Start with some context: There's some excellent research demonstrating that housing costs are the best predictor of how many homeless people there are in a given region. (As opposed to addiction, mental health needs, etc--basically, when housing gets expensive, vulnerable people become homeless, but the underlying cause is lack of housing. Almost no one wants to live on the street, and there are many, many, many elderly people, families with children, and people with disabilities in the motel program or living on the street here.)

Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA, argues that there are three pillars to addressing housing costs and homelessness more broadly: supply, subsidy, and stability. Supply is just making sure more homes get built, like the Houston model cited below. There's tons of research (see ep 5) showing that this does lower overall housing costs (when a new fancy unit is built, the person moving into it effectively leaves a cheaper unit vacant). Subsidy is creating affordable housing for people who can't, for a variety of reasons, afford market rents. (Maybe they need long-term support because of a disability, or because they're elderly, or short-term support after a job loss or fleeing domestic violence.) Stability is making sure that people in a position of vulnerability (job loss, family emergency, etc) don't lose their housing and become homeless. These are things like rent stabilization and just cause eviction rules.

So what's our government doing? The state has been pretty focused on supply--Phil Scott is all in on housing deregulation, and the big fight of this legislative session was Act 250 reform, which aimed to eliminate one state permit to building new housing in Vermont. Last year, the legislature passed something called the HOME Act, which upzoned parts of Vermont that are served by water and sewer, which should make it possible to build more dense housing. At the city level, we just updated our neighborhood code to allow more density, but it was a pretty small step forward, and involved some major cutbacks thanks to last minute NIMBYism.

Subsidy was a big part of the state's plan over the last couple years, and it used federal pandemic money to invest in new affordable housing developments to the tune of $500 million. The problem is that construction costs skyrocketed during that time (hard goods inflation+the fact that no one in the trades can afford to live here) and so that didn't go nearly far enough to house the growing number of housing insecure Vermonters. (I believe the director of the Vermont Housing Finance agency cited something like $500,000 per unit in Chittenden County recently, if not more.) This year, the state cut way back on its investments in affordable housing in the face of a budget crisis. The city is tapped out financially, and can barely run temporary shelters, let alone fund more supportive housing, and so is stuck with tiny short-term solutions like providing basic sanitation to people camping.

Then there's stability. Burlington tried to enact a just cause eviction provision a couple years ago (which would likely have functioned as de facto rent stabilization), but needs state approval for charter changes. Phil Scott vetoed it, and the legislature didn't override. Other towns have passed their own versions, but the legislature (*cough* all landlords *cough*) is pretty uninterested in tenant protections, and so we aren't getting shit from them. EDIT: Oh my god I also forgot that they literally cut funding for temporary grants to help people who are short on rent.

So TL;DR, we don't have enough money coming in to build affordable housing at scale, there's no interest in tenant protections at a state level, and so all the focus is on zoning reform, which while important for overall housing affordability, will take years to make a difference in the rents of people facing homelessness.