Homeless shelter capacity doubles

That’s 21 beds that previously served aging Vermonters on fixed incomes and in need of vital in-home care. The facility was at half capacity at the time of its sale and the remaining residents are being relocated with the assistance of the Department of Aging and Independent Living, but it’s still nearly two dozen fewer beds in a state already strained to capacity.

The new shelter will be owned by Lamoille Housing Partnership, though its operations will be overseen entirely by Lamoille Community House. The community house purchased the building for $900,000; a $3.8 million grant from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board will finance the purchase and rehabilitation of the former care home.

Expanded services for homeless people are desperately needed to handle the growing number of those without consistent residence in both Lamoille County and the state. There are 167 adults and 60 children currently experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness in local communities, according to Lamoille Housing Partners, and more than half of the 137 reported households experiencing homelessness were sheltering in a motel, tent, or vehicle, on the street or in temporary shelter.

A report from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development published in late January put Vermont at second in the nation for per-capita homelessness, estimating that about 43 out of every 10,000 Vermonters have no permanent housing.

Still, Lamoille Community House’s executive Kim Anetsberger is sensitive to the unique situation she’s found herself in, overseeing the overdue expansion of the homeless shelter while displacing beds needed for aging Vermonters, noting that the demographic served by both the shelter and resident care homes often overlap.

“I feel like shelters kind of catch people at the bottom after they've fallen through every other system of care,” Anetsberger said. “It’s like the last net before the ground. We do our best with all of the types of people that come in.”

New shelter

The Lamoille Community House had been searching for an expanded home for about a year and a half when the opportunity to purchase Forest Hill presented itself.

The organization arrived at this point through a fruitful collaboration with Lamoille Housing Partnership, who were themselves looking to build a shelter separately from the community house. By combining forces, the two nonprofits were able to bring together one’s services acumen with the other’s property expertise.

The two organizations had searched high and low for a suitable property amid the region’s tightening and expensive housing market. Though they sought to remain within the orbit of Morristown, where all the vital services are located, they found themselves looking as far afield as Johnson, where Jenna’s Promise has been establishing a town-wide network of services for people in opiate addiction recovery. They got close enough to choosing the area for the new shelter that they opened a dialogue with the selectboard.

The location they settled on is just east of their current seasonal shelter in Hyde Park village and just north of Morristown, at the end of a dirt road branching off Center Road.

Though Forest Hill owners Dave and Jennifer Anderson had received interest from other parties prior to the sale, the community house offered an ideal way to exit the increasingly unsustainable business of running an assisted living care home while ensuring the property was still serving the community.

“Transition from serving one community in need to another community in need was really the best-case scenario,” Dave Anderson said. “For the building to continue to serve a significant population in need of service and increase those services based on what the building can offer gives us a good feeling.”

Anetsberger called the building itself “perfectly suited” for what the organization was looking for in this search, but acknowledged that its remote location outside of a village center and away from public transportation posed certain challenges.

In order to make sure those seeking shelter at their new facility are adequately able to access support programs, the community house will have dedicated office space for those services, provided most often by Lamoille County Mental Health, the Recovery Center, the Restorative Center, Lamoille Health Partners and others.

The community house will also looking to institute a multi-pronged approach to providing transportation to their residents. A grant will allow them to provide electronic bicycles, and they’re looking to purchase a van to offer as a shuttle. They will also likely be making use of the newly announced rideshare program being offered by Rural Community Transportation in Hyde Park and Morristown.

With this purchase, the community house has essentially quadrupled its services — doubling its capacity while committing to year-round service. The nonprofit has been busy shoring up its funding to ensure there’s a cushion as it expands with a two-year-long fundraising campaign, which began in September, 2021; the campaign is ahead of schedule at this point, with over $311,000 raised so far.

The planned winding down of the state’s expanded pandemic-era hotel housing program promises to put additional pressure on Vermont’s homeless services as well. Though additional funding was made available in the state senate’s version of the budget adjustment bill to keep those in hotels there through the end of June, VTDigger reported, this extension comes with eligibility requirements that would only allow those with extenuating circumstances to remain. The bill still awaits reconciliation with the House.

Placement within the hotel system often depends on availability and those placed in the program are sometimes sent far from their community care networks. Lamoille County’s hotel housing is dwindling regardless of the plan, after the sale of the Golden Eagle Resort in Stowe and the removal of the 10 households living there by the end of March. The Deer Run Motor Inn in Cambridge and the Sunset Motor Inn in Morristown are still participating in the program.

Anetsberger was happy to see the hotel program extended, even for just a brief period, but also said that sustained, long-term funding was required to address a homelessness crisis that has been years in the making.

“We can’t fix this in two or three years with a program here and a program there. I think these programs need to be funded in a sustainable way for like 10 to 20 years to actually make a dent in fixing this,” Anetsberger said. “We’re not going to solve homelessness in two or three years. It’s been compounding for generations.”

Lamoille Housing Partnership is working to build up the area’s affordable housing stock, but at a rate that often appears far outpaced by the need. The partnership expects to add 49 more units to its housing portfolio this summer, bringing the total up to over 300 units, according to public relations manager Kerrie Lohr, but there are 537 households on the partnership’s waitlist.

Aging dilemma

With Forest Hill sold, it’s the end of a lifetime spent in the residential care for the Andersons.

The post-pandemic years have been the most difficult of their 27-year career, Dave Anderson said, primarily due to the staffing crisis that has hit assisted living facilities hard throughout the state during that time.

“The last year has been overwhelming for us. Between the two of us, we’ve been working pretty nearly 24/7 in the building, due to the staffing challenges,” Anderson said. “There comes a point when one has to think of themselves and their own futures, and having been a caregiver my whole career, that’s usually the last thing on my mind. Yet, when it comes down to the realities that we face day in and day out, it’s not something that we physically can maintain.”

The Andersons are familiar with the precarities of the assisted living business. They also ran the Maple Hill Residential Care Home in Waterbury until 2019, when it was shuttered due to the building’s uncooperative landlord, according to the Waterbury Record.

The underlying factor, according to Dave Anderson, is Medicaid historic and ongoing underfunding of Medicaid programs for supporting aging Vermonters, which Anderson pointed to as a primary reason behind the accelerating rate of closures among assisted living businesses like his since 2020 despite the demand.

“You have hospitals who have people sitting in their beds for months because they can't get admitted,” he said. “You have hospitals now who are referring long-term care patients and residents to New York, because Vermont can admit them.”

Just last week, the House Committee on Human Services was delivered a requested report on Medicaid reimbursement for residential care homes that painted a grim picture. Vermont has lost 81 Medicaid subsidized assisted living beds since 2020, which have been replaced by private beds alone.

Since 2020, 10 residential care homes have closed throughout the state, including Forest Hill.

Another report reviewed by the committee showed that there’s no regular mechanism for reviewing Medicaid reimbursement rates for assisted living facilities and no scheduled increase in rates.

In the report, the Vermont Healthcare Association recommended a dramatic increase in Medicaid reimbursement for assisted living facilities, a $28.1 million dollar injection over a three-year period to make reimbursement commensurate with the cost of care, or, they warned, Vermont will lose necessary care for aging Vermonters as that population continues to grow.

Dan Noyes, D-Wolcott, who represents Hyde Park, Johnson and Belvidere in the statehouse as well, recognized that the amount of funding required to adequately compensate health care workers is massive, but said the government must make some progress in the area.

“We’re gonna have to prioritize some level of increase to these home and community based providers in order to make sure that they’re able to provide services to older Vermonters,” Noyes said. “It's not a question if, it's how we're going to do it. We need to do it. This is important to older Vermonters to be able to have these safety nets.”

Anetsberger and Lamoille Community House know that the dwindling of assisted living capacity will come down on them.

“We get people that come to the shelter who can’t access assisted living nursing home care. They end up at the shelter, and then we don’t have the staff and training to adequately meet their needs,” Anetsberger said.