We are on the record and we are headed into Part 2 of our testimony on the homelessness issues and this is with us today are Ken Schatz, a commissioner. Jeff Pippinger is here for economic services in Louis, Sean Brown. Sarah Phillips is here and Gus Selig and Jen Holler are here from BHCB. So we have you listed as a commissioner. Please join us. Thank you. For the record, my name is Ken Schatz. I'm the commissioner of the Department for Children and Families. We do really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today about the programs and services that we have regarding homelessness. That's great and I would just like to introduce the committee. There's been personnel changes that have happened since we last saw you. So I'll start at Tom Stevens from Waterbury. I represent Waterbury Huntington, Bolton and Vules Gore. I represent Byron. Matt Byron, Virgins, I represent Ferrisburg Kingdom, Virgins, Walton and Madison. Randall Zott, Barnard, Margaret, Kuchy and West Tarantino. Mary-Anne Delonge, Swanton and Shelby from Franklin County, Mr. Torek. John Colackey, South Burma. Tommy Waltz, Mary Sadie. Mary Howard, Rutland 5.3. Chip Tarantino, Stannard and I go way back. Representative Long from New Fane also sits on this committee. Representative Gonzalez is the ranking member and we have a vacant seat. As we move forward just to the folks in the room, just to remember that a lot of us are new and so however we can translate lingo into English and acronyms into names, that would be great. We'll do our best. I appreciate that. It is always a challenge that I will say, as even as commissioner, that's sometimes a challenge for me. I have to stop and ask folks to explain what certain acronyms mean. Let me start though by sort of giving you a breath from Sean Brown, Deputy Commissioner of Economic Services Division. Jeffrey Piperger will do a great job in representing the Economic Services Division, but Sean is actually testifying elsewhere in the building. So he will certainly be available as time goes on. So I'm just going to do a brief introduction because Sarah and Jeffrey really have much more knowledge than I have about the programs. But I want you to know, as commissioner, we're committed to really trying to address homelessness. Frankly, I'd love to be able to say we're going to eliminate it. I don't think that's realistic in any short period of time, but really we want to minimize the number of people who are homeless. We want to do what we can to prevent homelessness. We want to make sure that with respect to people who are homeless, that we provide supports and programs to enable them to move into more stable housing. And we recognize, frankly, just how awful it is to be homeless. And I think that I want you to know that we are appreciative of the... I look at data, but I think it's also important to recognize that there are children, there are families, there are individuals who... the traumatic experience of having unstable housing being homeless is incredibly difficult. So we do our best. We have an array of programs and services that you'll hear about, but at the end of the day, we are committed to trying to meet the needs of those individuals, those children, those families who really have this difficult challenge in front of them. The point I want to make as commissioners, and you'll hear specifically about our housing programs, but especially for those of you who are new to these roles, the Department for Children and Families covers a, frankly, pretty wide swath in terms of populations and services and programs so that the reality is issues of homelessness really affects our child welfare system in a major way. So many of the families who are involved in that system are part of the barriers, part of the challenges they face are unstable housing. We have an office of child support that really tries to enable non-custodial parents to pay their fair share to enable those parents who are single parents to raise their children have stable housing. We have a child care that children's integrated services program that also try to address the varied needs of families. Again, housing is such an incredible part of family stability that I just want you to know that all of those things really come together and we work very hard to address these issues in major ways. I'm going to sort of leave the chair and let Sarah and Jeffrey provide you with more tangible information about the services and programs we provide, but I'll sort of leave by saying very clearly none of us can address this alone. We work and you'll hear about how we work with other agencies within state government including the agency of human services. We work with other partners like the Mont housing conservation board and we work with a tremendous array of community providers all over the state who are working very hard. We have a challenging issue here because homelessness continues to be a major challenge and problem for many of the citizens in our state. So I will leave and leave the chair for Sarah and Jeffrey, but please know that I'm available and glad to answer questions as they come up for you as we go forward. And we will see you I'm sure at some point or part of your team on on a larger general assistance description. You usually have some policy conversation about what's happening with GA and how it's used or how it's been used. Absolutely and I'm glad to be there and again Jeff Bechender is the director of our general assistance program and also will be available to you as a committee to address any questions you have and we can look at the ideas that we have to try to improve that program. Thank you. Will you join us Sarah? Be together. That's already. Yes, if you could just introduce yourself as the director of GA. Sarah Phillips, I'm the director at the office of economic opportunity in the department for children and families. For the record my name is Jeffrey Pippender. I'm the general emergency assistance program director in economic services. Great, so it's good to be in front of you again. You heard from me this morning trying to provide a very brief overview of our homelessness assistance landscape. So there's going to be a little bit of repeat but I'm hoping this is an opportunity to go a little deeper into some areas that we really quickly talked about this morning. So just as a reminder as the agency of human services actually administers more than 19 different housing programs across the whole agency that provides support to community-based service organizations. The work that happens they're not all targeted towards homeless households right so some examples would be the department for mental health has subsidy plus care. These are vouchers for folks who would otherwise be in the psychiatric institution right so it's to provide them with community-based housing and supports or we have a SASH which is out of the department for aging and independent living which provides service coordination, supportive housing for seniors largely folks on Medicare to be able to remain in independent housing, affordable housing or through the Department of Health we have recovery housing. So there's a wide range of ways that the agency is looking at housing and I say all of that to say that we do have conversations within the agency around how the programs work together and we're going to today focus around Department of Children and families programs that focus on homeless assistance specifically. So I talked about the housing opportunity grant program this morning but I just want to sort of briefly talk about a little bit more and exactly what we fund through the POP program. So the housing opportunity grant program lends together state funding and federal funding some global commitment funding as well from a range of sources to support community-based organizations about 40 organizations across the state that are doing a variety of work around housing crisis interventions. POP is the primary source of funding for emergency shelter and services around the state so that's a really important part of what we fund through POP that includes our year-round emergency shelters it includes seasonal or warming shelters those are shelters that are only off open during the cold weather months usually off many of them are through you I think you heard today through like Bethany Church and Mount Pilger that supported with funds under the POP program it's actually supported with general assistance funds which I'll talk about in a moment. POP also supports homelessness prevention efforts and I'll highlight a little bit of that and rapid rehousing and it also provides funding for coordinated entry. Sarah just on the numbers that have been in that box under the house the 3872 where are those are those numbers just from standard data collection from all the shelters? Yeah this is numbers these are this is the number of people who stayed in publicly funded emergency shelters we do have a couple shelters in the state that don't accept public funds so we don't collect that data so this is 3872 people were sheltered during the state fiscal year 2018 of those people 1100 and two were children under the age and are they unique or they those are unique yep so they could have been so they could have stayed several weeks or however long the process could take right those are unique individuals so this is just a little bit deeper look at POP and sort of where funds go under POP so about this is where I'm going to pause for a moment and say we the general assistance program has funded emergency housing or motel vouchers when shelters are full right so if shelters are full and there's no safe available shelter space for somebody then they can access a motel voucher if they're eligible uh and so we have over the number of years very thoughtfully and intentionally use general assistance funds to invest in community alternatives to motels because we think that those programs provide better service delivery and have better outcomes for families and individuals who are homeless so we have invested those funds under the HOP program so rather than you know two different grant programs for shelters around the state we have one one way that we put out funds for shelters and we do that under the HOP program so that's in part why you see about 50% of the funds going for emergency shelter yep so uh these are taken out of GA funds is that what you're saying general assistance funds so at the seven what I was just about to say 7.1 no that's okay you were right that's great of the 7.1 million that we invested under HOP about 1.9 million was GA funding okay so the individuals who are served are currently receiving general assistance is that accurate to say or they would we so I'll talk about some of those projects but any example would be the Bethany warming shelter in Montpelier we saw our spending on general assistance emergency housing increasing exponentially in the berry district or in the washington county area we had our shelter in Good Samaritan Haven in berry and they even operated a seasonal warming shelter in berry at heading and those were consistently they just didn't have place and because those shelters beds were full when they're full we see more pressure on the motels right on the motel bathroom program GA and so we very intentionally worked with um the berry or with with Good Samaritan Haven um who worked on the ground with partners in Montpelier and berry and they opened up the Bethany warming shelter and we use general assistance funds to open the warming shelter to provide additional shelter capacity so that those households those individuals could be served by the warming shelter instead of being in motels so we'll be sorry if I can supplement that just right and in same rules same house rules please identify yourself absolutely kentchettes uh commissioner department children families sarah gave a great response in terms of programmatically but i want to make sure that i take responsibility for decisions that i made so that you in the um in legislation have given dcf some authority to provide some of the GA money that you have appropriated uh to the department to use for programs to prevent homelessness and within the GA budget so what we have done is transferred some of our GA appropriation over to OEO as sarah described to support these shelters we do not require people who go to these shelters to to go through the GA eligibility process we made the determination that as an approach to make sure that people have a warm shelter they did not have to go through that process but we felt it was appropriate to uh support those shelters as a way of providing emergency housing that's great that's great clarification commissioner but for me it's it's hard to see that we can move resources to need and that's the that's the message that i hear here and it's it's it might i mean it's it's a good thing and just can um homelessness 101 or shelters 101 could you just give us a quick definition of what low barrier or high barrier no barrier shelters are because that's i think that's new vocabulary that we'll hear again and again especially with temporary shelters and seasonal shelters sure so yes i will and then i'll come back to talk about the other things so emergency shelter as i said this morning is a sort of a broad term that we talk about um there's a lot of ways that we provide emergency shelter for folks so we have this is this is john glennon right and uh uh this is one of our year round emergency shelters that provides shelter for families and individuals in adson county um and to be fair we have a number of shelters like that across the state we also have domestic and sexual violence shelters across the state that are there to serve that can explain domestic or sexual violence and then we have um we also we use motel rooms um and to provide emergency shelter we uh sometimes are providing emergency shelter for families actually in apartments because that uh is very normalizing for a family rather than putting 10 homeless families in one big building where they're all trying to share a kitchen if we um we have some providers where we've given them some funds and they mass release an apartment and a family can be in there temporarily while they try and find other housing and so that that's a method that works well for families and then we also have some seasonal warming shelters across the state um these are shelters that uh tend to uh have what we sometimes refer to as low barrier behavior based rules where um and and to be fair some of our year round shelters also operate this way it's sort of a continuum but where to get into shelter um it's easier to get into shelter so we need to provide a warm safe place for someone to stay we don't want to create a barrier we don't want to put up a lot of walls to get to that warm safe place right because we need a warm safe place so that people don't freeze to get outside and so by behavior based or low barrier what we mean is that you don't necessarily have to be sober when you walk in the door you need to be able to care for yourself and to behave well when you're inside the shelter you're not allowed to drink or use when you're in the shelter but you don't have to be sober when you're walking in the door necessarily so that's one example of low barrier another example of low barrier might be shelters that allow animals to come in right you heard from someone this morning where that was the challenge around having an animal in shelter and so that's another barrier right for people accessing shelter and so we have some shelters around the state that are able to be more creative and flexible around the animals there's a lot of other barriers and so when we think about warming shelters in particular shelters that just operate in the cold weather months um who are really there just as the bottom safety net to provide a warm safe place for folks and help them connect with other services we want to make sure that that's really easy to access that shelter and so our warming shelters tend to be the places where we're supporting that with that with that uh also include some some churches i know of one particular church that has what i would call a warming shelter because they operate in the winter time and people are able to go between certain hours and that clear on what the hours are and seems to me that there's some organization that's in charge of that particular program i think you're talking about spectrum use spectrum yes spectrum so spectrum has a youth emergency shelter youth warming shelter so this is a warming shelter i think it operates at St. Joseph's yes okay weird yeah and um so they right and so spectrum the service provider who operates a year-round emergency shelter for youth specifically operates the seasonal warming shelter for youth in the church um and they right and that's exactly how they operate in sort of a lower barrier approach and and their target population is really youth 18 to 24 um i didn't know that um but so that's that's exactly it it's good because you haven't seen it i've been there at times when um people have been coming in and it's a separate part of the church so it doesn't involve young part of the church where services are so so anyway thank you that's a great example i would say you know and in the spectrum shelters is an example of that our warming shelters and some of our year-round shelters but warming shelters specifically tend to close down during the daytime because they are operating in places like church basements or public facilities and so there's a challenge of figuring out it doesn't get magically warmer during the daytime hours right and so where do people go during the daytime to stay warm and safe and be able to move forward um so that that is a challenge to the experience um so just to jump back for a second so emergency shelters a big piece of what hot focus is on but i don't want to lose sight of the fact that you know 22 percent of hot funding is actually supporting homeless prevention activities 16 percent is supporting um housing services and rental assistance and security deposits and other financial assistance to help people get into permanent housing and be in permanent housing we also support a little bit of funding for transitional housing for youth and veterans and then we have a chunk of funds that supports coordinated entry and some innovative approaches that communities are doing like landlord lee's i mentioned this morning so i shared these charts again um this morning i shared these this morning around the number of persons in um for most public-funded homeless shelters the number of children and then the length of day but i just put them in here again is sort of i think it's um jeffrey's going to talk about the general assistance program and motels and show you some data around motels right so part of the picture is who's staying in emergency shelters and part of the picture is who's not in emergency shelters who's who's in motels because we don't have space in emergency shelters and understanding those two pieces together i think is important so i just want you to to see this piece and i think um in particular and i said this this morning but it looks like oh great the number of people in shelters is going down but in fact um uh the length of time that people are staying in shelters going up dramatically so um the number of people who can serve in the shelter is limited right if you have 10 beds in a shelter and people are staying there longer and you serve less people overall and just quickly um diana are you online i am thank you for checking all right so join us via um the phone so diana if when you have questions just um pipe up we'll do actually have a question for sarah at venay please do um sarah did you question number on um bed stays um just wondering kind of with that toggle between increased number of days that people are staying um uh and if that's something that you look at so how many beds nights there are they serve yeah i i guess yes totally it does make sense and we do have that and um i think you have a link to our we do an annual report on a housing opportunity program that shows a lot more information around how we look at results in that program not just shelter utilization data um and we do but we do look at bed nights i didn't put that in here but bed nights is essentially the number is one person in one bed for one night so um we can total that up for the year we saw our bed nights was um very high very high this year i remember people was lower and that's you know the average length of stay is reflected in that so did that answer your question it does thank you i mean and again these numbers are statewide so i mean when i mean at some point we'll see a breakout of what the seasonal shelter usage is going to be we can usually kind of share what what's going on since the number of the first or later sure we can come back in and share some of that yeah because it's so it's rated so differently you know girlings can get as big as numbers and yet they say we save more money for quality of the programs or shelters or whatever yeah i think it's an important point is that the the problems the problem is this is inherently local right and so our solutions have to be really locally driven i think about a third of our population people experiencing homelessness are in shaming county so it does kind of seem like it gets all the resources it doesn't get all the resources i want to assure you that we look very closely at the distribution of resources and need across the state but but but so yes we can certainly come back and share more information around warming shelters and provide you a better update around that and then also you know we see it's inherently local in the sense that you know like i said in washington county we saw those numbers ballooning and so we needed to respond locally in washington county and we also needed to look closely at like well not just the numbers is is ballooning but but who amongst the population um do we what's the right intervention because a warming shelter is not going to be a place for families if it's if families at the number of people families experiencing homelessness is is what's driving up the numbers of ga motels and we need to respond differently than with a warming shelter we don't want to put families in a church basement they have to leave at 7 a.m. and then the morning we come back at 8 o'clock at night and sleeping on the couch like this we're just not going to intervene in the same way so so yes so it's inherently local but we do look with our community partners very closely at who's homeless in your community and what problem what exactly what problem are we trying to address i'm going to turn it over to jefferson and talk more about the ga program specifically so again uh i'm jeffrey pippinger the general emergency assistance program director my general emergency assistance often referred to as ga can i do that? ga? um now you can thank you so um the ga program uh it's essentially the the program of last resort for the state and the statutory authority says that um it's just provide for the necessities of life in the event that there's not a program within gcf i think and otherwise do so for the purposes of this conversation we'll be talking about emergency housing but i just wanted to put a reminder out there that emergency housing is this much of a program that's this big but that much of a program often takes up most of the conversation i'm happy to talk with the other parts of the program at some point if folks are interested in that as well um for the purposes of shelter we provide emergency housing in a motel when no alternative to shelter is available so we have a shelter first policy if there's shelter available we would direct people there right any that there is no shelter or shelter is full then we were house folks in a motel eligibility for the program is determined in the district offices or by 211 after hours and on weekends and on holidays it is it's an extremely complicated program for the purposes of simplicity there are three primary ways through which somebody might be able to access emergency housing there is catastrophic eligibility there's vulnerable vulnerable population and in adverse weather conditions the way the program is set up currently in its incarnation it's categorical eligibility first you have to meet a category of need and then we will look at resources and financial eligibility second so catastrophic eligibility would be folks who are lean domestic or sexual violence constructive eviction cord ordered eviction or fire flood natural disaster that's up to 84 days sometimes we're in a motel we don't give 84 days at a pop but it's a maximum of 84 days the vulnerable population is a maximum of 28 days and those would be folks who are in the seat of social security disability pregnancy there are trimester children under six older braumonters there's a point system which can catch all of you do not need any of those other which has to do with the facility recently about facility for example or being a veteran then there's adverse weather conditions adverse weather conditions is what used to be known as the cold weather exception before that was changed several sessions ago essentially that means that at the commission's discretion we will relax eligibility criteria for brawlers seeking emergency housing that would be if there's a greater than 50 percent chance of precipitation and it's less than 32 degrees or an ambient or wind chill temperature of less than 20 degrees so we have a series of slides that are about data and I'm happy to spend as little time or as most more time as you like on this but essentially these first two slides will just show the the count of house would serve as well as the length of state a number of days and you can see that over time since 2012-2013 that has trended down with a couple of bumps along the way but generally speaking there's been a long-term trend of a decrease of those numbers well except for that 2012-2013 spike is that that was a bad year but why 2013 was the institution of the cold weather exception it must I'm just remembering that but I believe that that's when that exception of rules was first instituted so we saw a spike in utilization 2015 would be when we begin the summer 2015 when we began the initiative to switch to community investments to motels so part of the trend down may be attributed in part to our shifting from motels to community investments as well and no I'm the only the other thing I would add is that when you're looking at the data over time for the emergency housing program one of the things to keep in mind is that it's a crisis program it's a catastrophic program so it's hard to predict crisis but also whether or not it was exceptionally cold winter like 2015 was the polar vortex or if it was much warmer winter the seepings dip down so what we also did for you today was to look to provide some information regarding our unduplicated utilization currently looking at fiscal year 19 relative to fiscal years 18 and 17 during the same period of time so July 1st through November and what we've seen as you can see in this table is that we're seeing a substantial uptick this year relative to previous years for this period of time the household utilization is up about eight percent from fiscal year 18 and up about 24 percent from fiscal year 17 I would say that that in and of itself raises some flags for us but the number of nights that bar right hand column that's where we start to get really concerned about the shift because this year we're seeing an increased number of nights it's up about 35 percent from last year and 47 percent relative to fiscal year 17 and we're only partly through the year so we'll see what that how that shakes out in the end but also remember that the adverse weather conditions did not go into effect until November 1st and our first night was about midway through that so again how do we read how do you did you code the people who come into the system so that you know why they're in a crisis mode or that they're utilizing services so that we know that there's a temporary or a chronic or you know whatever doesn't possible categories they might fit in yes so this is the this is the really boiled down version of it yeah I actually have a lot more data that's broken out by category I'm happy to share that or I think we're doing it yeah but we have that broken down by category of eligibility as well as subcategory and do those classifications give you any clues as to why the number of how they start to I would say that they don't necessarily get an entire picture I would say that one of the things you'll see is that since even just from a 20,000 point level the fact that we have unduplicated household utilization those can be household with or without children we see that number going up but the the stay is going up the number of nights is going up much faster so what we do know and this is that is corroborated within the data is that the folks who are in the house that are catastrophic circumstances the dv court ordered constructive eviction and we rarely see the fire flood natural disaster anymore but those three we see that increasing so it's really that the length of stay is being booked out is that ensure and we also wanted to provide you with just a snapshot of what it has looked like between adverse weather conditions over time so this is state fiscal year is 14 through 18 with the number of nights that have been called the number of physical nights that have been called the number of applications that have been granted to break out of adults and children and then the cost associated with that again 2015 was the polar vortex remember 16 was a much warmer return um and then 17 and 18 were I'm sorry to call much aesthetically nice so using this chart and going from 1.8 to 344 the final budget or I'm like oh that's great but how do you approach going into each season each of these each of these situations I mean this is GA this is emergency money you don't know what the emergency is going to be but I'm looking at this going did we save money or did we spend less I feel the same way that means that being said I would also point out that I should have said that 16 was the first winter that we had the community investment so the seasonal shelter in Burlington for example which has done a tremendous amount of work in that community and then 17 I believe is when most of the D.B. partner initiatives came online which I'll talk about in a second if I may Ken Schatz again this is part of my challenges this sort of relates to the budget process as you all know those connections are there so we do the best we can to come up with a budget knowing that we have no way of knowing in advance what the weather conditions are going to be like so that's part of our challenge it's sometimes why you see us come back in the budget adjustment phase of the of the appropriations process but even then if you think about it we're only in the middle of the winter and we have to submit our budget adjustment scenarios in September so it is part of our challenge to close out but hopefully what we've done as as Jeffrey and Sarah have talked about is by putting more money in these community investments in at least in terms of shelters and that's aside from the work that BHCB and other entities have done to create more more affordable housing units we hope we can manage these needs to the best of our ability we try to claim but honestly it's it's a bit of a guessing game we as you can see from the chart that Jeffrey showed you those numbers do go up and down and so we're you know that that's just part of the dilemma we face in terms of trying to plan these programs but we're committed to the approach of providing these community investments in terms of shelters and other programs to try to do as much as we can to avoid people having to utilize the motels in any time of the year but particularly when it's extremely cold and quickly just for the benefit of us all really is to say priority keep saying prior to the use of community investments so up until then there wasn't well what got eventually interpreted as an over reliance on using motels and hotels especially the all-weather exemptions where just if you get a quick primer on 28 days 84 days you know just the just how we use those and why we switched to I mean you're going to go into the community investments in a second so yes so the community investments really it's about kind of a couple of things number one how can we use those dollars in a more effective more efficient way but it's also about connecting people with services because in a motel room you have a motel key and there are things that folks have to do to continue to maintain eligibility for general assistance but you are at a motel in a key as opposed to if we're sending you to a seasonal shelter or an investment run by one of the domestic violence agencies where there's a different set of services and connection right away and the cost of the hotel rooms average over $8.90 and this wasn't the capital deposit correct so we're our statewide average is about $76 currently for motels statewide that ranges anywhere from Harbour Place which is significantly lower than the market rate up to over $100 depending on location some districts we have one motel some districts we have six seven eight as far as the community investments are concerned I would say a couple of things there's already touched on this but I would reiterate the fact that where we have seen a good deal of success and some really interesting innovation is around the seasonal shelter and also around there are three domestic violence organizations in the southern part of the state who have taken over the db motel pool for the state so they have expanded shelter capacity as well as them operating the motel pool and I can tell you that they're they have negotiated lower rates than I think you know our statewide average is and in length of stay is much shorter than ours so I'll give an example of that so make it more clear so like in Rutland news story is the domestic violence shelter and they were always full and so we were regularly putting the state was regularly putting a lot of controlling domestic violence into motels in mellon county a lot spending a lot money in mellon coming on for evening motels we approached news story and said hey what if we were able to grant you some funds and you could instead when your shelter was full you could place folks in motels but then when the shelter had a space to open up you can bring them back into the motel and also even or back in the shelter and also you were placed in a motel and you would be regularly meeting with them so in other words there was that service connection and they they were glad and willing partners in that investment and it significantly decreased the amount of money that we were spending on we're still have a lot of domestic violence victims in Rutland county in motels but now it's really just all for a news story and they are really the right provider to be meeting with those families and providing services so and we're spending significantly less on motels than we otherwise would be so because we also want them to connect with news story on night one not on night anymore i'm curious did anything ever become of the warming shelter proposal in Rutland right so we had for a number of years uh worked with community partners in the Rutland area to see whether or not we could create some additional shelter capacity in Rutland because we just don't have enough and in particular for single adults in in the cold weather months and we identified that as a as a need we did have a one-time funding appropriation that the legislature gave us specifically for Rutland to create seasonal capacity for uh for adults in Rutland and we uh there were a lot of different ideas put forward but none of them were able to get traction um we haven't given up hope and I think there's still Rutland is areas still um very much on our minds in terms of trying to address homelessness in Rutland it is one of our hot spots in terms of spending on motels and um i think i hope anyway that our friends of the hcb might talk a little bit about um some projects and development in the Rutland area around permanent housing which which ultimately we're talking about how you address the crisis need but you really end homelessness with housing so we're really supportive of the efforts of the hcb is doing to to promote housing projects for the homeless in the room now i would say one last comment on community investments before we move on because of money to share but would be that um it important i what i one thing that i think is a critical component of community investment is that it's a community investment so what we're saying is we're going to communities around the state saying what are your needs what have you identified as a community as a as something that might help or that you are a resource that you need is non-existent or what can you more expand so because what works in Brattleboro doesn't necessarily work at the port and what works in Mary might not work in middlebury so i just wanted to name that but that is kind of a it's an important distinction that we're asking communities to have that conversation with us and our most recent GA investment is um is in lamoille county where a group of um really an interfaith group that has for a long time identified the need for any shelter capacity in lamoille county came together last year and sort of had a rotating churches offering and synagogues to say churches offering shelter overnight they realized that rotating spaces facilities night to night was really hard for people and they worked to identify a facility they could use regularly and with the lamoille county sheriff's office of all things who had a building available and um in high park and they've been operating in morris bill and sort of a space and someone gave them that they're moving into high park in i think next week even and they're excited to be in their sort of more more permanent space and they're going to be offering well it's 12 beds of warming shelter for uh for adults in uh in lamoille county and that was an investment that we made with general systems problems and so this is the chart really that shows before we move on from investments that just shows the green is how much was spent directly on on motels emergency housing and the purple is how much of GA funds was spent on community investments so you can see sort of the trend over time spent they've invested more GA funds in in community based projects and do those and i'm sorry i know you're going to answer this no i was going to move on so no no i know you're going to answer that okay very great so in addition to the motel voucher program uh another um intervention that we have in economic services is the brahman subsidy program uh that was begun in 2011 it's a rapid rehousing initiative this is a housing first model in fact the thought that we might be able to take folks who are experiencing homelessness and put in a rental situation with subsidy to get them a deal of a good deal of stability um so one million dollars is the limit for the vrs and almost all of that goes towards subsidy um the eligible participants have to meet the ahs definition homelessness they're paired with a housing support worker those might be i'm not the reach up case manager it might be a contracted case manager it might be a partner but that's to make sure that folks have the supports um necessary to succeed as a tenant during the course of their subsidy which should be up to 12 months uh participants contribute 30 of their income so as their income increases over the course of the program their contribution will increase as well and the thought is that this program really should bridge people to a long-term stability solution whether that's a section 8 voucher there's a vrs preference for housing choice vouchers through monstay housing authority or perhaps it might be a project-based situation or also increased income and currently these numbers are much smaller than the hotels but we have 45 active participants 24 tentatively granted participants those are folks who are approved they're eligible for the subsidy and we have said yes you can receive this and they're looking for simple housing uh the right number of bedrooms some of the passes housing inspection uh and also within the month state housing authority payment standards um you'll see that there's an asterisk there and that's because i'm just pointing out for comment the fact that we're having we're really seeing trouble this year this year so far with tentatively granted participants people who have that subsidy in hand finding affordable housing that meets their needs at the uh at the really at a cost of really important and that is statewide that is not particular to one geographic and that's what they can afford is what they're 30 percent of so if you i mean if there was an apartment for 600 dollars that would use this this voucher then then they might be able to afford that 30 percent of 180 dollars and whatever but if they go into five twelve hundred dollar amount of apartment 30 percent of three six yeah i mean just whatever the numbers are i'm just is that how you used to be this this the master has a great pair of hands i can get those but that's a pegged number okay so you're looking at a one bedroom a two bedroom three bedroom chitin county with a balance of state it has to be under a certain dollar so is that the problem that people can't find housing at the state level yes that is a problem yes it's one of many problems but yes it is it is a problem that we zeroed in on and and we have some other experts in the room who can speak about this more generally but essentially um HUD the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sets what's called fair market rents um and that impacts um it says this is what uh it's not even what the average rent is in a community and they have sort of a convoluted way that they get to this number and it's particularly problematic how they get to it in small rural communities which is why we have trouble with the fair market rents standard in Vermont um and they essentially say if you have a section eight voucher uh housing choice voucher um this is you can and you have the voucher you're looking for an apartment you can get an apartment that's two bedroom but it has to be the rent and the apartment has to be at this standard or less right and so it's hard then to go out in the community and find apartments that are less at or less than that payment standard now housing parties have a little bit of flexibility which is why it's called payment standard but essentially it's a fair market rent is sort of caps the amount of that um the rent of the apartment that you're looking for it's challenging so we know that a lot of our rents in Vermont are just above the fair market rent standard um and Vermont rental subsidy uses that standard because folks can bridge from the Vermont rental subsidy to the state housing authority section eight so in order to to bridge from the temporary one-year subsidy to the housing choice voucher the section eight voucher they need to meet all of the section eight requirements in order to stay in that same apartment so that's the challenge there we do have some flexibility with funds that are just purely state general funds that don't necessarily need to meet the fair market rent standard but that that is a specific issue that we've zeroed in on and there's um I would defer to my colleagues on the right if you wanted to learn more about how we're addressing that. I've just briefed you Sarah did a great job of eloquently describing the problem but from my perspective you should know this backup this has caused a backup in DCF's temporary housing programs so that went because that's our role and and so the reality is if we have folks in Vermont rental subsidy the idea is as Jeffrey described it's a bridge program and the idea being that hopefully we can work with them within a year to move on to more sustainable permanent housing if they can't find housing they can afford we've got a problem because they're staying in Vermont rental subsidy program longer than anticipated which means we can't bring new people into the program um and that's a problem similarly with respect to the issues that Jeffrey described regarding motels um that's some of the reason why those length of stay and also if the shelter programs as Sarah has or will describe people are staying longer in those programs for temporary housing because they can't move on and that is definitely a challenge we all need to do our best to address and committee this might seem like two or one or three or one or whatever on these vouchers stuff it'll come crystal clear in about six months so as you get used to it there's a lot of terminology being thrown out there's no quiz on it but it's there's a lot of resources here that are being used and they're trying they're just it's not a simple voucher issue or this housing is just so many pieces that we're just starting to cover one is that when we say tentatively granted folks have if if you've been tentatively granted for a Vermont rental subsidy you have 60 days to find a place and what we've been seeing this year is folks maxing out that 60 days and then coming back and asking for the 30 day extension which is also you know which is part of the program and still having trouble so getting to the end of 90 days and kind of really being on the edge of whether they can find a place and the other thing that I would mention is that it's um is that previously educated at 88 percent of the Vermont rental subsidy participants are reach up so um cool question on that point do you think what's your barrier inventory or market price removal yes yes so yeah okay and i'm not being flipped no no no no i yeah and different communities have different reasons that show it out again i would differ i'll i'll just jump in it's not really on the slide but i'll say one of the things that's working right because we just told you about a lot of things but i just don't want to highlight something that is working so we have under hop where we sort of do some innovative investments we have invested in landlord liaisons i mentioned that sort of briefly this morning in four communities and i'll highlight ruttland again not because i think ruttland that landlord liaisons has done an amazing job at the homeless prevention center this is a position where her sort of entire job is to do outreach to landlords and to help them understand uh the clients they may be accepting through the program and to explain the commitment that the homeless prevention center is making and when you can call us and to be available anytime a landlord needs to call someone because there might be something going on they have some risk pool funds that they put up so this is like a pool of money they have on the side that's saying you're going to have our client we know they have sort of a rough history they're on a good path now we're working with them and if something goes wrong we're going to be able to step in and help you uh with whatever went wrong and to be fair they rarely use those housing mitigation funds but just having them available sometimes can make a landlord willing to take a chance on someone and so um so i think this is a great example where they have this is they've been able to where otherwise families and individuals who are homeless have a lot of housing barriers right sometimes it's criminal record sometimes it's bad or no rental history at all uh minimal income which we're helping with you know rental assistance programs um other behavioral challenges going on and so it can be hard to get an apartment when you got that all stepped up against you and and you're trying to find a second chance right and so the landlord liaison has really been helpful in terms of getting units even in the in the private market available to clients because we have a really low vacancy rate and i'm a landlord and i can choose between this person with a great rental history or this person who doesn't have a great rental history i'm going to take a person with a good rental history but if i might take this other client if i know that the rent's going to be guaranteed because the organization's going to be paying it and i know that um there's going to be a housing support worker in there every month or every week and i know that if something goes wrong they're going to be there to help me out financially um and so hey that sounds like a great deal and so that's made a real difference it's been a game changer for us in terms of being able to more quickly house people and i would say i would just piggyback and say that where we i you know i said it was a statewide problem right it almost entirely a statewide problem some place where we've seen a lot of success this year this fiscal year with vrs leesops with those tentatively is barry and barry has a way of working as a representative commotion just before you ask a question i just want how we're interrupting you a lot so how are we on the material that you prepare because we do have other folks here too i think we're i think we're pretty good okay we can move it along faster too okay representing so the program you're just describing in terms of the liaison is that the only one i'm familiar with and i'll go back in time three years is pathways housing is that what you is the program that they had or i know they had at that time is that basically what you're describing so pathways uses a similar design in their programming so they um pathways vermont which is a non-profit organization um provides supportive housing for people who are homeless and they uh they have funding to provide funding for housing support worker who works directly with the client and then they have a separate staff person who acts more as a liaison with a landlord i don't think they call it a landlord liaison but essentially within their program they they use that same model and it's a very good model we don't fund pathways to do that work but that model works yes we think it does it does great so if that's the direction that all of this is going i think it's a worthwhile investment and i think you would get a lot more um owners to participate and to be willing to take a chance because there is that backup because that's the problem that um landlords face when they do take someone in because everything looks reasonable um and then something happens and the whole thing goes out and then they're left with clean up so to speak this the way which pathways worked i know elizabeth yeah i think it is a good model um so i just want to i think there's a um this year in particular vermont legal aid has really really serious fiction prevention report the vermont council homelessness which is the interagency council um in government and community partners and um other statewide partners housing partners participate in vermont council homelessness and we've have been having a specific focus in the council this year around eviction and homelessness prevention so i just want to highlight a little bit sort of of um how we approach homelessness prevention at the agency as well so hop funds do provide some funding for homelessness prevention but sort of broadly um not everyone who's evicted becomes homeless uh not everyone although eviction in itself has a lot of significant costs for families and individuals and communities and landlords um not everyone who's participating in a homeless prevention program is facing eviction right so these are also households that may be uh staying with other friends or family or moving around a lot for some nice public couch surfing um and we don't necessarily think of those households as being sort of literally homeless they're not hitting our shelter system they're not hitting our motels but they're sort of on the verge of homelessness right um and so we have a lot we do have resources available to support um folks with homelessness prevention and a lot of times homelessness prevention efforts is as much about connecting people to fight financial coaching and counseling um renter one-on-one classes um faith-based providers are a big part of our homeless prevention safety and we do have some really limited public funding under hop that specifically supports rental arrears um moving help security deposit and rental assistance in homelessness prevention cases i'm not going to go through this slide in particular but so a whole bunch of other ways that you can think of sort of more upstream homelessness prevention efforts that are really important you know when you think of like transitional housing for reentry folks coming out of corrections right that's a homelessness prevention effort right um that's putting helping folks coming out of corrections have some housing have some stable housing and not just kind of hit the streets or hit g a or hit um our emergency shelters and they have some housing and they're getting back on the feet so these are all a really important sort of big picture way that we think about homelessness prevention um i do want to just highlight for you under hop i talked about about 22 percent of our funds under hop actually go towards prevention and thinking about what that means we provide services what we call broadly housing relocation and stabilization services what a very long germany term but in other words housing support services for people who are either at risk of homelessness or or experiencing homelessness this past year of those service those service providers in your community you heard from um the septa housing support case worker right she does both of those things she works with people on the verge of homelessness and she works with people who are homeless and at any given point in time her caseload is kind of shifting right who what's the need in my community and this past year all of the folks like susan across the whole state that were doing that kind of work 71 percent of their time was spent focused on um prevention clients versus rapid rehousing versus rehousing clients um that's a shift the year before was more like 50 50 and sort of the look our look back has been more 50 50 but there's been more of a shift in their time focusing on prevention um and we served under hot we had 1500 households that we served with prevention you'll hear jessica rubber rattle off this number 300 and it's just rubber from Vermont legal aid rattle off a number of 360 7000 dollars was spent on rental over here this is where she got that number from so of the funds um under hot that actually wore dollars that went in to pay for client financial assistance or rental assistance not the not the support worker um we spent over 500 000 on prevention um and um 367 000 there was four rental assistance which is in the case of prevention it's usually rental over yours and then i just want to highlight briefly for you family supportive housing um family support you heard you may have heard ted brady sort of do a shout out around family supportive housing but this is um intensive home-based community um seven community providers across the state providing intensive home-based case management and service coordination for families with really complex high needs uh we have seven providers in seven districts um we serve about 155 families it's a small scale program um here's a list of the providers these are families who are experiencing homelessness they enroll in the program they're families that have multiple episodes of homelessness have very young kids are involved child welfare with family services or gcf and uh they enroll in this program family supportive housing providers have placed them in housing through partnerships with affordable housing providers um and uh and sometimes with a voucher as well and then they provide long-term ongoing support services that are home-based to help them stay in that housing um we actually use medicaid funding um to support family supportive housing which is something we did in 2016 allowed us to expand from uh five districts to seven um it's just a little bit more about what the focus of the program is case loads are just 12 to 15 families which really allows for some intensive support services uses a two-generation approach which is really both working with parents and kids within the household um and we focus on personal finance with families because we know there's an underlying financial component to the goals that families have so focusing on budgeting and saving and spending um with families I mentioned that already I'm just saying that we have about 155 families last year we served 147 um I mentioned coordinated entry this morning and I I don't want to spend a lot of time on that other than to highlight for you that as a system of care we have been working really hard in the past few years to work better and smarter um and I think that we uh we need to keep doing that but coordinated entry is really about um getting people quickly connected to housing help making sure that if I'm homeless I don't have to knock on six or seven different doors I can knock on one door and you know how to get me connected um so coordinated entry doesn't put more resources into providing housing or services but it sort of is the way that we do work in our communities and we agree to all work together so that if I knock on this door you know how to get me connected so that that point a of being identified the point b of getting in housing is shortened um it also is the way that we're sort of across the board assessing needs of households doing housing assessment with every household in the same way so that um if you go to one provider they say oh you need this housing you go to a different provider they say oh you need this kind of housing we want to sort of be more collective in our first understanding what housing intervention is going to be right for family and matching them to the right intervention as opposed to just come first come first serve so Vermont Ronald Setzi is not right for every family right it's only going to be right for some families because it's time limited and the rental assistance is going to end some families are going to need family support housing which is much more intensive but that's a higher cost intervention and that's not going to be right for every family so we got to get better at matching people to the right intervention and that's what coordinated entry is really helping us do so I want you to know that as a system of care we're really focused on doing it better I'd like to ask for your question that was a great slide because I just wanted to question okay great I'll go back with that yeah I mean your testimony this morning from a couple of people have been homeless and it's a reminder that often the homeless have no clue where to go you know and so I'm glad to hear you talking about you can knock on one door and it opens essentially many doors but what about the people that don't even know there's a door to knock on how do you reach that yeah it's a really good question and we do uh you know we have providers around the state who do outreach I think you may have heard for many weeks this morning talking about working with partford police department to actually go out right into folks camping in the woods and make sure they knew how to get connected so that's one example of outreach you know part of what coordinated entry does also says that we may have in in what a single community we may have two or three providers that are doing most of the sort of more intensive homeless assistance work right but then we have lots of other providers that may may touch those clients in different ways right that that we might have the library right we might have a police department we might have these are folks that are on more the periphery they're not they're they're sort of core mission isn't homeless assistance but they're part of our community and so part of what coordinate entry does is sort of say hey if you come across someone who's in a housing crisis here's the referral you make um and and there's more work to be done for sure and making sure folks are educated on where to make the referral but in every community we've said here's how you make the referral so that if you are sort of on the periphery you know how to in that moment you know how to make the right referral um as opposed to saying here why don't you try this place this place this place or this place you can say no go here and they're going to get you connected um and I think that that's that's part of what coordinate entry is hopefully going to make those access points more clear for folks that sounds good thank you okay um and then the last kind of thing that I'll just uh throw throw at you here it's been a lot it's been great um I really like this slide I still was from the U.S. Interagency Counsel on Homelessness for USICH um and I think we at DCF think about homelessness I think Commissioner Schatz a bigger job saying DCF serves a wide range of populations not just families of children but first and foremost in my mind is that um homelessness especially an early child has really devastated my sequences and we need to do better for families experiencing homelessness so a person in the U.S. is most likely to experience homelessness in the first year of their life half of the children in shelter under the age of six and when I reiterate that that is true in Vermont also half of the children who are homeless in Vermont are under the age of six um and even homelessness during pregnancy has been shown to be really harmful for children's development so I think this is an area that um is a hard one to tackle but housing and stability in particular kids really young kids has really devastating impacts for those kids moving forward into those families um and at the agency we have a number of really specific strategies that we're approaching in terms of how we work better um around or working with our early childhood partners and around homelessness we need to do more here but um we have to sort of have some work groups that are working on specific things um you know we did some training with child care providers around how do you how do you get connected if you have a family and your child care um who's maybe have housing crisis do you know how to get them connected do you know some of the special resources that might be available for them like um like uh subsidized child care you know that they're categorically eligible for child care financial assistance if they're homeless so we need people to know about the resources available and we put some effort behind doing that um and then I don't know Ken if you wanted to wrap it up here you want me to sort of focus on some of these things I'm glad to go ahead and start now just feel like it's needed okay so looking to the future so we really want to mention coordinate entry because this is where a lot of our energy is going to sort of make sure that we fully implement coordinated entry um it's been on the ground for about a year and we want to get better in actually doing it and sort of fully fully doing it um HMIS is the way that all of the providers um uh track and manage the data around homelessness so this um I can give you information around how long someone was in shelter um but that person in shelter was also maybe on the streets a little bit they were also maybe at a motel they were also maybe in this other program and so HMIS is the way that we get the fuller picture of homelessness in the state not just a shelter stay and so implementing HMIS is sort of something that we are fully invested in um we know that we need to strengthen our support services around helping people both find housing um which I talked about and then keep housing and those are two key pieces um and we want to continue to expand community capacity uh through GA investments um and then improve access to affordable housing so those are some key areas at DCO and if I may so the reality is you know we do have a complicated issue to address and there's complicated systems that are already in place to address them this is where you as a as a policy committee will also be asked by the appropriations committees uh to review our budget at DCF and I look forward to those conversations because in terms of implementing these uh these strategies we do it of course through our budget and so what I would say to you is don't hesitate uh to think about these issues and how we might better um align our resources and our approaches uh to address um these issues along with other departments other agencies uh and other community providers so glad to answer questions about this but it's challenging it's hard because we do have as you know a finite amount of money in in our budget and we do need to think about how best to align the money that we have available with the services that we want to implement. I just want to make one final recommendation to you commissioner is that you put a meteorologist on staff so they can better budget for your coal weather shelters for the next year. All right well thank you very much it was um and nice to meet you in the committee and we will I'm sure see you again. Thank you for so we have with us well they'll introduce themselves to their titles um and then kind of I'm going to pop pepper you with questions that you know our report asked for clarification is what I think we've gotten into lingo um but please join us um you did you you were here for the introduction so you know us all now? Yes. All right thank you please. Okay well for the record I'm Gus Seaman I'm the director for the Lamont Housing and Conservation Award. And hi I'm Jen Haller I'm the policy director for the H&B. So we will also do this presentation together um and just by way of introduction I'll say that the Housing and Conservation Award was established in the mid-1980s uh by the legislation on your predecessors um at a time that the federal government had really retreated from housing and I'll talk about as an investment area and I'll talk a little bit about that uh we're here mostly to talk about the theme you've been on all day which is homelessness uh and we appreciate the opportunity to come back but our fundamental role in this work is to provide capital dollars to support the rehabilitation and construction of housing of all types all over the state and um we'll talk specifically about the housing revenue bond and how that's contributing um to the work that you're addressing today in homelessness but I would also say that to address the issue of homelessness you need to help your housing market for the variety of reasons in many parts of the state that's not what we have um what's in front of you right now are two things one is um what's in the statute that enabled our creation uh so we have a mission that encompasses housing and conservation and the photo that you're looking at is the as an architects rendering of what the site of the Burlington College would look like when build out is completed and what's happened here and this is what we call the whole project is we have helped the city conserve and purchase 12 acres right on the lake for everybody to use and a developer is going to build a 700 unit neighborhood with about um 150 to 200 units being very affordable housing including some of those apartments that will be reserved for people with experience homelessness so that's kind of from a statutory perspective a whole month for us and it's great that we're going to build a neighborhood and this will help increase accessibility for the old north end to the lake uh in a very positive way so meets all of our goals and I won't dwell on this slide but this is what we've done humanly over 30 years in terms of housing and conservation um I'll talk a bit more about AmeriCorps in a minute as it relates to homelessness um and as we go through this presentation I guess I just want to say a couple things about homelessness in general and I get and I respect uh the commissioner Schatz but the one thing that I hope I'd like to disagree with him on is his pessimism that would can solve this problem that we may not solve this problem that we're just going to continue to care for it and I say that from the perspective of somebody who when I went to work at what is now called capstone community action in 1977 we didn't have the committee on shelf temporary shelter we didn't have couldn't marry the haven we didn't have the haven in part for we didn't have groundwork's uh collaborative in gravel bro and that's because we didn't need a system of shelters to house from ours so as you think about this problem and we're mostly talking about how do we fix up for today I guess I would say the bigger policy issue is how did we get here um and I'm going to lay out three things that I think caused it but if we didn't have homelessness writ large in the 1970s not just in Vermont in the United States I grew up in New York City and that's a T.C. in the 70s and you didn't come get out of the metro at Union Station and see the homeless everywhere it was a it was a different place three things happened uh one is um in the 1980s we really changed federal policy we slashed the high budget good time uh and that was uh housing experts debate this but we also had the institutionalization which I think from a humane humanitarian perspective very good thing we used to house many hundreds of people at the state hospital and at the random training school but and the promise was that money would follow people out of those institutions and to some degree did but didn't necessarily for housing in any kind of a way and then the last thing that has really changed I think in our economy is what people earn and what the cost of housing is and for those of us who have been fortunate um you know I bought a house in East Calis in 1978 and it cost us twenty six thousand dollars we sold it about six years ago for around two hundred thousand dollars um a young person getting out of college today or a young couple who have college debt and they have childcare expenses well that's a stretch and in lots of parts of the state two hundred thousand dollars is at the very end of where the market is particularly in the northwest part of the state so there's something about our economy about the whole issue of how we divide up and share income and how we deal with wealth that has really changed I think we were far less prosperous state in the 1970s but we didn't have this problem so I would just say this is a big problem and as you think about it think about that perspective of how did all those things contribute to where we are in this issue today the the other thing I want to put forward is that an investment in housing and we're certainly here to talk about how we can make the vehicle for them investment is actually going to save us money in the long term in two different ways and we'll speak to this in some of the slides but I believe that it can save money in other parts of the state budget whether it's the GA budget the corrections budget health care costs any kind of institutional cost certainly if somebody is in the psychiatric facility for any length of time that's a very expensive way for somebody to be housed but I think there's also growing evidence that about two years ago the legislature and all the new members I suggest you might want to be back here had a doctor from children's health wash Dr. Megan Sandel come up and make a presentation and I thought it was more and more there is data about what it costs in terms of our health so that for me this for some people this is just a fundamental moral issue but I think others how do we pay for it what are the dollars and cents to it and I think there's a cost that we don't always account for the cost of trying to educate a child who's been homeless and move from one school system to the next cost of mental health care all of those things are going to cost that we need a better way to measure it and if we started to measure them we might say that investing in housing is a really really good thing so our role we create and preserve housing for very low-income folks up to moderate-income folks we're the only place in the budget where you're directly putting capital dollars to build housing we're supporting housing in some other ways we are providing buildings that permanently house people who've been homeless we're part of our statute it's what's called permanent affordability we have worked with most of the shelter providers one way or another some of them don't even know it because we made a grant 20 years ago and the staff and the boards have changed over but there's pretty much no shelter facility for the state that we haven't invested in but the biggest part of our work has been in multi-family rental housing but we've also done single-family home ownership as well the home parks as well we do a fair amount of training and technical assistance we work through a network primarily of regional partners and Jen will talk in a moment about the policy work that she led to when she and other agencies hired a consultant who developed the road map and homelessness um there's clearly as you've heard today three parts to this problem one is having the housing available and the problem of people getting rental assistance vouchers and then having landlords turn them away and having to turn those vouchers back in is a symbol of the shortage of housing they have other choices in the market easier to manage less stress on them and they can charge higher rents a second piece is certainly the services that are needed for housing and beyond investing in the housing and conservation board i certainly would say to you that if the family support housing program is working in seven districts in the state it would be better for all of us if it worked in all 12 and maybe some of the districts we just had a meeting with ahs the other day and they reported to us that usage of ga programs particularly up in frankland county and ruttland county uh maybe we need more support in those parts of the state and certainly uh we need to get every dollar we can out of the fence for rental assistance um but you may need to look at investment in that program at the state level as well as the contingency program department um so with that i'm going to turn it to jen to go through the next few slides because she really led the effort on the roadmap and then i'll talk some more before we go just to finish off just a historical point um in terms of the what causes homelessness or what what can what doesn't help i suppose this race is what 2011 2010 2011 the state lost close to a thousand section eight vouchers from hud and you know some of the numbers that jumped up by 12 or 13 there was a correlation in numbers that that there were this many more families that were homeless and you can't say they were homeless because they didn't get a section eight voucher but there was a deficit which has only been partially replaced if i'm not mistaken is that right do you do i mean you're correct that there was a cutback i can't remember the numbers of how much we lost when there was a big fight over the budget but i wouldn't be surprised if we netted out the loss of several hundred vouchers across the state and that's not good for the people who depend on it it's not good for the landlords who are trying to do the right thing and really depend on regular payment and the reason they're rent so they can get their expenses so that certainly is something that has always been the absence of this act of a real partner that was as we were going and some of the things that we heard about in the sort of philips the monumental vouchers essentially the vermont ones those were created in the aftermath of having lost those that big chunk of vouchers with the thought that well maybe they'll turn over in 12 months and so that those are reactions to the to that programming that we've done here that you know on a policy level here but that the that this building has done to try to um patch the holes and happen Jen so as Gus described the vermont housing conservation board we're kind of a quasi public agency for the newer members you're going to be hearing from a lot of folks over the course of the next few weeks but we're sort of structured a little bit like eSAC or vermont economic development authority but our vision is really around affordable housing and land conservation so fundamentally we're a funder and you know grants and loans for affordable housing and then things on the conservation side of our our mission but we also do policy work and one component of that a couple years ago was helping out with a study that was funded by the legislature take to take a look at how the state is addressing homelessness and essentially to find out what's working well what's not what else do we need to do so a steering committee was set up and the housing conservation board myself and at the at that time the Angus Cheney was at the agency of human services put together a steering committee and Sarah did a lot of work on that and more Collins was here earlier from VHFA participated as well but we wanted to get a set of outside eyes to come in and look at how Vermont is approaching this problem and to tell us essentially if we're on track or what we can do better so it hired a national consultant over the course of about six months pretty intensive effort and they ultimately came out with a report that highlighted these five recommendations here and they highlighted what you've been hearing today is that a big part of the problem around homelessness is that there's there's an insufficient supply there's just not enough affordable available homes for folks essentially this consultant said Vermont's on track you guys are doing very well you need to continue to do a few things you really gotta address this this gap in your in your housing supply in large part that led that led to conversations in the building around doing a housing revenue line so if you're interested in the in the roadmap itself just when the screen was at a difference it looks like airheart has provided to you with that and there's some good there's some good background in there but it talks about the importance also of the supportive services so for some folks homelessness is just a like a stretch I wouldn't say just but is a stretch of bad luck and if they can get back on their feet and get back rent paid for a little bit and stabilize they'll be fine and on their way and for other folks it's really the result of a lot of chronic conditions are really pretty serious challenges in their lives and they're going to need some support services in order to be able to remain stably housed and one of the recommendations of this of the roadmap and the consultant was that you need to ramp up the services as well so I'm going to talk about some oh I should mention that all the photos that you see are all pictures of housing that the state has invested in through VHCV so I'll give you a variety of the kinds of things we've done I'm going to talk a little bit now about what we've done over the past few years with kind of our our ongoing state funding we get through the budget state funding for property transfer tax and then we use that to leverage federal programs as well so I'm going to show you a few examples of those to help give you a sense of what we do so this one we've actually talked about in this committee before but now it's done so it couldn't resist wanting to highlight it but it's an entire new neighborhood in Rutland formally called Forest Park now known as Hickory Street and the community had a really terrific celebration around that this summer and there are 78 brand new homes there replacing some really substandard distressed I think they had a mold problem you guys had a mold problem they had some pretty serious old problems down there too but it now is new community space place space and there are a number of apartments there specifically dedicated to the homes there so it's a pretty it's a pretty great success while we're talking about Rutland I'll follow up on something that Sarah Phillips mentioned a little bit earlier and that is that as a result of the roadmap and always we try to coordinate across data agencies and keep those lines of communication going so we did just have a meeting with them and we know that there is a high level of need in Rutland and we have been working with folks down there to let them know that there's a pretty unique opportunity available right now with the housing brand new bond funds and really hoping they could come together it looks like something is beginning to come together now with maybe a building identified very early conversations of the feasibility work going on around potential permanent housing but for homeless individuals or smaller units so we're very hopeful that that's going to come along Jen this dedicate this we've heard this several times about dedicating in the home units in the homeless this is the result of Governor Shumlin's directive I mean we've all the industry has always focused on it but he made a specific request or directive that X percentage of the housing be dedicated well there's actually two pieces to that so we'll talk a little bit more about the executive order later but you're exactly right it's always been part of our mission and they just do king services and others to try to sort of go homeless that work was sort of accelerated a couple of years ago by first the executive order and then also really early in the revenue funds but there's also something known as the qualified allocation plan so that's going to get referred to as the QAP but that governs the use of federal housing tax credits which are a big source of funding for a lot of the projects we kind of are phcb spending but often the seed funding the first money in and then that allows people to pull together the other resources a big part of that is federal housing credits and there was a an incentive built into that for folks who dedicate a certain knowing that the challenges that were out there there was an incentive built into that allocation plan for projects or developments that include a specific number of units specifically dedicated to the homeless and when I say dedicated to the homeless it means that they will make every attempt to first house someone who is homeless what they won't do is keep that unit empty for months on end if there's another eligible family that can move in but next time there's a turnover first is there a homeless individual or family that can use that unit so that's what we mean when we say dedicated I just wanted to add that I live across the street from the entrance of hickory street development and I have to say what a difference what a difference it is me I've met many of the neighbors there they're happy they have a wonderful community garden there in the summer it's it's a great place I usually take a walk around there it's it's a great improvement and I hopefully see many more I'm just going to add one point to this discussion which is we work primarily not exclusively but primarily with a network of about nine regional non-profit organizations we're very mission driven a couple statewide groups often they're partnerships with private sectors as well and what we found on a statewide basis when we look at what Jennifer does tax credit housing is the modest serving among the very highest numbers of extremely low income people in the country as a percentage and we think that that's because they're very mission driven they want to do the partnerships with the homeless service providers the lower social service providers and so I think one could argue also that what that network is doing is by focusing in that way is preventing folks from being homeless and that network of that network of regional non-profits include the Champlain I mean these names will be familiar to the Champlain Housing Trust, Twin Pines Housing Trust, Addison County Community Trust, Downstreet Housing, I'm looking around the table the oil housing partnership Downstreet again and Champlain Housing Trust but Downstreet Housing Community Development completed a project just a couple weeks ago that has been really exciting I wanted to show that to you this was funding that was provided to them a few years ago the French Block it's right across from City Hall right down here on Main Street on Montpelier the upper floors have been vacant for 37 years they were in terrible terrible shape oh I said sit I I meant to say since 1937 a number of private developers had taken a look at it and just ultimately had to walk away because the challenge was too great but now it's 18 mixed income apartments with some considered affordable some that are just offered at market rates and five are specifically dedicated to homeless folks and it's been a it's been a terrific historic preservation and community revitalization project as well part of what BHCB does is help provide funding for emergency shelters too and this is an example of one of the Good Samaritan Haven in Barrie going up to South Brownington this is an example of what is known as permanent supportive housing so this is a former motel it's known as beacon apartments and it serves medically vulnerable or chronically homeless individuals people who are really really challenged and need a lot of supports around them the Champlain Housing Trust partnered with the UVM Medical Center because these are folks that were often showing up in their emergency rooms and then they would discharge them and there was no way that they could really get better if they're living living woods and intense and or bouncing from shelter to shelter so that's up and running now it provides 20 homes the block on the right is data that's collected and has been shared and since been updated I don't have the most recent version that shows the direct cost to the medical center of the 28 patients that live here and you can see so the bar on the far left was 90 and 100 days prior to them moving in and then 60 to 90 days and then zero to 60 days and so you can see that that was pretty expensive the line in the middle then it's like the tallest bar is how much the direct costs were right after they moved in is because that's a plane they're playing catch up they're getting lots of care that they that they hadn't been getting and then and then the cost dropped way off so people are getting not only their housing but their health stabilized and that impacts the state's finances as well I guess I would just say that the health UVM Medical Center is actually now investing as part of not their chair of the budget but their medical budget in housing because they've found that it's saving the money you know there was a report on public radio not long ago about people who are homeless who have caught an emergency zones and the stress that that causes the nurses and the other staff but also the expense of it so as I said when we open the presentation we think that there are that if you did enough accounting you would see cost savings not just in the state's budget plan our health care systems as well by providing people housing and when you think of what it is for instance to be a diabetic and not have a refrigerator to keep your medicine in maybe that's not a big problem this time of year but if you're moving outside in the summer and you don't have any refrigeration things are going to go wrong and and I think it was because the head of the emergency center saw the savings once hard to place open so on the medical center said oh there's a smarter way for us to do this than just having people running out of our emergency rooms and so I think that's been a great breakthrough and one of the things that I think was crazy to spend some time on. Yeah we will hear from because you gave some of your other lists of talking about not only this but we heard very briefly about the Bel Air as a transitional housing or pre-housing so just the numbers are phenomenal just the number drop-offs are phenomenal. We have also one of our staff that's interviewing some of the residents here and we have a video that we'd be happy to share with the community. So this next slide is another way in which the states investments through VHCB are helping people from being homeless. This is transitional housing for people that are coming out of corrections or have on their examples of ones that we helped fund around the state and so the housing the regional funding nonprofits or other groups only maintain and manage the housing and then they have a contract with the Department of Corrections for a certain number of beds and the one up on the right is how are you talking about Rutland? That's Mandela house and Rutland women who are coming out of out of incarceration and a couple examples of Dismas houses once I believe in Burlington and the other part of folks who are able to stay there until they can figure out how to get back on their feet and move into Burlington housing. So in my mind that's the best outcome but there's also a financial implication and that is that the cost for the Department of Corrections of helping paying for those beds is so much lower than where it would cost them if they were still in prison that it saves about three point seven million dollars a year. Okay so this is another facility we developed with the Committee on Temporary Shelter and Housing and Human Rights in Muskie and it is for homeless veterans and that's a pretty easy place for people to agree, everybody on it, empty it and help. When we had the opening it was I think among the most emotional experience I've had in my many years doing this work and both the DFW and the Legion present not just local chapters but national folks because it is such an important project. But the other thing I'd say and this is a completely different issue that this committee should be focused on and your colleagues as they think about Act 250 is a question of what density means and so when you look at this building which is a tall building but it's on one-fifth of an acre this is what 125 units in acre looks like. So we can do density.  Are there any other projects in the works for veterans and these little agencies right now or is that just one and it's kind of a pilot program? That one has been done and successful there is another facility in Northfield that's really been run on community energy It's been a terrific partnership and I think that there's a desire to do more but there hasn't been the same halt of funding and the same level of concentration of need that I'm aware of but if somebody brought us a proposal I can tell you we'd be excited to work on it. So we respond to proposals and I guess one of the things we should have said at the outset our job is to be responsive to your constituents so if there's a need in any of your regions you think he isn't being met make our phone ring. The reason we're having a conversation in Rutland about a facility for the homeless is because AHS told us last spring real problem and so we can do that all got together and now the building is under option. As Jen said it's at the early stages but we are happy to you know your community is better than we do and we're happy to hear what you think communities are and try to make sure they get rest. Thank you. So just to give you other senses of the work we're doing and this has permanent affordability as a headline when we were established back in the 80s there are two developments one was in Essex the other in Moortown that had been subsidized by the federal government for its development it's 100 units in Essex great school system 37 units in Moortown and owned by the same guy and we went into the farmers home administration this what it was called back then and played by the rules and he prepaid his mortgage and then doubled rents in Essex and a year later every family that depended on that housing and couldn't afford to turn the Moortown project into condominiums and again everybody was displaced so the view that was established in our legislation was when we invest the state's funds it should not be something that's going to get approved for five years or ten years or even 20 years which is what the old section 8 contracts required it ought to be a permanent investment that's part of the reason that we work with nonprofits is you know if you're a private developer you really want to make the money both on the front end and the back end and we were saying there's a policy matter we don't want you to just place people on the back end you've begun to work very regularly and talk about this become back into the community and all of you on a lot of partnerships between the private sector and the non-private sector there's a big project going on in South Billington and you're coming out that's very much that kind of partnership two projects here one is a group of habitat with humanity celebrating the groundbreaking of the house but it was a bad day so they do it with a model we've done about I think we're up to 125 homes across the state habitat and they're knocking out about seven houses a year faith-based folks from all over the state getting together lots of sweat equity people they choose as homeowners have to put in a certain number of values to help build the house and it's the most affordable kind of home ownership we can get the building on the right is the Swanton school and it was vacant I think for about a decade before it was occupied I haven't been there probably in 10 years but I think it's becoming a good senior housing it looks essentially the same it's a valuable third valuable to the community and it seems to be running well I don't hear complaints from anyone okay it's a good sign let us know if that changes okay a couple more projects and you know one of the themes that I've heard from the governor and the speaker and the president is we really need to pay attention to rural Vermont so on the right is a building that was done in the 90s by the Des Moines Housing Partnership in Hardwick and there's been a fair amount of work done on the main street there on the left is is a building in Townsend and that's where Grace Cottage Hospital is which is a federally qualified health center and a lot of people came together including one of our former board members former secretary of agriculture Roger Albee because they wanted to make sure people in their community could age there and have a place to go and it's mixed income his mom was one of the residents some of you know Pat Molten and some of you who are older might remember Big Al Molten and Big Al and his wife spent their final years in this facility in Townsend and it's been a great success and a great partnership through the health center and one of the very first projects that we use modern look to so the chair raised the question of the governor's executive order a few minutes ago and I just wanted to provide this overview of how many folks who've been homeless and that's according to a federal definition have been housed by our partners and but I think what was most remarkable in this last year is that for 1,100 turnovers over this part of the 6,000 apartments and 28 percent went to people who had been experiencing homelessness I think there are more people who were who were not counted in that number but were for instance if you're doubled up with family or friends you don't count this homeless so I think the number of people who are actually significantly at this for not having housing is higher than that and this really is this work again is only possible because of partnerships uh with local providers without that I think it's your comments earlier about whether you're a for-profit landlord or a non-profit landlord if you have a bad tenant and things don't work and the apartment gets wrecked and you have to go for an eviction it costs an awful lot of money and that I think is one of the reasons we have people who kind of fall into the category I mean there's some words they should be strong up in my opinion but then there are people who own properties who have just gone through a series of tenants where you have a certain amount destruction that happens on non-caring and you go in and you fix it you make it presentable so that people have good housing to get somebody and it can cycle why I mentioned pathways or wanted to know if they still are doing that is that it takes I think it's a great program because it gives landlords of security that they're not just going to be left holding back so to speak it makes everybody think accountable and there's responsibility to go around because as a landlord you've got responsibility you have to place up as well but I think if that were more widespread that might very well release apartments well I think we agree and I agree with what Sarah said places the value of the program as is the family support housing program like you funded in seven districts and we'll get expanded beyond that so I think those levels of supports are just absolutely critical for the most vulnerable among our fellow citizens so we have a lot of time one way to think about this is that the 15 the goal of 15 percent was applied to everybody who is receiving public so anybody who gets public money whether it's DHCB or one of the federal programs that flows through the state for project they in their existing portfolio so the properties or the apartments that they already own and manage would need to try to meet that that 15 percent so it's a way of looking back at the investments that the state had already made and there's you know here you'll see there's about 6,000 apartments that there and those those because they're permanently affordable those are going to help many many generations of families and people turning over so those assets those investments are always there but at the same time it is it is honestly challenging the people who only manage the properties a little bit some instances and some of the larger groups have the ability to invest in more supportive or like resident service coordinators and but some of the smaller organizations just don't have that ability and it can be a little bit challenging for they're a different kind of landowner but it can be kind of challenging in the services right there to survive. So is this in the examples in Burlington and in Rotland and Montpelier that we saw is this 15 percent and what kind of how you work with the development of those properties? How do you keep affordability affordable? Well that's it. We should probably be a little bit more precise in some of our language so the executive order asks us and asks the HFA and asks the department has anything if you're going to give money to somebody that they commit a 15 percent of their housing you may do that by asking them to enter into a memorandum of understanding that they service provider it might be a formal service organization like the committee on temporary shelter it might be women and abandoned women it might be any number it might be from the action agency that's what we ask them to do but we understand they need the services in order to serve that population. We define affordability generally as developing a rent schedule where some percentage of the apartments in a rental development will be affordable to somebody at 50 percent of median. We also ask our partners to go to the various local housing authorities at the state housing authority or the state's programs to get rental assistance for tenants and sometimes they will bring somebody in without that rental assistance but work to get them on the waiting list so that they can work their way up if they have a low enough income that they can't swing it. You will see people in the units that we fund work using 40 their incomes are low enough that they're using 40 and 50 percent of their income for rent so we don't get to that federal standard without rental assistance for really low income people without a subsidy but we are getting rents made available that are below $100. And Representative Cromach just on pathways they're heavily, January 31st is pathways day kind of the car room and we'll have them on here so yeah they're awesome, they do awesome work. Okay so to get to the bond, the bond was just passed 18 months ago on January 27th 2017. The sale exceeded the expectation so those of you who were here to support it was expected to raise $35 million. We actually, we hit the market at just the right time it was just under $37 million dollars. We have committed, we've marketed it as a sustainability bond because of the board's track record of environmental stewardship both in our conservation work and our smart growth philosophy for where we built housing and the energy standards we employ for the buildings that people bring us so that helped improve the return from the bond holders. We've so far committed 22 million just under 22 million dollars we're going to consider a couple more projects next week. So far we've funded 468 homes around the state some homeownership most of it is rental housing it's in 15 different communities eight different counties the first 86 homes are already occupied in three towns there's about 240 homes under construction today all over the state that first picture I showed you up here is Manchester Vermont where we're doing a 12 unit condominium project and when the construction is done it'll be 20 unit condominium project and people will be able to get a free bedroom home in Manchester for that 180,000 dollars so there that's a great view. The built picture you're looking at is in South Burlington and it is part of a city center development and I talked a few minutes ago about public-private partnerships this is a turnkey between a couple developers Chris Snyder of Snyder Homes and Ken Graberman and they have a master plan to build 700 homes in what would be South Burlington City Center right next to this building the community is voting to put in a library and City Hall behind it is a school down the street we've broken ground on a 16-minute building and the developers are going to do market housing. We did it yes and that voting we voted it. So anyway C-30 this is among the units that have been occupied already with great great opening a few months ago now. The bond asked us to make sure 25% of the housing would be available for the lowest 800 dollars and 25 percent above 80 percent of median of the world 120 which is something we haven't been able to do just because our funding has been too low to serve that into the market until the bond so we're working and we're on track. The next couple projects are not yet under construction but we've provided funding and assuming they get the rest of their financing together in the Great Valley and the Virginians this spring or early summer. But this one is actually under construction this is an Hartford 30-unit development that will be built by weight fall and on to finally fall next year. This is due to start in April this is downtown Springfield you know where the movie theater is this is kind of catty corner to cross from it. Commercial space has been vacant for at least a decade local economic development group has agreed to master lease. Commercial space there are going to be four partners for folks who are homeless, homeless youth in the building. This is Putney Landing this is again one of the buildings that have been occupied and there are 16 kids who call at home and again two apartments dedicated the homeless at this site and there's an adjacent none an adjacent site from another site in town that's also been developed that is also has some people who are homeless in the old historic building. This is a project that we hope will get the rest of its finance and we just need the finance at this fall and be under construction next summer in the Shaftsbury just over the line from Newark Bennington which is one of those schools that had a really positive reputation and we had about 10 years ago done some conservation work and there'll be a path from the site to Lake Pan and Lake Pan and Lake Missionary so it will be a great place for kids to be able to grow up. And then this is a development in Brattleboro that is a collaboration between the Wynnum and your housing trust and the ground works collaborative. I heard from Deb Zach this morning a little bit about this. And it is again one of the buildings that was occupied and if you had seen the buildings before construction you would have shaking your head and said put this really a good place for people to live but they had a great architect and a great design team and they re-oriented the site and they built a community building in the middle of it and low day or micro apartments the feeling is really nice. This one received award from a national association of community development agencies in part because of its potential model you know using an old roadside motel you know the travel industry has changed a lot and this is a way that providing supportive housing in this really small community where Brattleboro is small compared to naturally and they saw that as a potential model and it was recognized in that way. And this was a project that 30% of the community in which they wish a lot of them are 60 to 80 and so this is I mean that's the other part of this that's outstanding is that it's for the for the lowest level of community income. So this is a building owned by the Claire Martin Center in Randolph which was the qualified health agency for that part of the state it's been vacant for about a decade and this will be four homes for the homeless folks who kind of assist the panel almost and it should be under construction now or very soon and within the next year and within all the services in the community. So briefly we are on track to meet the goals of the revenue bond. I will say that when the next fiscal year begins unless you do something different we'll actually have less money because we've spent so much of it down and we've had the last two years. Majority will serve families and almost every development one or two have units that are dedicated to serve the homeless in a few cases. The dedication will be off-site rather than on-site. We are seeing because of the bond a huge amount of it's sparking a lot of ideas so we think we'll have way more demand next year and we're seeing more mixed income development which we think overall is a good healthy thing. One of the things housing economists will tell you is when people and this makes fair amount of common sense to me when people with more means are in the rental market they're not buying homes and they're competing with people who have less means who wins that competition, who will allow them to take a chance on a person with a good credit score and a good reference and a person with a bad credit score and maybe not such good references. So while I think we have heard from legislators in the past that we should focus only on the most vulnerable I think they're with some wisdom to the governor's desire that we serve this wider spectrum and have the resources to do it. We have some challenges continuing and I'd say in terms of the question of today in terms of serving the homeless we have a limited amount of rental assistance and we're not and we have a limited level of support services so we need both those things along with the housing dollars to meet the need and as I've already indicated we will we have also a problem in our economy where wages just don't keep up for the cost of housing and that's a fundamental one I know this committee wrestles with in other ways and then finally we will spend the bond down and whether we can keep up the momentum we'll be up to all of you and the other party and the I think that there's just a couple more I still live back to something that Sarah was saying I mean just to reinforce how important this is I mean why why it really matters in our homelessness and particularly the impact on kids so the MacArthur Foundation did some particular body of work around how lack of stable housing impacts kids and their upper formability so clearly the research shows um that's saying the formal housing is a launch you've had folks in terms of um and it's not my brighter future this picture here is a as a group of kids who are at a care center that's next to the four housing project over on Barrie Street owned by Downstreet Housing and Community Development um guys have certainly seen this many times I love this picture because they're they're all really excited and they're holding their scissors in the safety position um this uh this young father is uh pictured outside his home in Brandon and the brand of training school a number of buildings there were converted to affordable housing um in their own advantage by the housing trust of Rottenham County but here's some really pretty powerful quotes that sort of extract from these various research papers and studies um that the MacArthur Foundation um does so if you're worried about health if you're worried about education outcomes or if you're worried about um children's livelihood it's all impacted severely impacted by lack of stable housing um so one one broader thing I I'd like to add about the housing revenue bond I mean you've heard a lot about the challenge of homelessness today the legislature did a fantastic thing um 18 months ago I'm passing um a housing revenue bond one of the largest investments in the state's history of affordable housing why are there still homeless people on the street I mean part of that is lead time um the um the bond is up and running the projects are going quickly but out of that just right now 86 homes are now occupied hopefully by the end of the year or early next year there'll be another 250 and at that point we really hope to be able to see the impacted communities and some of those numbers coming back down but it's just a little too early yet for the impact of the benefit of the bonds to be felt in um in communities um so just wanted to it takes a little while for it to get out there and get going so um this is all great stuff great news but um what's what's of concern to me is that from taking testimony last year in human services the number of homeless people in vermont is almost exactly the same as it was last year how do we explain that what what what do we attribute that to if you would like to make a call please hang up and try again well I'm gonna I'm gonna say two things one is that uh the who is homeless is a dynamic the number may be consistent but who becomes homeless is a changing number so if if the point point in time count is what 1200 it's not the same 1200 people and it is captured at a at a particular point um the second thing is that the housing market is dynamic and tight and what we are seeing uh maybe not in your district but in some parts of the state is that rents are continuing to go up significantly and so the stress and strain and who becomes homeless uh you know when you have job loss which affects some communities um you know so if we're looking at windham county for instance between the changes at yankee and the printing company that went out of business and so on where the economy has changed there and not for the better so I think all of those things can contribute to the fact that we are to some degree stuck in a particular place the last thing you know we actually have more housing than we had a generation ago but family size you know we used to think of family of four is a typical uh besides family size is shrunk down to about two point walk on average so because family size whether it's because of age because of divorce whatever the social reasons are we need more homes to house the population of the land this is my second week in the legislature so um I the the x and 15 is being revisited now and there's a paper I wrote and there was a part of changing the focus of development to more centralized downtown if I understood that correctly if that means forward would that impact your work and these examples you've given us would you have to focus more on building our compounds or would that matter to you well we already have what we think of as smart growth criteria for where we will build so it was never our goal and if you think about our mission which is also a conservative in our countryside to build in the farm fields of the moth it was really to build where there is infrastructure the way there's water and sewer we have been in some rural communities and had to that don't have for instance public sewer system the village of rotten is one where we did a housing project that um where all the systems are on site that's very expensive but I don't see that as changing our work I think we want to help strengthen our village centers we've got some key downtown projects ahead of us one downtown st johnsbury we're working on a very big economic development and housing project in bennington uh we have a proposal in front of us next week for downtown St. Aldins um and I think we want to build where it is convenient to public transit whether it's shopping or social services so um it actually strengthens our conservation mission to not be strong now I think what comes from the act 250 work is still to be determined right now if you're in a priority housing area you get a pass on act 250 if you're building affordable housing and I would say that that's a good policy overall if it becomes any housing can be built I worry that perhaps we'll have increased the value thank you for sticking with us it's only a start but it's a good foundation of information and um I appreciate you you know just focusing in on the mostly on the homelessness issue and what the hcb is contributing to working with that so can I make one announcement before we break sure so uh going to what gus had mentioned about price of housing going up much quicker than wages um tonight from 430 to 530 public assets institute will be giving a presentation on the economy and the state budget and will be presented again on next Tuesday the 22nd from 9 to 10 a.m and that's in room 10 so you might want to think about um going and hearing what they have to say it's it's very informative it's very reliable and um it certainly ties into what we've heard today in some respects thank you very much and committee um we are done