COMMENTARY: The Hotel Motel Program is a Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitches

February 27, 2025  |  By Sophie Hislop and Dwayne Robinson

Last August we were evicted from our apartment in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and our journey with the General Assistance Hotel Motel Program began. We are both Vermonters, who had been living in the Upper Valley when we first became homeless. We were working with Upper Valley Haven, who had found us a place just over the border in New Hampshire.

We are a family of four. Our son, Davien is 4 years old, and our daughter Eveleen is 14 months. 

After a few weeks in an apartment paid for by the city of Lebanon, we were able to get a placement in the GA Hotel Motel program back in Vermont. But the closest place they could find for us was in Brattleboro.

Our experience in the Hotel Motel program in Brattleboro was bad. Shortly before we hit our 80-day cap, the owner of the hotel we were staying in forced us to move rooms, into a room that had black mold. They wouldn’t fix the problem, despite our asking multiple times. When we left, they were getting ready to clean the room and put someone else in it.

After we left Brattleboro, we went to the Waterbury shelter operated by the state of Vermont. The people we were working with in Brattleboro were trying to find a back-up solution in Brattleboro, but couldn’t find anything there or closer to our home and our friends in the Upper Valley. They were able to find us a place in Waterbury, and we were able to move right in just as our time in the Hotel Motel program was ending. So we packed up our stuff and drove north.

Our experience in Waterbury was good for the most part. There were lots of services located right in the shelter. HireAbility was there to help folks with getting ready for work, Reach Up helped us with our benefits, and both of us were able to see our caseworkers right there in the shelter. WIC helped us with nutrition for the kiddos, and VCCI – the Vermont Chronic Care Initiative – and the Health Department helped us get care for Eveleen when she got sick.

Our experience with the shelter was great and supported us on the way to finding our own space. Now we’re working to find a place to call home. We have the Vermont rental subsidy voucher, but we’re on the list for a permanent voucher called the Vermont Family Reunification Voucher, which would support us going forward when we find an apartment. We just need to find an apartment. That’s hard work, but we can stay here for at least six months, maybe longer, and we have a stable place to call our own.

It costs more money to be homeless than to live in an apartment. So, we’re working on supporting our family and finding a place to put down roots. Once we do that, we’ll be able to find jobs. Right now, we don't know where we’ll end up, and that makes finding permanent work really hard. It’s like planting a tomato plant. How many times can you transplant it before it dies? We’re going to get stability first, and then we can move forward.

The hotel program is not ideal, especially with a family. You can’t cook, you’re cooped up in a single room. We were seen as less than by the hotel owners and treated poorly. If the state is paying for your room, you’re automatically a “scummy street person,” pre-judged. All the money the state gives to these hotel owners doesn’t get used for painting the rooms and making them better, they use it to buy fancy new cars and spend money on themselves, instead of taking care of us.

Not everyone treats us this way, some hotel owners take pride in their properties. They keep it fixed up, safe and healthy, and take care of their residents. They don’t judge them for being homeless. But in our experience, for every one of those, there are three that don’t.

The GA Hotel Motel Program is Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitches. The money for the Hotel Motel program needs to be re-directed, not expanded to hotels. It would be great if we could buy the hotels and renovate them into one and two-bedroom apartments, but even if we can’t do that, we should find other places to put in transitional housing and more shelters.

We did the math, and if every single county had someplace like the Waterbury shelter, and longer-term transitional shelters, we would solve at least half the problem. Vermont needs to invest in real solutions so families like ours don’t have to keep looking for a new place to call home.

In an effort to tell the stories of Vermonters it serves, the Vermont Agency of Human Services assisted the authors in copyediting and sharing this opinion piece. The content and views of the authors do not reflect the position of the Agency of Human Services or the State of Vermont.