By Frank Knaack and Falko Schilling
Editor’s note: This commentary is by Frank Knaack, executive director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, and Falko Schilling, advocacy director of the ACLU of Vermont.
Homelessness in Vermont is at its highest level on record, as more people struggle to afford sky high-rents and housing costs. According to the most recent data, there are nearly 3,500 unhoused Vermonters on any given night, including nearly 1,000 children and senior citizens. And we know that is an undercount, as it reflects only the people who engaged with our state’s dedicated and perpetually under-resourced shelter service providers.
Into this crisis comes the U.S. Supreme Court, and not in a good way. Last month, in a case called City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, the Court allowed cities and towns across the U.S. to arrest and ticket unhoused people for sleeping outside, even when adequate shelter or housing is not available.
Criminalization is not a solution to homelessness.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated in her dissenting opinion in Grants Pass, the decision “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”
This decision is not just inhumane, it also encourages counterproductive public policy. Arrests, fines, jail time and criminal records make it more difficult for individuals experiencing homelessness to access the affordable housing, health services and employment necessary to exit homelessness. Landlords are less likely to rent to people with a criminal record, employers are less likely to hire a worker with a criminal record and encampment raids often result in the loss of vital records needed to obtain housing assistance.
And, because Vermont’s criminal laws are enforced with a massive racial bias, any move to further criminalize unhoused people will have a staggeringly disproportionate impact in Black Vermonters. According to the most recent data, Black people are over 5.2 times more likely to be arrested, over 7 times more likely to be incarcerated and 5.6 times more likely to be unhoused compared with white people in Vermont.
The racial bias in Vermont’s criminal legal system already makes Black Vermonters more likely to face harms that can lead to housing insecurity and homelessness. Any move to further criminalize unhoused people would magnify this unconscionable disparity.
Rather than arresting people for being unhoused, Vermont’s elected officials should follow the decades of evidence showing that the most effective way to address homelessness is to provide people with affordable, stable housing and supportive services, like case management, healthcare and mental health and substance use services.
The underlying cause of Vermont’s housing and homelessness crisis is the severe shortage of homes affordable to people with the lowest incomes and a widening gap between incomes and housing costs. To solve this crisis, Vermont must make sustained, long-term investments across all areas that have contributed to Vermont’s housing and homelessness crisis, including funding to construct new permanently affordable housing, rehabilitate existing structures into affordable housing, increase middle-income home ownership and more.
While Grants Pass may make it easier for our elected officials to turn to responses that are politically expedient, but proven to be ineffective and inhumane, we urge our elected officials to focus on real solutions rather than making it harder for those who are already struggling to get by.
Vermont’s criminal legal system cannot provide adequate health care, effectively treat substance use disorder and mental illness, provide people with a living wage or provide housing to unhoused people — the core solutions to making our communities safer and more just for all.
It is well past time to stop pretending that criminalizing unhoused people is anything more than the intentional attempt to hide our state’s failure to provide for the basic needs of its residents.
Let’s be clear — Vermont’s homelessness crisis is a political choice. While this crisis will not be solved overnight, Vermont must invest in proven solutions to homelessness, including stable, affordable, accessible housing and voluntary supportive services. It is past time to build a Vermont that is safe and just for all.
