to be around 1300 and the non cohort households, folks who have general eligibility through those two categories of catastrophic and vulnerable that were on the first slide and then the adverse weather conditions folks who are experiencing homelessness who came in from the cold over the last couple of months and that those that adverse weather conditions eligibility is set to run out on March 15th where it will go night to night depending on the weather when the weather reaches a certain temperature with a combination of precipitation. We open adverse weather again so people may be coming in and out of adverse weather eligibility starting March 15th and then it all ends on April 15th. The next slide is the June cohort. This is what we do track this. We do report on this every single month. So we know more about the June cohort portion of folks in the GA housing program because they're required to engage with us. We do case management. We do complex care for those folks and we've been working with them as hard as we can to get those folks into housing. The intent I think when Act 81 was passed that we get those folks housed by April 1st you can see that's not going to happen. There were 1,289 households when we started. We're down to 616. That's 674 households that have transitioned out and you see the average nightly rate which we track is currently at $131 a night per hotel room. The next is households by cohort size. So this can inform the kind of units that we need looking at it, the unit needs in each district. So again, here's the district with the number of households and sorry, number of people in each of the households. You see it's a large number of one-person households but there are still significant numbers of two-person and three-person households and the number of children in the cohort. We do also have information about size of household and number of children in the general population as well. So beyond just the 600 households in the cohort, the additional households in the other programs we have the same demographic information that can help inform what the housing unit needs are in each region. We have it by county and we have it by size. The next page shows you the eligibility categories of each of the households. So this can further inform what kind of housing that we need. We have the categories of age 60 plus, disabled by the definition of qualifying for SSI and SSDI, domestic violence, families with children, health code violations and evictions, natural disaster, pregnant. And this is again, the cohort that we can get this for the larger population. Commissioner Winters. Yes. I just, Commissioner, Chair Stevens, there's a lot of slides in this slide deck. And I'm thinking like I'm just wanting to make sure that there's ample time for questions and for our other witnesses. So I'm thinking that if we can focus in on things that are for the future, things that we're looking at in terms of expanding shelter capacity, what the plans are for the GA Emergency Housing for the future, what your plans are for temporary shelters versus permanent shelters, that type of thing. And feel free to go quickly through your slides, but I'm just thinking when we get to, I know there's gonna be questions. Let's just put it that way. I'm very surprised there might be questions. Now, I will try to move quickly through some of the background, but I think this kind of paints, I'm trying to at least paint the picture of what the population is and what the unit needs are. I appreciate that very much. And form some of the unit work that we are doing. So these categories, these demographics help us match up what we know about the needs, the family size, the location, and try to understand the unit needs in each district. And we have that case management with a portion of the population in GA. So we know what apartments are needed by bedroom size, who might need an accessible unit, who might need a nursing home bed, be open to or want a trailer rental, who would be appropriate for a shared living arrangement. So all this data that we have does inform some of our housing work. And then just looking at the total individuals because we talk about households a lot and it doesn't always reflect the total number of individuals that we are talking about here. So housing by program category, we have in number of individuals is 2,605 individuals when the number of households is a little over 1,600. And that's 1,970 adults and 635 children. Very quickly, a couple of background slides on the number of households we're serving annually. You can see from FY 17 up through FY 23, the number of households we've served really spiked in 21, it's, so we have 1,600 households in GA housing right now, but there's a lot of churn of people coming in and out. So 3,600 in FY 20, almost 5,000 in FY 21 that's come down a little bit in FY 22 and FY 23, but you should understand that we are turning away households every night because of full hotel system. Very important, I think here to understand the average cost per night for hotels and motels. What we're spending now versus what we could be spending in another way. So it started out as $74 per night in FY 17, an average of about 75 just before the pandemic hit. And then you kind of see the spike to a doubling of the average hotel rate in the last six years. And I appreciate this committee's work on a price cap and trying to put pressure on the hotels to lower those rates. We are, the negotiations are ongoing. We have some hotels that have stepped forward and said, yes, we'll accept a reasonable rate of $75. Others who wanna talk about perhaps another path. So those negotiations are ongoing. And we have more hotels at the table willing to talk to us than we ever had before. And we appreciate the committee's assistance on that. And this is the total cost of the general assistance program over the years from FY 18 to FY 23. You'll see the big jump during COVID. We had an influx of federal money that really encouraged and allowed us to do these things. But you look at a $14 million program just prior to COVID and then a 52 million in FY 21, 54 million in FY 22. FY 23 shows 34 million, but that's not really reflective of the actual because we had a different program start at that time. So the overall actual for FY 23 was actually 95 million, but that was inflated because it included security deposits. The federal program ended and we started a Vermont program, included security deposits. Rates jumped at that time from 119 a month to 143. And we paid for an entire months at a time because it was treated as a rental. So that's a little bit deceptive in 23. And as you know, for FY 24, we're looking at about $60 million spent on the hotel hotel program. Very quickly, key concerns with the motel system. I think you all know this. It's inconsistent access to services. Providers have safety concerns providing services onsite at some locations, health and safety in general, the conditions of hotels. We've had a number of battles there and brought enforcement actions with the Department of Health. Concerns over exploitation and abuse of guests. Movement across districts destabilizes health and social services and inconsistent amenities from hotel to hotel. So high costs for low return, 132 average nightly rate recently. It's about $4,000 a month without providing any services. And as you all know, we would prefer to house people in our traditional shelters that include case management, housing, navigation, warm meals, laundry, and many other things. And I'd love to just give a quick overview and maybe have Lily Sojourner chime in a little bit here about our Housing Opportunity Grant Program. We've made investments there. There's additional investments this year. $27 million of state and federal funding with OEL partnering with over 40 programs across the state to provide housing. And fiscal year 24 includes 7.8 million in one-time funds that predominantly funded emergencies shelters and financial assistance. Moving very quickly to some of the things that the HOP program funds and the award summary, that's things like emergency shelter, operations and essential services, transitional housing, homelessness prevention services, rapid rehousing services, coordinated entry, innovation, homeless management information system and flexible client-based financial assistance. See for yourself the pie chart and some of the awards. Move right along to the HOP client-based financial assistance. If you have any questions or follow-ups on that, Lily can answer those. But you can just see the network of local providers that provide all of these homelessness services, whether it's Brock in Bennington, Capstone in Barry and Morrisville, CBOEL in Burlington in St. Albans. You can see the list there of all of the people who participate in preventing and addressing unsheltered homelessness in Vermont. And a lot of that happens through the HOP grant funding that this body approves and is administered through our Office of Economic Opportunity. So looking at what it costs for a shelter per household, per night, it can vary from 90 to $150 a night. So that's somewhat in line with what we're paying for hotels and motels, but you get so much more with a shelter than you do with a hotel room. It's least expensive as an emergency. The least expensive of these is the emergency apartment model for families. And that's part of our temporary solutions in the BAAs to expand some of those, working with Capstone. And in a facility-based project, we have learned that the most cost-effective models seem to be between 20 and 30 households. Recommended that we don't go higher than 40 households is generally our approach. And in older projects, OEO tends to fund a lower share of the project. And for more recent project, OEO is finding funding 95 to 100% of the cost. And when we talk about our shelter system, we have constant challenges of locations, of community support, and it's particularly of the workforce to run the shelters and provide the services. So we have been beating the bushes for the last couple of years trying to expand our traditional shelter system, but there are those challenges that we face every time. They're often expensive, take a long time to set up, take a lot of community interaction, and we don't always have the workforce to run. So a little bit more on the hop shelter data in S. And in fiscal year 23, 3,180 people were sheltered. So again, people coming in and people going out of the shelter system. 2,547 adults, 633 children, and the average length of stay was 64 nights. So you see the length of stay in our shelter system is much smaller than what we see in the GA housing program. There's the average length of stays in a graph. You can see that it has gone up. And I think that's very much a reflection of the lack of units and lack of places for people to move on to, even though they're wrapped in supports and services and housing navigation and subsidies, it's very difficult to have those programs be effective if we don't have the units. And this is the overall emergency shelter capacity. I think just maybe a few months ago, that capacity was much lower at about 460. We've increased it by 80 beds recently through hop funding. And we also are increasing it by another 100 beds over the next year. That's base funding that is in the budget. It's $7.2 million, I believe, for the ongoing operation of additional shelter capacity. So going from somewhere around 280 beds to perhaps 660 in the coming year. And so that's a significant increase of our emergency shelter capacity separate from what we have in the hotels and motels. And I think as most people here know, we are a shelter first state. So you're offered a shelter bed if that's available before you're eligible for the GA housing and a hotel program. The next slide is about that shelter expansion. And I'm trying to move through these just as quickly as I can. The budget does include $7.1 million in additional base funding for that shelter capacity. There are eight projects and approximately 180 households to be supported through that expansion. And that's ongoing base funding. These projects are supporting community providers with track records for offering emergency shelters. So we're working with what we know works with providers that we know are effective to help expand and develop new shelter projects. Five emergency shelter projects are supported in FY24 with one time funding. And so just so you get a sense for what those are, the seasonal shelter in Montpelier, the Elk's Club, the year round shelter in St. Johnsbury. And you can see the number of beds there. Young adult emergency apartments in Brattleboro, preservation of a shelter project in Burlington and conversation of a heat shelter in Burlington, conversion of a shelter in Burlington from seasonal to year round. Those are the FY24 expansions. And the expansions for FY25 are targeted for certain communities. These are conversations that are a ways down the road and hopefully will come to fruition in FY25, one in Rutland, one in Brattleboro and one in Hartford. So I know there will be a lot of questions about this. This is the temporary shelters to support GA transition. We are proposing in the BAA a $4 million with another 2.3 million in one time funding that was from Act 81 to set up as many temporary shelters as we can by April 1st to ease the transition from GA and provide some extra time for those who need it. We have the Winston Proudy Center in Brattleboro. It's 20 rooms for families with children, about 40 to 48 individuals, services already on site. That makes sense for us to do for approximately 17 months. That's what the provider is able to do. So we get a pretty good return on investment there. It's for under a million dollars capstone community action. We have expanded to three emergency shelter apartments. That's seven bedrooms. That can go for 15 months and they are one time leases. The Waterbury Armory, which we are diligently working on, that's congregate shelter, which we know is not ideal, but we're putting all options on the table. That's 40 individuals and is slated for three months at this point. But I think we may reassess at some point and see what's working and mobile units. We have potential to set up three mobile sites at 46 beds per site. Those are trailer style units that come with a common space and portable showers and bathrooms. And we can set up to three sites is what we're looking at for those and 138 individuals. All of these intended to provide some options, to try some new things, to relieve some of the pressure in the hotel motel system and send a message that we are not stuck with exclusively using hotels, to relying on hotels to do our GA housing system. Just a couple more slides here, pointing out the permanent supportive housing benefit, which is something that we're working on that is in funded in the budget. They can provide direct services to participants, starting in January 2025 to have up to 100 participants that we can support, with pre-tenancy supports, tenancy sustaining services and community transition. Interim Director Sojourner can talk to this a little bit more, but we're pretty excited about this program that can help up to 100 participants. A couple more slides, one more slide on family supportive housing to give you a little more information about what that program looks like. A few other things that we have been using and are very proud of and I think are effective are the home family housing voucher, which launched in January 2023 to help families with children exit homelessness, the landlord relief program, which was launched in February 2023 in the Vermont rental subsidy program expansion for reach up families. So a lot of assistance to families in need and renters through these programs to help do some of the prevention work around homelessness. And just a couple of quick slides to mention that there are ongoing housing work and options across the agency of human services that include all of the different departments within AHS, 154 residential mental health treatment beds, 63 intensive residential treatment beds, 96 recovery housing beds, 245 Department of Corrections transitional housing beds and 873 skilled nursing facility beds. And just a note there that the department disabilities aging and independent living is working with DCF and OEO to hold the webinar to provide more information to get community partners more aware of the eligibility criteria for choices for care and to try to move as many folks who are eligible from the hotels into a more appropriate setting for them. And also to note the project with BDH, the Homeless Health Care Capacity Building Projects. Director Sojourner can speak to that. And the last two slides really, it's the cost of other programs and these are some other things that we think could be, we know could be very effective but are not as effective if we don't have a unit to move people into. We have the rental assistance programs, home vouchers and rental subsidies, that's approximately $24,000 per year per household is what it costs. And you can compare that to what it costs to house someone in a hotel or motel, shallow subsidies of approximately $7,000 a year per household, we think could help a lot of people out of the hotels and out of homelessness, permanent supportive housing to enroll additional funds there, could enroll additional households, hop client-based financial assistance so we could add to hop funding if that was something the committee wanted to consider and hop services. Just say that when we talk about solutions to homelessness we often talk about a three-legged stool of a unit, a subsidy and services. And while we do have some of the funding in the programs for subsidies and services we just don't have the units. So we're really sitting on a two-legged stool at the moment. And so Commissioner Farrell, and the last side just to say that DCF doesn't build housing units as you all know, we are the option of last resort and we're supposed to be the safety net. That safety net has gotten larger and larger. It's been very easy I think for people to say stick people into hotels and a lot of our other partners kind of stepping back and saying it's been solved. And as you know, that's not the case and we need to do things differently. We do partner with other agencies, houses, community partners and others to inform their work with the data that we have about folks who are experiencing homelessness. And we know that unsheltered homelessness is complex with so many root causes it's gonna take a huge effort to address. I really appreciated Chris's presentation before me kind of a framework of the size and scope and cost of this. And we are very much in favor of a lot of the things that he's proposing. We've identified the same needs that he's talking about there in terms of shelter in terms of specialized kinds of shelters. But it's a matter of, I think, do we have the budget? Do we have the resources? Do we have the workforce to accomplish what he's talking about there? And I'll stop there. Thank you for indulging me and running through that many slides that quickly you take a breath and you will have a lot of time. I wish I had a glass of water for you. I'm feeling like, you know. So as Chair Stevens predicted, we have a number of votes on the House General and Housing side of things. And it's a representative Elder James and then Krasnow and then Howard. Thank you. Sorry to put you in front of Mary. Thank you, Chair Wood. I'm going back to page five. I'm just talking about the June co-book. I just want to clarify, 674 households using the verb transitioned out here. But my understanding is that's just, they left one way or another, right? So that would include people who are kicked out for a cause we wouldn't know by the hotels. And I know you had another slide that mentioned exploitation by them. So anyway, I'm just trying to say, is there a subset of that 674 you can point to that have actually, what I would consider were transitioned is that they were moved into other housing that we know about as opposed to just left. Is that a subset that you all can identify? Yes. And Deputy Commissioner Gray might have this at our fingertips or not, but we do know to the extent that they let us know when they leave. I think it's 270 or so that we have confirmed to have found other housing. Don't quote me on that number, but have confirmed to have found other housing. And then there are a lot of other reasons why people left. Sometimes it is before a violation of the rules of the program or the hotel. That's a smaller subset. People die in these hotels. So we have older folks or people who are confirmed for a variety of reasons. So we have a handful of clients who have died while living in the hotels. Brandy, you want some of the other reasons for people exiting? Yeah, sure, happy to for the record, Miranda Gray deputy commissioner for the ECMO services division. And I do have that number and I'm trying to get it at my fingertips. So I'll be able to share that with you, but we do have a certain amount of the population that has transitioned into apartments or other housing. Some people have to get in with other households, but then to go back to your point where some people maybe have been ripped out by new help. I don't know, the services does know if someone has been asked to leave a motel and depending on that reason, they might not have been eligible to leave a cohort anymore, but it would be helpful for our regular general assistance emergency assistance housing program. So that also started July 1. We went back to pre-pandemic. And so people were then eligible for either 20 or 84 days. Thank you. Thanks. And I just wanted to flag this. I don't think we should use the word transition for people who've died or people who left for reasons we don't know. I just didn't know. I would break that into two categories. Thanks. I do have the exit reasons in front of me and it was 222 households as of early January that we confirmed found housing. And we know that by whether they went to a hospital or treatment facility, an apartment, housing other than an apartment or housed by another agency. One of the larger categories is no renewal. So they just don't renew their voucher with us and don't tell us why. May have joined another household. I had died. That number is 13. Exited for misconduct. That number is 47 and a few others. I was just gonna say and members, you can find that actually fairly easily on the department's website. If you go to DCF and then you look under quick links, it's the first item under quick links and you go through that. And there is on a monthly basis, we required per Act 81, a monthly report from DCF and that's actually that they have updated their exit reasons to be more specific. And there's a whole dropdown there that you can find. And it's actually 239 now have found housing households. And so thank you actually. That's a, I hadn't seen this yet. So that's a nice breakdown. I appreciate that. Okay. And now we have Rep. Sam James and then Krasnow and then Howard. Yeah, thanks for being here. I'm on page 27 of the temporary shelters. And I have three, I think related questions about this slide. If you could remind me please, how many Vermonters should be, how many Vermonters we're talking about? So how many beds or spaces or folks do we need to shelter? What deadline it is that the administration is proposing again for this? And then project by project, where you guys are with that? Like contract locks and loaded, the beds are ready or we're still working on this hasn't come together yet. I'm really trying to get a handle on page 27. How many people doing in Krasnow? What date are you proposing? And how far along are we with every single one of these projects in the real world? And I have to tell you, I did not pay, I represent James Dachshund. Hi. It's a question I ask every time we see DCF and we'll see what they answer today. So we'll probably, and hopefully it's consistent with other things that I've said. It's all very fast moving. And the goal has been to be ready for April 1st because the law says that the cohort has until April 1st. We also know that the adverse weather conditions, March 15th is the date. So if it's warm enough outside, folks will exit adverse weather. And so you can see from kind of earlier in the presentation, trying to lay out the numbers there. We have those in the cohort, 616, let me get to individuals, not households. 616 households, non-cohort households, that's general eligibility for 28 or 84 days. So those folks are always coming in and out. That's 137 households. And then the adverse weather group is 875 households. And if you look at individuals, the cohort, and I know we're not supposed to use that word anymore, but the April cohort individuals, it's 1,055 individuals, 774 adults, 281 children. That's the group that we've been trying to target with this temporary shelters, understanding that there are also as many people coming out of the adverse weather program, similar numbers to who are in the cohort. And historically, pre-pandemic would have adverse weather conditions, the adverse weather conditions would end, and those folks would not be housed any longer. These are larger numbers, much larger numbers than we saw during previous to the pandemic. So we know it's a different equation, but we are expecting that we are trying to plan for April 1st cohort ending, and March 15th adverse weather ending by setting up as many temporary shelters as possible with $6.2, $6.3 million in BAA for this fiscal year. And so we have the five areas of the state that we're focusing on where we see the most need. Those areas of the state are Bennington, Rattleboro, Rutland, Central Vermont, and Chittenden County. And so the thoughts, I'll speak now to some of the things that we have in the works, some of the things that are more certain, some of the things that are still not certain. The one that is the most certain, and we're really happy to be able to say this, is the Winston Proudy Center in Rattleboro, the former Austin School for the Deaf, and they had some unused dorms and they have the services on site, Winston Proudy Center for Child and Family Development. It's an ideal match for rooms and families. So they had 20 rooms that they could put together, a lot of the dorm furniture, like beds and things like that, common living space. They were willing to put that together when we kind of reached out and were looking for temporary options. It's only available for a certain amount of time, but that that's available for 17 months, which is great. We'll take the extra months for the amount invested. I really can confirm this, but I think it's somewhere around $900,000 took on this for the next 17 months. So that one is signed to be delivered. We are finalizing the grant. We're having a more notice and we're just. Okay, I'm just gonna ask, why would that not be a permanent? I mean, that seems like an opportunity for a permanent shelter at low, I'm sorry, perhaps. No, that's okay. At low initial capital investment. Yeah, sorry. And I don't wanna get ahead of Winston-Powdy and their team, but they have great plans for their campus and are looking at permanent housing on their campus for these buildings. So I think they're still early in that process. I think if for some reason those bins change, I think that they would definitely partner with us. So the long-term plan for the space is in the same spirit, you know, 1000 and so. Thank you. And in all of these conversations, we do have to be careful about getting in front of the partners or the communities involved. It's really kind of a delicate dance that we're trying to do. We did have one really great project in Montpelier that I've spoken about a couple of times publicly, but I don't wanna denigrate the provider who does wonderful work, but their board voted against it because it would stretch them too thin. So we had something that we thought was fairly certain, started talking about it publicly and then it fell through. So it's, I mean, just wanna be careful about, you know, saying that anything is even Winston-Powdy, which I thought was fairly certain, she still won't have a sign cut, right? Another piece that we're looking at for Central Vermont is capstone, working with capstone, three emergency shelter, apartments, seven bedrooms, 15 months. What's the price on that one? I think it's a little less than $90,000, so it didn't set them up. For the three? For the three. And that is also, we have an award notice to them and we've set them a draft grant agreement to confirm. So that's, you know, small addition, but an important addition to have seven extra bedrooms available in Central Vermont. The Waterbury Armory, after one of our other projects in Central Vermont kind of didn't happen, as I was describing. We really pipped it quickly to the Armory as a property that would be available to us and could provide shelter. You've all probably seen that in the news recently. It had spirited conversation with the community a few weeks ago and in plan on having more. The, that shelter is still, that those, so it's moving, you know, that's moving fast. We have a lot of resources dedicated to it right now. It's the buildings and general services. It's the National Guard, you know, it's our teams kind of taking away from other work, trying to make this happen by April 1st. We have RFPs to review, service providers that we have to bring in because we don't have a local service provider to provide the staffing there. A lot of logistics as you might imagine around transportation or law enforcement or emergency services or food, laundry. So that's coming together very quickly and as soon as we have more details to share, we can. I don't know if, Miranda, there's anything else you wanna share about the Waterbury Armory project. No, I don't. Okay. I mean, sorry, we're sitting right here.  Soon we have a follow-up. Yeah, I do, Commissioner Winters, I think what we're really trying to get at is we have X number of beds. I think you said by the end of FY 25, there'd be approximately 680 shelter beds. Is that right? Did I write that down correctly? I think that's right. 680, does that sound right to you? By the end of FY 25. By the end of... Adding in 625. By the end of 625. 540, I think might have been the number. Was it 640? Okay. Well, I think we're... Yeah, I think it's around, because we hope to get the full 80 on this year. So it's roughly 100 that we would be adding in state best players. So we did 600. We did 600. So I'm sorry, what's the number? 600. 600 now? Mid 600. Mid 600. 640, 650. And it's gonna depend on the size of what the provider can do. Okay, so just trying to get at... What is it that we need as a state? Follow me. Are you saying 640 is it? So there will be 640-ish shelter beds as of the end of FY 25. We obviously need many more shelter beds than that. The current funding, the current capacity that we know of with the providers we're working with is to increase by another 100 this year. We would need to increase by more after that. But in July, what will the shelter bed capacity... What will the need be? It's significant. We don't know exactly how many people have other situations to go to if they exit the hotels and motels, but we do know that we have that very large number of 2600 or so individuals, depending on what the legislature does, exiting from March through July. Representative James, you have a follow-up and then we'll move on to Representative Krasnow. Yep, and so I'm just looking again at this page to bottom line it for myself. I wanna make sure I'm understanding. We've got April 1, 1,000 people more than, not including adverse weather. So April 1, 1,000 people and on this slide, so far I'm seeing ready to go contract signed room for maybe a hundred people. And everything else is in the works or underway or not confirmed. Correct. Okay. Representative Krasnow. Yeah. Representative James took some of my questioning, but I guess my first question is, does this money in the VA, does it factor in additional costs such as transportation, kids moving around to schools, even furniture, upstart costs, things like that? My concern, this should not, if kids should not legally move to different schools and other things like that, is that included in this money? I think that's separate. I might defer to some. Well, yeah, so that's more, I'm not sure how that's budgeted for kids who, you know, there's the McKinney-Vento law. Yeah, that's what I'm referring to. Do you know where that falls in the budget? I don't know, I'm not sure if I have a form like in this message. I mean really, it's pretty record the way I said during my interim director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. That will be, that would be a question for our agency of education. I think that it is something that Economic Services and DUSF are aware of and we're in touch with the agency of education if there are changes coming that we will have to work with school districts on. I mean, in terms of some of your other questions, for instance, Winston Proudy, right? I mean, this includes the operating cost for that site. So it includes furniture for the space, you know, people will be moving into a space that has furniture that has the things to meet their basic needs. They're going to take the same cost to that project. So the emergency apartments include, you know, the supplies. So some of those things are included in this and then some of the things that you mentioned would not be. And are not traditionally things that we find for DCF. So that's nice. No, I don't think so. I think it is funded elsewhere though. And one of the things that we do take into account when we're either placing people in a hotel or a shelter or if we're moving people to a temporary shelter site is we do try to give preference to those who have a connection to the community. We do like disrupt children in particular and school systems as little as possible when we make these moves. Yeah, I've seen that in my community and it's been really horrible for youth, you know, and we've had some youth in my community who've spent years now living in a hotel being shuffled around the state. And it's really hard. I'm going to ask one more time that I've asked this before but my biggest concern is if by April 1st this does not happen, there's no other options for people. There is no housing. There is no place for people to go. So I'm just looking for reassurance that there is, that this will happen. And when we earlier, when mentioned, you know, shelter first state is that means that you go to shelter first before hotel, not that we give shelter to everyone. That's correct. Housing first is something different. Right. And so, you know, we already in my community area have, as we all know, dozens of people being turned away when it's even this cold out. And I'm just really concerned about the communities being able to embrace hundreds of people if this does not get done by April 1st and how that will look for people and how as a policymaker, I'll be able to just be okay with that. Is there a question? No. Chris, no? Okay. I'm just trying to make sure that. My question was, what's the plan if it's not done by April 1st? Thank you. So I think we reassess our relationship with the hotels. I think we reassess our shelters. Are there other contingency plans for more congregate settings? I think it's something we would have to consider. I just want to be clear that even if we do put together the number of temporary projects that we're talking about here, those significant shortfalls in the number of people that we need to, that would be looking for shelter. Thank you. Probably the point Representative Krasnow was making. So even just to clarify for people, even if we are successful, we mean the global we putting together all of the temporary shelters and whatever else is on the line here, there's still well over 1,000 people who will be unsheltered. Representative Howard and then Representative McGill. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Commissioner, for your testimony here today. The number of people in my community, which is Rutland, is quite high or people without homes. I visited one of the motels and to say it's deplorable is, I can't even describe how bad it was. I don't understand why the state of Vermont owns property, owns the ASAP Bloomer Building in downtown Rutland where offices have moved out, the Social Security Office moved out three years ago or more empty. Another department, I can't remember the name, is moving out and renting from a private landowner. That building is pretty much empty. It has an empty restaurant downstairs on the ground floor that has been empty for years. As far as I know, it has showers in the basement. They have restrooms. Why isn't the state putting people in there temporarily instead of paying exorbitant amount of money for motels and hotels? These places, these spaces have been empty for years. Living in a motel hotel is not ideal for anyone, but especially children. Thank you. That's my question. Thank you, Representative Howard. And I agree with everything you said. I can tell you that we have looked at the ASAP Bloomer Building. We looked at 108 Cherry Street. We are looking at all available state properties. It's expensive to retrofit some, so it could be maybe temporary. You have to have certain require codes and certain sprinkler systems that are required for overnight occupancy. That was one of the most prohibitive things, I think, about both Cherry Street and the ASAP Bloomer Building, but EGS can speak more specifically to that. We are looking at state properties and anything that we have available. If you have some others that I would love to connect with you, we've been actively engaged in Rutland trying to find spaces at some conversations with Rutland-Wire. I'm in constant contact with the mayor. Our field services director, Adam Sandsick, is constantly trying to find spaces in Rutland. We're hopeful we can, and the mayor has a longer term plan for a shelter, but that's not anything that's immediate. That's part of the package that we're talking about for FY25. But I'd love to talk to you about spaces that you might know are available in Rutland. Because these office spaces, they need to be cleaned, they need to be heated, they need to be air conditioned, and they're empty, and I'm sure a sprinkler system would be less expensive than spending the exorbitant amount of whatever it is, $135 a night per person. So it's a good question, and I don't have the construction knowledge, but what I have been hearing from BGS is that they are very expensive to retrofit, but as it, how it compares to hotel or to temporary solutions, I'm not sure it might make sense. I'm thinking of BGS invitation. Maybe you should be annoyed. Okay, Rep. Sam McGill, you're gonna have the last question on this, and then we're gonna invite the next witness. I wanna stay on the same slide. I was wondering, can you give us some information about how much you're budgeting per project? I'm a huge advocate for having a menu of options. I'd like to see more beds created, but I'm really just trying to get a sense of kind of what the per bed cost is, kind of for each of these different options. And if you can't get that to me now, I understand, but an estimate would be good. Yeah, I can give you some estimates on the cost, so though it seems to be always changing as we get quotes back from vendors, you are, please. Winston Proudy, the total cost was $915,000. And does that include services for that term? I think there's staffing. Okay, yes. It's salary and operating. They also are families for a housing provider down there, so they're gonna be, we anticipate that there'll be a lot of crossover in that population, so they'll be able to leverage that as well. For passive community action, it's $87,000. Sorry, I missed that number. $87,000. That's just the apartment cost. They are able to leverage housing counselors that they have through their sort of standard-based hop grant to address this capacity so that the services will come separately from that. And so, yeah, I mean, those are the two that I can speak to as the commissioner said, some of these are kind of in-negotiating, in-negotiation, and it's too preliminary to share based on an RFP process. And looking at the timeframe, the cost per bed will be different, but we can give you the calculation on the cost per bed.  And we have RFPs that run the gamut for 90 days. I think some purchase price is also $890,000. Right, and that's a long-term asset for the state after this temporary use. So we're not building that into the cost per bed, but fair enough. And then there are some renovation retrofit to make it available for occupancy overnight. So that's like the sprinklering and things like that that may be built into the cost or BGNAS is gonna absorb that for future use. And then on the mobile units, we're looking at different, whether we purchase the units and own them or a provider purchases them and provides the service along with it or we do a rental lease. So those are all kind of various, but a number that has been kind of floated out there that may not be terribly accurate. So please don't hold me to it. It is about a million dollars per site for 90 days. And so a lot of these are as expensive or more expensive than a hotel. They do come with services and they do disrupt the hotel and motel model and provide us with some different options to provide us with some negotiation leverage. And just the thing that I would leave the committees with is there's a lot of short-term problems to solve. I would love to be in this seat next year and know that there are a lot more housing units in a smaller problem to solve. I know the interim is the part we really have to have a lot more conversation over while we're building out the rest of that system. But Commissioner Perrell and others will come and talk to you about unit generation and the more units that we can have, we think the more successfully we'll move people more quickly through these temporary solutions that we have propped up. Thank you. Thank you very much, Commissioner Winters and Deputy Commissioner and Director. We appreciate you being here. We know it's a tough job and I would love for you to be continuing to sit there next year. So next, we're going to hear from Mr. Ferrell, Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development and I think Sean and Nate as well. Nate's not in here. Okay. And Commissioner Bolio here? Yes, before I left. Okay. This is very humorous. You have to bring your own chair with you. I missed the first time in my years I've ever seen that, but it's very funny. This test, just to be brief. I know this whole year, that is representative of the whole year. Bring your own chair with us. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. No, I'm not. I'm just going to make faces. No, I'm just leaving. Please keep it down or we'd like to hear from the witnesses. So thank you for being here and we appreciate your attention and I just want to make sure that people understand that we also have three other witnesses after you that we want to make sure we have time. So I'm just, that's more of a notation to committee members in terms of making your questions kind of succinct. That would be great. Thank you. Floor is yours. Thank you, Chair Wood, Chair Stevens. Good to see everybody, a lot of familiar faces here. I'm awkwardly flanked by Commissioner Bolio and Director Gilpin. They're going to touch on a couple of things. You know, I'll set the stage and, but you know, the reason they're here is because what I'm going to be talking about is more of the long-term vision, right? I can't make any promises about permanent units that are going to come online to solve this April one issue or even a July one issue, but we can talk about what we can do over the next five, 10 years so that the people that are sitting in all of our seats, 10 and 15 years from now aren't kicking us and say, boy, I wish Commissioner Farrell did something about this housing problem. So I also want to point out that the tools that we're going to talk about today are a couple of those in the tool belt. Commissioner Bolio is going to talk about some tools that are being proposed. Those are also not the only things being proposed. There are many things, but we wanted to give a flavor of the way we can leverage public and private capital to make sure that we're making, bringing everybody into this. Can I interrupt just for a moment? I just want to make sure that you have not submitted anything in advance because I don't see it on our webpages. Yeah, we won't be submitting any. We may submit VHIP data, I suppose, but we have nothing to share. Okay. I see we do have something from Commissioner Bolio. I have a one-page run. I see it. Yes, that is there. It's going to be impossible to see on the screen so I'll probably just speak to it, but it is available. People can call it up. Thank you. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that we weren't missing something that had been sent in. No, no, that's okay. And I guess as I get started here for the record, Alex Farrell, Commissioner at the Department of Housing and Community Development. So, like I said, I'm in the position where while you all are very much focused on this emergency, I have to look five, 10 years down the road and I have to use the data available from Vermont but also in other jurisdictions what has worked and what needs help from other resources. And what that means is in my seat, I cannot separate homelessness from the broader housing issue. And there's a lot of data that shows us why that is. And I can touch on that in a minute. You'll also hear me say that this is going to have to be a layered approach. You will never hear me say that Act 250 reform alone is going to solve the problem. Nor will you hear me say zoning reform alone is going to solve the problem or appeals reform or just state investment or just incentives to leverage private investment. I will never say any of those things alone will solve this. You will hear me say, we have to do all of them to solve this problem. You know, I think, Chris Donnelly said something that I've said a couple of times and I just really appreciate there's a lot of folks saying this, we are not in danger of overbuilding anytime soon. The efforts we make to increase production of homes and the investments we make there are not going to push us too far in the other direction because we are so far behind and we've done it to ourselves over decades. I'll share some more data there in a moment. So this decades of under production, the population we're discussing today are most harmed by that under production. In every jurisdiction where this has been studied, the people who are most harmed by low production and low vacancy rates are the most vulnerable, the homeless and the people that are on SSDI. So we know that programs like VHIP that have received substantial funding and VHIP is a new tool in the tool belt that has been bringing units online at a case and a cost that we weren't benefiting from prior to March of 2020. And so we've got that great benefit now. But just like with the layered approach to regulatory reform and appeals reform and all of this, VHIP alone also will be the tool. VHCB, VHFA with the low income housing tax credit, these are all tools that work together, community development block grants. And so as we're thinking about how we make investments, we also need to think about how the state leverages federal investment as well. So Director Gilpin in a moment is gonna dive a little bit more into VHIP, the data that we have thus far. And then what we expect from VHIP going forward and luckily, Chris Donnelly teed some of that up. But what we have observed is that even after historic investments, 500 million over the last three years, that didn't get us where we needed to be. It's getting us a lot of the way. And that's because of partners like VHCB and CHT. It's also because of the work VHIP is doing, but we have just had the greatest test case in the history of our state that proved that investment alone far beyond the state's means will just not do it. We need investment along with many other things. So the reason I am really working hard to share this message and make it clear that vacancy rates and high rents are most negatively impacting folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum is because A, there's data support and B, this is really finally starting to gain wider acceptance. And I'm sure a lot of folks have seen the publicity that the book, Homelessness is a Housing Issue has gotten that has made a lot of this data more widely known and accepted and has reaffirmed a lot of what we're saying that it's got to be a multi-layered approach and expanding the whole stock is really important, especially for folks at this lower end of the economic spectrum. And it's also easy. I know we probably hear in the news, folks who want to point to substance use disorder want to point to mental health and say, these are the reason for our homelessness issue. It's not, it's certainly not the driving factor. They're complicating factors that make it a lot more challenging to make sure these folks get into a better place. They are complicating factors, not the driving factor. And frankly, there's evidence to suggest that nor is poverty the driving factor. It is what leads to somebody being more at risk for homelessness, but the scarcity in a region or a city is what drives those homelessness rates. You can compare Detroit and San Francisco, for example. There is a far worse homelessness rate in San Francisco than in Detroit. Largely because Detroit has had other problems, but those problems have led to, despite a worse poverty rate, more vacancies. There are dozens of other cases that can highlight this, so I won't dive into all of them, but the best way to combat homelessness in the long run is gonna be to increase the supply. Now, I'm gonna quickly, before we pivot to more tangibly the tool we are using right now, VHIP, and then just a couple examples of proposals from Commissioner Bolio, I just wanna cite something that VHFA put in a recent post that I think summarizes sort of the Vermont situation well. And they said in most counties in Vermont, the number of people experiencing homelessness increased between 22 and 23, not a surprise with the greatest increase in Rutland County. Meanwhile, the number of building permits issued each year in Vermont has stagnated at about 2,300 homes. State flat at about that for 21 and 22 and was far lower in the years before that. The HUD median rent estimates for Vermont counties continued increasing at an annual pace of 5% and statewide rental vacancy rates are below the 5% threshold considered to be a healthy vacancy rate. And any of the other measures that we discussed today that don't focus on permanently increasing the supply and housing in Vermont are one aspect of what we need to discuss here. Because like I said before, the people in our seats 10 years from now are gonna kick us if we didn't also look at that total supply. And I just, I wanna share one last data point for when I think of this decades in the making, we should have seen this coming, we should have been doing things sooner. I'm gonna just talk a bit about the units permitted by decade. So in the 80s, the average number of units permitted per year was almost 3,900 units per year. Just so folks know that actually peaked right around 88, 89. Then in the 90s, that average came down from 3,900 units to in the 90s, it was about 2,800 units. Average per year. In the early 2000s, it came up slightly from that roughly 2,300 to about 500 per year in the early 2000s. And then from 2010 to 2019, the average number of units permitted during that decade was 1,600 units. So decade after decade, we slowly produced less and less. And here we are now talking about an absolute crisis. Now, 2020 to 2022, so just essentially the last three years that we have data for, there was a slight uptick in each of those years that got us to that roughly 2,300 that we saw in 2022. So about 2,200 units on average during those years. And we know that some of that was a benefit of substantial public investment. But again, we're talking about a $500 million investment that we're not gonna be able to do again in that short of a time. Perhaps as Chris laid out a case over a number of years, we can find ways to be strategic about our investments. We also need to be clear-eyed and realistic about what our capacity is as a state and how we can increase that. And I'm gonna make one final point before I pass it off to Sean, which is the reason these layered reforms are beneficial, things like zoning reform, appeals reform, active 50 reform, incentives to leverage private capital. When you stack them all and then we remove these arbitrary caps, the cost per unit on a construction basis might not change, but the average cost can decrease because it's about scale. If we're capping the number of units that can be built in a certain area, let's say 29 before triggering active 50 and adding other costs. Well, developers are going to stop there. They're gonna just build to what's gonna be just enough before they hit that cap and we're gonna lose out on all kinds of units that we really can't count. Perhaps that developer could have built 80 units on that same square footage. We are doing this to ourselves and in some ways we can quantify it, in some ways we can't. It's hard to prove a negative, right? So I just wanna say it's not that we can save costs because you save on the active 50 application, you're losing out on scale because all those fixed costs, all the infrastructure, if you go into put that building in, you need to spread that over more units. And if we're not letting developers spread it over more units, we are driving up the per unit cost. So that's where you can drive that cost down, not just from the savings from a permit. Anyways, why don't we pass it to Sean? Actually, why don't we take a moment to take questions for you and then we'll pass it to Sean. Chair Stevens and I are gonna take the prerogative of being at the head of the table and asking a couple of ourselves. So the first one, I am delighted to hear you say that you'll never hear you say that active 50 reform alone will solve this problem. Delighted to hear you say that. And I'm delighted to hear you say that I have to look five to 10 years down the road for the people sitting in your seats 10 years from now. What I'm not delighted to hear because we haven't heard it is an actual plan. You know, we saw from our previous witness this morning that they actually have thought about what it would take to serve very low income people.  I've been, I'll be honest, I've been frustrated that we've put $500 million plus into this and we have not focused sufficiently on people of very low incomes. And so I don't see a plan coming from you. I don't see something on the table that says we need X number of units every year to do this.  We are gonna need an influx. And even if we don't have sufficient funds.  It's still, I believe, the responsibility to say what it is that we need, even if we're not able to fund it at this point in time. And that honestly is just something I have not seen. And, you know, maybe you have that, but we would love to see that. So... Is there a question there about Jim? No. I don't know if that's the question. Is there a question? Do you have such a plan about how many units? How much it would cost? What, that is my question. Thank you, Chair Steeves. Certainly. And to be clear, the legislation we proposed was based on the plan that we have. So for starters, we actually agree with the HFAs assessment that if by 2030 we are able to produce 30 to 40,000 units. So what that works out to be is that the building permit numbers I was sharing with you need to be between 4,700 and 5,500 per year to hit that. That would start getting us to the healthy vacancy rates. I'm sure some of you tuned in and saw our presentations during the fall about the unit deficits and you saw how we walked through by region, what the vacancy rates are by ownership and by rental. And then you saw that we talked about how many units we need to get to those healthy vacancy rates. So that's the starting point, right? I think you're saying we've assessed the problem, but what you're not seeing is the plan to get there. So our estimates based on what we proposed, we think are a good step in the right direction, though we recognize political realities make it tough to pin down something that everyone can agree upon and we think meets the needs. Anytime you put out a projection, folks are gonna quibble about what's the number? Why do you say 10% increase versus 16% increase? So for example, if we're able to estimate based on what Minneapolis's reforms did, that got them roughly 13, 15% ongoing increase. There were some years immediately after their reforms that got them higher than that, but assuming those are anomalies, the 15% increase is a basis. So when we recommend stacking reforms, we can then use that data to assume a certain layered effect. I think it's reasonable to assume that the H719 stacked reforms, for example, would result in production between 4,200 units per year, 4,900 units per year. That would get us back to that late 80s production. That is what needs to happen in order to meet this need. The reason there's also included in that investment in things like VHIP, in things like other incentives and the administration continues to fund VHTB is because you are right. Those compliment this broader approach. And I understand what you're pointing to with this trickle down. This is not my theory. This is experts who have studied this for decades. I am simply pointing to the correlation between vacancy rates and rates of homelessness. And we are also saying we need to continue to invest in things like VHIP and VHTB that are going to ensure that there are specifically those units as well. Okay, I'm going to call in Chair Stevens, Elder and then Brickwar. Thank you Madam Chair. You did use this word commissioner. Are we in a crisis? Certainly. Why haven't we called a state of emergency then? That's beyond my stop. Is it being discussed at any level in this building of saying we've been discussing the housing crisis, an unhoused crisis, a middle income housing crisis. We have this number of 40,000 units unattainable in our current state. And yet we're not calling for a state of emergency, which is something we cannot do as a legislature and as a general assembly. So the political reality is that we are going to sit and talk at meetings like this and in meetings in our individual rooms and talk about what we should be doing. And yet we're not doing it for political realities. And one of those is, does the administration have the stomach to propose $200 million of additional income simply for a 10 year plan? Nevermind the services, nevermind middle income, nevermind the other areas of school construction, nevermind the other needs, some of which have been papered over with federal money through a crisis, which I believe we're still in the middle of, does this administration have the stomach to consider raising $200 million a year for the next 10 years to putting their heads down and figuring out where we're gonna find that money and how and be frank with us and be frank with the public that talking about what we need ends up just being a recipient effort because we have studies that show us for years and years and years what we need. We understand here in this building what we need. Are we willing to make the investment? Is the administration willing to put forward a plan to fund something like a 10 year housing plan to fund a 10 year school construction plan? I think there are a few questions in there. I don't know about a school construction plan. But specifically for housing, we had a proposal today for $200 million a year that would provide at least two and perhaps three of the stools of dealing with low income housing and including some of the stuff we'll hear from Sean. But the question is, in the end, will we be able to raise the money and are we looking for a way, are we Vermont looking for a way to fund it? Because I've been talking about this for 15 years and we haven't achieved it. Is that my failure? There is part of a collective failure. And I think the failure to address how we would actually do this. Now we have a number in front of us today. Is the administration willing to address the need for investing $200 million in low income housing over the next 10 years? I think that investment contemplates keeping the current structure exactly the same. And the plan that we laid out indicates that we can make the investment go further that we don't necessarily need to go to that level, $2 billion over 10 years. We can make a significant investment, but we can make a smaller investment if we make the hard choices, make the structural chains that's needed. And was there a down payment in the budget proposal to BHCB and to other housing agencies or was that missing this year? The budget does have BHCB included. Submission? That's not my call. I'm sorry, I didn't hear that last part. I asked him if that was sufficient. Oh, okay. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. Representative Elder Gregoire and then Bartley. We thank you. Thanks for being here. I am gonna follow up on a bill that you did talk to us about not in too much detail, but this is bill 686 that basically asks us to sort of measure as we go against these goals. So whether the goal is to do a 5,500 units a year, 30,000 units over five years, whatever the goal is to say, let's see if we're hitting some interstitial benchmarks that are appropriate, realistic. And so without getting more into that, one thing that came up from your testimony or actually your contractor's testimony is that we have this part of Act 47, S100 that we passed that says upon publication of the statewide housing needs assessment, we also have to have accompanying regional targets. And then we heard testimony that said, actually we don't know we can do that because the statewide housing needs assessment isn't necessarily a targets thing, it's a projections thing, and anyway it's counting based, not regions based. I'll leave it at that, but that, we're gonna revisit that. Clearly you are required to publish those targets, whether or not the HUD maps make it easy to do so. So I'm just kind of curious, do you have a plan to publish those targets? And we don't have to go super in the weeds of it, but can you connect it to this idea of the kind of 5,000-ish homes a year? Because I want to see some kind of, I do want to see not just projections, but targets, and then I want to see measure as we go kind of accountability, which I know is hard, but if you could just speak to how your department plans to create those statutorily-required targets along with the housing needs assessment, that would be really helpful. Yeah, the way we did it was we did a layered contract with VHFA, so we have a contract with them to complete the housing needs assessment, which is the requirement. And then we worked with the RPCs and VHFA to pair up to set those other targets for it, I believe 2040 and 2050, is that what? Yeah, absolutely. So we acknowledged the need to do both separately, and then we coordinated the RPCs to make sure that we can make that happen. The statute says you have to do them both together. Well, we legally can't do them together, so to speak, because we have to have a submission to hide. They're gonna be done as part of the same project, if you know what I mean. So the same insights that are coming from the housing needs assessment will be part of the broader targets. But our housing needs assessment is gonna kind of point out, and again, Act 47 talked about 2030, we don't wanna wait for goals in 2040 and 2050. And so I thought in some ways, your testimony kind of let me know that, or made me infer, and I did this wrong, but that actually we've asked for something that maybe your department can't do in Act 47. And I wanna drill down on that, because setting targets, along with the current statewide housing needs assessment, was a very clear goal of that legislation. And sometimes we have to revisit these things and say, oh, actually, the square peg isn't gonna fit in the round hole here, but we need to have clarity on that. Because for example, Bill 686 that I won't get further into, it is building on a presumption of what is in statute. And yet we're hearing that we're not gonna actually accomplish the plain English of what the statute sets out. I think I'm trying to, I think we are achieving that. It's not that we're going to change the housing needs assessment to do that, it's that we're adding this on top of the housing assessment. Now, from my seat, that is effectively no different for you all, because you're getting the same information. Whether we give HUD something different shouldn't matter to the general assembly because they'll still get all the information. We just have to parse out what HUD gets. Director Gopin, do you want to? Yeah, I'd say it's the same deliverable. So we are putting it together functionally. Okay, yeah, just as long as they come out contemporaneously, and I won't believe that further. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Representative Gregoire and then Bartley, and then I want to make sure that your other presenters have an opportunity. So last two questions for you for right now. Sorry, just a moment. I do want to make note of the time we're at, nearly 20 to 12, and we want to make sure that we have time for particularly the pathways, folks, before we break, because they've come a long distance and the center amount of habitat for humanity is going to be today, going to be today after lunch in house general and housing. So any member of my committee that wants to join that, not any member, because I need a quorum in my committee. Just any, not every. Yeah, that would be great. So I just want to, sorry, there's just been a lot of questions. As you know, this is just something that we are struggling greatly with here, and we know that everyone is doing the same. So Representative Gregoire. Interest of time, I will pair my question and comments down. I appreciate your use of science to discuss this issue in studies and economics. We know, well, I think some people know and some don't, but that scale matters. So, but I just want to ask this question, I guess, I have a lot more to say about the whole issues of all, everything that works together. But if the legislature is finally willing to come to the table in good faith, is the governor willing to come to the table in good faith as well? Oh, certainly. Okay, I'll add to that. Representative Barley, thank you. I'm super sorry. Exactly, and thank you for being here today. I just want to make sure I'm hearing correctly and understanding correctly, that you're not implying that Act 250 reform is the only solution to the crisis. And I think we all around this table and in this room agree that this is a crisis. But it's just one aspect of the recommendation that you're making, which is also why the governor's recommendation was formed in an omnibus bill. Is that correct? That is correct, thank you. Thank you. Okay. I think we're gonna pivot now to Mr. Gilpin. It sounds to go first. Sure, why don't we do Sean first? Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. Hello everyone, my name is Sean Gilpin, I'm the housing division director at the Department of Housing and Community Development. I'll try to be brief and certainly I'm not difficult to find. So feel free to reach out to me afterwards for follow-ups and there's an awful lot of information on our website as well. It gets updated regularly, including some statistics. But VHIP, the Vermont Housing Improvement Program is a really exciting and frankly very impressive partnership between us and the five homeownership centers throughout the state. So it covers all the regions of the state. It's a program by which we provide through the homeownership centers relatively small grants to private property owners in order to reinvest in vacant and underutilized properties to bring. The idea is it's a rehabilitation project to take some of these old blighted buildings, bring them back up to code and put them into service as rental housing. The program has matured and evolved over time. It started out at the very end of 2020 as the rehousing recovery program was actually funded with CARES Act dollars and then was put into statute the following year and has been funded with ARPA to date. And so we get quarterly reports from the homeownership centers. And as of their report on January 1, so from the beginning of the program to January 1 of this calendar year, we've brought 535 units online. Over 90% of those are serving people exiting homelessness. There are an additional, as we speak, 383, 86 units in the pipeline right now. I fully expect that we'll exceed 400 units this calendar year. And we'll probably be on pace to continue that for the following calendar year as well. There are a number of program parameters that we apply to this outside of just what's in the statute, but what has been done up to this point has been a focus primarily, as was noted earlier, primarily on rehousing the homeless. And that is in large part because of the statutory directive to do so, as well as the funding mechanism, which has been COVID relief dollars, which we needed to show to the feds that there was a direct nexus to alleviating COVID. And our argument was that removing people from congregate shelters was a necessary move to make. So the program, as it's been run to date, or at least most recently, I won't go over all the history because we have ratcheted up the requirements on property owners over time, but as of this date, a property owner can apply for up to $30,000 per unit for a two bedroom or below rehabilitation. Three bedroom and above can be eligible for up to $50,000 in grant funds, and then any new unit construction. So if you're converting a commercial building, an office building, my God, if you're dividing a single family home into multiple units, each one of those net new units could be eligible for up to that 50,000. There is a 20% match requirement on behalf of the property owners. We have seen that just be completely exceeded in absolutely every project. So we're really finding out that, and our average grant amounts is $38,600. So for $38,600 in public investment, we're getting new units online. And these units are required to be rented at a HUD fair market rent rates, which is the amount that a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher can pay is allowed to pay for a minimum of five years. And they must be rented to somebody who's been referred by the coordinated entry lead organization or a refugee resettlement organization. There's been a handful of those, but it's by and large been homeless providers. Now we're about to go through a pretty exciting transition in this program that's gonna broaden it dramatically. We are almost fully obligated all of the ARPA dollars that were spent. And at the end of next week, we're actually gonna be pausing applications at all five home ownership centers to give us a moment to institute new rules that actually live up to the full aperture that was allowed in the statute. And so there will essentially be two different tracks that a property owner is entitled to take. One maintains that five-year affordability level and the homeless service component. Or an alternative track would be a 10-year affordability timeframe without the homeless service component. So one property owner could rent to ideally tenants at 80% area-meaning income or below for that 10-year period. And there is, I will say, just the one last thing. We are asking to actually move to all of these grants being forgivable loans. And that is a tax implication. For all intents and purposes, they function as a zero-interest deferred payment loan that's forgiven on a percentage basis each year so that by the end of the compliance period it's been completely forgiven. What we've found is that people getting this lump sum is causing some tax issues with some individuals because that's considered taxable income in that tax year. We understand that on the federal level, if it's a forgivable loan, it will only be considered, only the amount of the loan that's forgiven in that year will be considered taxable income, which will make it dramatically easier. Although we encourage everyone to seek out private tax assistance, figuring that out. We don't provide any of that guidance, but I'll stop there. I could talk about this program all day, but it has done an incredible amount of just unit creation, but also anecdotally, we're hearing a lot of connectivity between local property owners and service providers that they weren't aware of before and actually seeing sort of organically a better communication in that housing ecosystem in the places this has been utilized. Thank you. I just want to make, would you state again the move that the 10% it seemed like that would be removing the requirement to assist people who are facing homeless as they're homeless? Yeah, so that will be an option that doesn't have that requirement. These are competitive grants, so it's not a first come, first serve. We work with the homeownerships to prioritize. So as we have no idea what the application, applications are gonna look like once this option is out there. We actually started the program in the CARES Act without any homelessness requirement other than to at least receive referrals from a coordinated, or from part of the continuum of care. We actually found that several landlords took it up and the program was still well subscribed and we actually ramped up and said that for the latter half of the CARES and that all of the ARPA today has been that homeless requirement and we have not seen the numbers go down. I expect as was noted, we're probably getting a lot of the low hanging fruit. So in order to keep the program bringing on as many units online as possible, we wanna go to the full statutory parameters because there has been a concerted effort among our homeownership centers to be sure that we maintain and we want to do that as well, maintain a large portion of this program being focused on homeless service provision but also want to expand it to other low income unit creation just to bring new units online. But that five year options still have that requirement. Yeah, I understand. So I just wanna make, I guess my question is, will you be delineating a certain amount for each? Or are you just gonna be managing as one budget? It would be easier for us to manage as one budget when we start delineating amounts because we're working with five different, five different organizations and they all would have to figure out their allocations for the private. So it becomes really cumbersome. We could set general, I mean, I would be more than happy to put in our policy log and our policy documents that were targets for certain percentages. I guess what, okay. So other people need to ask questions. We're just gonna take a couple of questions. I do have concerns that that's gonna reduce the number and the focus on people experiencing homelessness. And again, refocus on the triple down effect, which we see is not necessarily beneficial for quick access, fast access as you have proven that can happen. So, thank you for that. Yes, Representative Chestnut-Tanderman. Thank you. So my understanding of the BEHIP program is that it has had a lot of success all around the state, rural areas as well as open call urban. But I just wanted to confirm the size of the projects are they primarily, I mean, I understand they're multi-unit projects, but less than five or can you clarify who's applying for and using the grants? Yeah, it definitely varies by region. You can see some more sophisticated operators in the Chittenden County area, Northwest area. But by and large, I'd say it's probably about a half and half split. I don't have the exact data in front of me, but it's probably about a half and half split of below five unit structures and above. But a lot of, and as the program has aged, we've seen more and more smaller landlords get involved. I think it's as sort of the words gotten out and they've seen some of the other operators in town be able to utilize it effectively, that it's continuing to spread around the communities and small. And is it being used by just average person wanting to do an ADU on the property? Yes, we've completed 13 ADUs as of January 1, and there are 54 in the pipeline. And we're actually working, we've worked a little bit. We're always trying to braid resources, so we work with the weatherization crew to try to figure out how to up referrals there. We've also had some conversations with some of the credit unions and the Realtors Association that talk about whether this could be considered a potential piece of equity going into a home purchase so that you could purchase a home and with the intention of building an ADU for affordability reasons. So there are a lot of opportunities there. And I will point out that there's a great deal of data on your website. You can see for your own regions, who actually buy individual and how much they received or what quantity of unit right at the website. So thank you for that transparency in data. Okay, yes, Representative Barrows. Burrows, sorry, I said barrels, burrows. Thank you. We talked last week about when the clock starts ticking on the five year. Can you just reiterate or for example, our chair wasn't there and none of these kind people from human services weren't here, so. Sure, and so that clock does start ticking at the date the unit goes into service, not. The lease date and not the. The PCCT. Not the grant agreement. And we've clarified that with Downstreet. Thank you, I appreciate you doing that. Yeah, and we actually, we've found another interesting piece of data. So the average time between grant agreements and unit lease up is 197 days. So we're talking about six and a half months, which is again, the speed and the fiscal efficiency of this program is pretty. That is really different from what was suggested last week, which was I think 18 months. So there was an 18 month deadline that we put in place because we didn't want people to dawdle on things. But we found that most of these projects are being completed within an eight month time period. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And now we'll move to Commissioner Bolio. Yeah, thanks for having me. Craig Bolio tax commissioner. You heard commissioner Farrell talk about, you know, the holistic package, including regulatory reform, investment and incentives. So I'm here to talk about some of those incentives that are accounted for in the governor's recommended budget and also part of the governor's housing package that's outlined in H719. There's three of them. And I'll touch on each of them briefly, right? So the first is a property value freeze for new construction and restoration of blighted residential property. The second is a property transfer tax exemption when purchasing blighted property that will be restored, residential property that will be restored for use. And the third, hello. And the third is an increase to the base in the downtown and village center tax credit cap from three million to five billion annually, right? And just at a high level, right? Why are tax incentives part of the solution? And I think for my chair, it's because when they're used correctly, they can be a very focused and effective tool to leverage public dollars to spur private investment without a lot of overhead and administrative costs, right? So I'll go through the value freeze briefly first. So it's a five-year freeze for freezing the property value of either newly constructed or rehabbed residential dwellings at their pre-improvement value. So maybe it's a plot of land and that's the pre-improvement value. Maybe it's the depressed value of a blighted property that's gonna get restored. And there are rules around the proposal to make sure that it's really targeted, right? So it's only available in certain areas, designated downtown's village centers, neighborhood development areas and then a federal designation, new market tax credit areas. It's only available for properties that will be used as either owner occupied