Lawmakers consider using late-year VHCB funds to jump-start supportive housing for people with developmental disabilities

Kristen Murphy, executive director of the Hmong Developmental Disabilities Council, told the House Committee on General Housing on April 8 that the Road Home planning group estimated roughly 600 units of permanent supportive housing for people receiving developmental disability services would require about $5 million to $10 million per year over five years to make meaningful progress.

Murphy said the legislature had originally sought to direct $3 million through the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB) but that a technical obstacle prevented that funding source from being secured before crossover. She asked the committee to consider corrective language in S.328 so VHCB could use an unspent 2024 shelter appropriation for a different type of service-supported housing for this population.

"We know that about 80% of our service recipients are reliant on living with aging family caregivers or in an adult foster care model called shared living," Murphy said. She argued that those arrangements are among the least stable and that capital investment and coordinated supports are needed to create permanent, community-based housing.

Murphy urged the committee to add one sentence to section 6(d) directing the supportive housing advisory council to provide advice to VHCB on expenditure of funds "for the production of permanently affordable housing for individuals who are eligible to receive Medicaid-funded developmental disability services." She said advisory consultation can prevent proposals that would, for example, place tenancy rights with staff rather than with the individual resident.

"Permanent means the individual with disabilities holds the tenancy rights," Murphy said, citing federal Medicaid rules and national practice. She added that, as a management and integration norm, designated units for this population generally should not exceed about 25% of a mixed-use development.

A VHCB representative, Pauly Major, confirmed that VHCB and its partners had committed $3.9 million of a 2024 appropriation to a shelter project that later lost an anticipated federal HUD Continuum of Care operating subsidy. That project shifted to a different financing model using a 4% tax credit and could not use the original shelter-specific funding; as a result, some funds remain available late in the fiscal year.

"If this language is put into the bill or the budget to broaden eligible use, we can essentially take dollars meant for permanent supportive housing for people exiting homelessness and turn it into permanent supportive housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities," Major said, while cautioning that not all decommitted dollars would be available for disability housing.

Major estimated that setting aside $2 million and carrying it forward could advance one or two additional projects, pointing to potential opportunities in Williston and Middlebury, but he said exact unit counts depend on project design and other funding sources.

Committee members asked for the exact sentence Murphy proposed and whether reporting language could include recommendations on future funding; Murphy agreed to provide the sentence and did not object to adding funding recommendations to the advisory-council reporting requirement. The committee did not take a formal vote on S.328 during the session.