More than 1,000 Vermonters won’t get rental subsidies this year as housing authorities roll back the primary assistance program for impoverished households.
Facing flat federal funding and an unforgiving rental marketplace, housing authorities big and small have stopped issuing rental-assistance vouchers known as Section 8. In more than 100 cases, they’ve withdrawn vouchers issued to individuals and families who were still searching for an apartment to rent.
The first wave of cuts came in January, when the Burlington Housing Authority announced it would need to drop subsidies to nearly 400 households this year to close a $2.3 million budget gap. Last month, the largest issuer of Section 8 vouchers, the Vermont State Housing Authority, said it would need to shelve nearly 500 subsidies. Combined, those two agencies issue three-quarters of all Section 8 vouchers in Vermont.
The cuts effectively freeze a key tool used to help homeless Vermonters move into permanent housing or ensure that renters on the margins don’t slip into homelessness. Without new vouchers to tap, social service agencies will struggle to move clients into apartments, further clogging a homeless shelter and services system that is already overwhelmed. Even homeless veterans, who qualify for specially tailored vouchers in partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, won’t be immune.
Demand for housing-choice vouchers, which allow recipients to afford a reasonably priced apartment of their choice, has long outstripped the supply. Yearslong wait lists are common, and people holding vouchers have increasing difficulty finding vacant units owned by landlords who will rent to them.
The cuts effectively freeze a key tool used to help homeless Vermonters.
But this year’s rollbacks are especially significant because the state is struggling to turn a corner on homelessness, rates of which have tripled since the pandemic. Many of those waiting for a voucher are among the 4,800 unhoused Vermonters who are connected with social service programs. Others are housed but spend large amounts of their income on rent.
“It is going to make the path forward longer and more arduous,” said Travis Poulin, who oversees housing case management at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.
The $70 million program relies almost entirely on Congressionally approved funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Several public housing authorities told Seven Days that they expect to receive the same amount of money this year, or slightly more, but it won’t go as far because their allocations don’t account for the sharply increasing cost of the program in Vermont and nationally.
Section 8 voucher recipients pay 30 percent of their total income toward their rent; the government covers the gap. That subsidy, on average, was $672 in March 2020, when the pandemic began. As of March 2025, it had surged to $895 statewide and nearly $1,100 in Burlington.
The higher subsidy cost reflects the degree to which rents have outstripped the earnings of low-income Vermonters, who often face barriers to full-time employment, such as health problems or the need for childcare, or who simply work low-wage jobs. The federal government and local housing authorities place limits on the amount that landlords can charge, but the rents must be high enough to entice landlords to participate in the program, especially in such a low-vacancy marketplace.
Some housing authorities in Massachusetts with tight budgets have asked landlords not to increase rents this year, the Boston Globe reported. The Burlington Housing Authority has not made a similar request. That agency, like others in Vermont, is already seeing its pool of participating landlords shrink, said Stephanie Bixby, director of rental assistance.
“The cost of being a landlord in Burlington is skyrocketing,” she said. “We are not in a position to force anything down a landlord’s throat.”
So instead, the Burlington Housing Authority is cracking down on renters. The agency has become quicker to yank subsidies when tenants break the rules or fall behind on their portion of rent. That approach is more palatable than revoking vouchers at random, executive director Steven Murray said.
Around 25 renters lost their vouchers in April for various reasons, agency data show, up from 12 in January.
“We’re devastated,” Murray said. “We’re here to help people.”
It could have been worse. Anticipating a shortfall, his agency began pulling back vouchers from recipients who were searching for an apartment in January, several months before its federal allocation came through. The earlier intervention served to reduce the total number of vouchers the Burlington Housing Authority needs to cut, Murray said.
Without new vouchers to tap, social service agencies will struggle to move clients into apartments.
The Vermont State Housing Authority is just beginning its rollback of nearly 500 vouchers, including 50 or so that had already been issued to apartment seekers. The agency won’t issue new vouchers to any of the 3,000-plus households on its wait list for the foreseeable future, and it’s pausing referrals to a program for veterans operated jointly with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
VSHA executive director Kathleen Berk doesn’t expect to take more aggressive steps, such as revoking vouchers from existing tenants or resorting to stricter enforcement.
Most of the state’s seven smaller housing authorities are also cutting back, according to figures that agency directors compiled for Vermont’s Congressional delegation. The Barre Housing Authority, which distributes about 100 vouchers per year, needs to shelve a dozen, which it will achieve through attrition, according to executive director Jaime Chioldi. The Winooski Housing Authority will likely need to drop between 17 and 25 vouchers from its current pool of 235, executive director KR “Deac” Decarreau said.
The voucher program supports much of the affordable housing that is available in Vermont. Champlain Housing Trust, the largest nonprofit landlord in the state, takes in about 45 percent of its $37 million annual rent revenue from housing-choice vouchers, according to figures the organization provided to Seven Days. Those funds help tenants in more than 900 apartments across more than 50 locations.
Financially, the housing trust can absorb the voucher reductions now underway, CEO Michael Monte said. But the cut “stymies the system of getting people housed,” of which Champlain Housing Trust is a central player. The trust operates emergency shelter “pods” in downtown Burlington as well as other kinds of transitional housing and long-term apartments.
Sarah Russell, the special assistant to end homelessness for the City of Burlington, said the Section 8 cuts add yet another impediment to providers’ efforts to reduce the number of people who live on the street or in shelters, though the effects will take months to play out. “The outlook is grim,” she said.
Other forms of subsidized housing in Vermont are not currently facing the same pressure. That includes a segment of the byzantine Section 8 program known as “project-based vouchers,” in which the subsidy is tied to an apartment in a specific building rather than to the tenant. Project-based sites and similar forms of public housing have become more common in recent years, though they still tend to have wait lists. Champlain Housing Trust has contracts with housing authorities for more than 400 project-based units and is currently constructing apartment buildings in Burlington and Shelburne that will include another 50 such units.
But project-based units have drawbacks, aside from their short supply. They can concentrate poverty in specific locations, and they dictate where families in need can live. To get housed, someone might have to leave a town where they have better employment opportunities, help that they need or where their child goes to school, Russell noted.
President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed wholesale changes to Section 8 that would largely shift control of the program to states. The president, in his most recent budget proposal, also called for a two-year limit on subsidies to encourage families to transition into self-sufficiency more quickly.
Those proposals could further limit the rental assistance that is available to Vermonters, though they remain a long way from becoming law.
Last month, state officials published the story of a Milton mother who was able to purchase a mobile home using a new state program that sells them at cost to low-income families. Kendra Payea had been using a Section 8 subsidy to help pay her rent for 14 years. That voucher enabled Payea to leave a COTS family shelter in Burlington. By securing the mobile home this year, Payea was able to relinquish her voucher for someone else to use.
“It feels good to know that it could possibly help another family that was in the same situation I was in,” Payea said in the story.
That cycle is becoming even slower.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Short on Rent | Housing assistance cuts could keep more Vermonters homeless”
Related Stories
Letters to the Editor (7/2/25)
Vermont Has Made Little Progress on Homelessness, Report Finds
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!