This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
An annual tally of Vermonters experiencing homelessness showed a modest decrease between January of 2024 and 2025, the first downward trend in the data since before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
But the data shows a growing share of Vermont’s homeless population is living “unsheltered,” meaning people are sleeping in a vehicle or outside. Advocates say it’s not time to celebrate a turn of fortune in the state’s efforts to curb its homelessness problem.
“While this year’s numbers are sobering, they have remained relatively stable compared to last year. But stability doesn’t mean that the crisis is easing,” said Taylor Thibault, associate director of homelessness prevention initiatives at Champlain Housing Trust and co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, at a press briefing revealing Vermont’s latest homelessness metrics on Wednesday.
Vermont’s 2025 point-in-time count — a yearly, federally-mandated effort to to tally every person experiencing homelessness on a single night each winter — registered 3,386 people this past January.
That’s a decrease of 72 people, or 2%, since January of 2024, according to a report released Wednesday by the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont and the two regional organizations that oversee the count.
Yet the share of unhoused people living without shelter rose dramatically year-over-year. This January, the count registered 270 people who were “unsheltered,” which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as having a “primary nighttime location” like a vehicle or the streets. That’s a nearly 63% uptick since the 2024 tally.
That figure is considered a significant undercount. On the night of the annual census, the city of Burlington was operating an emergency cold-weather shelter as the city faced frigid temperatures. That meant more than 70 individuals who used the shelter were counted as having a place to sleep indoors, even though the shelter only operated for a few nights.
More from Vermont Public and Seven Days: Vermont doesn't track homeless deaths. So we did
“Historically, Vermont has had very low rates of unsheltered homelessness,” said Sarah Russell, special assistant to end homelessness for the city of Burlington. “Now, that is really not true.”
The point-in-time count is generally regarded as a low estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness: accurately counting people sleeping outdoors is notoriously difficult, particularly in Vermont’s rural setting. The count only captures people who spoke with outreach workers conducting the January tally, and it doesn’t include people who are couch-surfing or doubling up with relatives.
But service providers and advocates now have what they say is a more accurate and up-to-date method for counting Vermonters experiencing homelessness throughout the year. And its results reveal an even larger population struggling to maintain stable housing.
Across Vermont, homeless service providers use a system called “Coordinated Entry” to streamline assistance for unhoused people. Earlier this year, the two entities that oversee that system throughout the state synced up their datasets for the first time.
The combined data shows that there were 4,588 unhoused Vermonters in June 2025, according to the report released Wednesday. That figure includes 1,041 children under the age of 18.
“What we’re talking about is our neighbors,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, at the press conference. “The family with children sleeping in their car, driving around trying to find a safe place to park…it’s not unusual. It’s quite common.”
Advocates say even the Coordinated Entry numbers represent an underestimate, since the data only reflects people currently connected to services. The system also excludes people receiving shelter via the state’s sexual and domestic violence nonprofits to shield their privacy. (The Coordinated Entry data does use a slightly broader definition of homelessness than the point-in-time count, encompassing people who will lose their housing imminently.)
The Coordinated Entry data also offers a window into how long Vermonters remain unhoused. Only about a quarter of people experiencing homelessness were able to find housing in less than three months, according to data compiled in June. For more than 30% of people, finding housing in Vermont’s tight market took more than a year.
As the number of Vermonters experiencing homelessness registers in the thousands, capacity at homeless shelters numbers in the hundreds. Even as many organizations have added more shelter beds in recent years, the state has space for only 602 households in traditional shelters, according to a state report released in late June.
When those beds are full, the state relies on the motel voucher program, which state leaders have sought to curtail since pandemic-era funding ran out two years ago. Their cost-cutting measures have resulted in multiple waves of evictions, including one in early July that primarily impacted families with children and adults with severe medical needs. Hundreds of people have run out of their allotted 80 days in the program and will need to wait months to regain eligibility if they haven’t found another housing option.
Though state law says the Department for Children and Families can currently use up to 1,100 motel rooms at a time, only 662 are now in use, according to state data updated on Monday.
At Wednesday’s press conference, advocates linked the long-running scaleback of the voucher program to the rise in unsheltered homelessness in Vermont.
“Defunding shelter programs such as the motel program does not decrease rates of homelessness. It only sets back the timeline for stability for these households and prevents them from being able to access those basic human needs,” said Russell, from the city of Burlington, who also co-chairs the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance.
In prior years, this annual homelessness report has highlighted a stark racial disparity in Vermont’s homelessness population. This year, however, the report’s authors excluded metrics on racial background.
Advocates worried that noting such information in a report submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could jeopardize federal housing and homelessness funds that flow to Vermont, given the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“We had to delete a large portion of this report due to the fear of retribution,” said Mary Gerish, an administrator at the Bennington Housing Authority and a co-chair of the Vermont Balance of State Continuum of Care, which tracks homelessness data.
A VTDigger/Vermont Public analysis of Coordinated Entry data from June shows that while Black people make up about 1.2% of Vermont’s population, 7.4% of people who are unhoused are Black.
To ease homelessness in Vermont, the report’s authors called on Gov. Phil Scott and state legislators to make greater investments in affordable housing, shelters, and services, enact more robust protections for renters, and to expand drug treatment options and harm reduction programs, among other demands.
“Every year we fail to invest meaningfully in our community, this crisis gets worse,” said Kim Anetsberger, executive director of the Lamoille Community House and the other co-chair of the Continuum of Care. “We cannot keep delaying this investment.”
