Maryellen Griffin: We Can’t Afford More Evictions and More Homelessness
This commentary is by Maryellen Griffin, a staff attorney with Vermont Legal Aid. It appeared in VTDigger on January 26, 2026.
The data confirms what common sense tells us: eviction is a leading cause of homelessness. Thousands of Vermonters are already homeless, including hundreds of children, and legislative proposals to speed up evictions will only make things worse.
Landlords filed 1,818 eviction cases in Vermont in 2024. If we speed up the eviction process, where will these households go?
With a rental vacancy rate of just 2.1% and only 1% in Chittenden County, there’s simply nowhere for people to land. Raising the number and speed of evictions will create more homelessness.
Instead, the Legislature should focus on preventing eviction. Preventing eviction is far cheaper than homelessness.
The evidence consistently shows that back-rent assistance and right-to-counsel programs save states money by preventing eviction, homelessness and the resulting costs to taxpayers. These aren’t theoretical solutions. They’re proven interventions.
Elinor (not her real name), a Legal Aid client, has lived in her apartment for five years without incident. Two years ago, three investors bought her building.
They raised her rent by 30%, and when she questioned the increase, they started eviction proceedings against her.
Vermont has no legal limit on how much a landlord can raise rent or how quickly, and Elinor can be evicted for no reason at all, even if she pays the increase. She’s willing to move, but she does not have anywhere to go. Way too many tenants in this situation end up homeless.
Elinor’s story isn’t unique. In the past five years, requests for legal help with eviction have increased by 45%. This is what happens when eviction meets a housing crisis.
Between 2019 and 2024, Vermont’s rental vacancy rate dropped from 4.5% to 2.1%. During this same period, median gross rent jumped 34.6%, from $980 to $1,319.
Over half of Vermont’s renter households already pay more than 30% of their income on rent, and, for one in four, housing costs are more than half their income.
More than 70% of all evictions are for nonpayment of rent. These aren’t irresponsible tenants. They’re our neighbors, our service workers, families and retirees whose income stayed flat while rents rose 35% in five years.
In recent years, the number of available rental units has actually decreased. Between population growth, short-term rentals, flood damage and other losses, Vermont just doesn’t have enough of the kind of housing people need.
Given the severe shortage of affordable units and the extremely limited availability of deeply affordable housing, our high rates of homelessness are completely predictable.
When you evict someone in a market with a tiny vacancy rate, you’re not helping them find better housing. You’re making them homeless.
In a crisis where there’s nowhere for displaced tenants to go, making evictions faster just pushes families into homelessness, transferring costs to the public that are far higher than the original rent dispute.
The costs of mass homelessness are staggering: emergency department visits, shelter costs, management of encampments and, tragically, lives lost.
While emergency housing is expensive, kicking people out of emergency housing when they have nowhere else to go is not just cruel; it actually costs municipalities even more.
Meanwhile, some legislators are proposing ways to evict people faster, even though investing in eviction prevention strategies would cost less and work better.
These are our neighbors being evicted. This can happen to anyone in a market this tight.
Vermont faces a clear choice. We can fund back-rent programs and require mediation before evictions are filed. We can ensure effective housing support services are available to everyone facing eviction and guarantee tenants the right to legal counsel—programs that cost less and work better than managing the homelessness that results from eviction. We can improve access to rental assistance.
Or we can speed up evictions and watch our homelessness crisis accelerate, spending even more on emergency services and shelter and seeing even more Vermonters suffer.
Where are people supposed to go when we evict them faster? Until we answer that question honestly and invest in real solutions, legislating for more and faster evictions isn’t a solution. It’s simply a way to push more Vermonters onto our streets.
The evidence is clear, and the human cost of getting this wrong is too high to ignore.
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