Feature Writing

By: Lilly St. Angelo

Published Feb. 2, 2023 in the Burlington Free Press

Angela Izzo's rule of thumb is that it always takes three weeks. It took three weeks for a hotel to reject her emergency housing voucher. Three weeks to find out an available apartment would not take her voucher. Three weeks to finally get approved for the South Burlington hotel where she lives now. 

Izzo has a sense of humor about the Vermont housing system that comes from repeated frustration and letdowns. She shared her story of being unhoused for two years with the Free Press in hopes of shedding light on the failures in the system so that it may change to help more people in the future. 

She jokes about wishing she could dial phones for Economic Services workers to speed up processes and how she sometimes gives her housing caseworker new information about programs before he knows it. The same story has repeated itself many times over the past two years of Angela Izzo's life: a spark of hope for a way to stay in the Burlington area where her doctors are, then disappointment when the opportunity falls through — the pattern never ends. 

"Have I told you the system is broken?" she says with a laugh after recounting one of her many moments of being let down. 

Izzo, 54, lacks a job because of physical and mental health challenges from her melanoma treatment and the stress of being unhoused for over two years. But she has an affinity for detail from a career in graphic design and reads every word of every document she signs. She also has a car, and she doesn't suffer from addiction. 

Even with her put-together appearance and self-advocacy, Izzo remains impermanently housed. Her story illustrates how easily people fall through the cracks when a system is overwhelmed. The number of people experiencing homelessness in Vermont over doubled in size from 2020 to 2022 according to the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness's Point in Time Counts. Izzo has faced barriers including high turnover rates and burnout among social services employees, ever-changing state rules and her own vulnerabilities that come with being unhoused with no end in sight to finding a way to stay in Vermont.

Navigating the maze: The beginning

Izzo was evicted from her homeshare in Winooski on Dec. 1. 2020. It was an illegal eviction, both because of the informal way her landlord went about it as well as the eviction moratorium that was in place because of the pandemic.

Since then, Izzo has learned a lot about the state's housing system including two key truths: she is reliant on the people who advocate for her, and everything moves at a snail's pace. This fall, it took her two-and-half months of searching on her own and nine rejections to get a hotel room for the winter due to the extremely limited availability and the state requiring hotels to sign a written occupancy agreement, which some hotels are shying away from.

Vermont's Emergency Housing Program, which Izzo relied on for almost a year and a half, ran from March 2020 through June 2022 and provided hotel vouchers to people who made up to 185% of the the federal poverty guideline. The federal poverty level in 2023 is an income of $14,580 a year for a single person, according to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. The program allowed people to stay in a hotel room for 30 days before the state would re-examine their eligibility. But the housing programs offered by Vermont's Economic Services Department went through many changes over the past two years, and Izzo has navigated all of them.

"I can learn a lot and I can learn quick, but when I'm trying to get all the rules down, and their rules change so fast that every time I talk to a different person I get a different answer — it has been frustrating as all get out," she said. 

From the beginning, she slipped through cracks. She secured a hotel room in Williston soon after she was evicted, but in order to stay eligible for a hotel voucher, she had to have a housing case manager, a policy ironically designed to keep people from falling through the cracks. During the eviction and in her early days of being unhoused, she was bounced between several organizations and agencies including the Howard Center, Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, Vermont 211, Economic Services and finally Committee On Temporary Shelter, the organization where she was told she could find a housing case manager. 

System failure 

COTS provides a variety of services to people who are unhoused or at risk for becoming homeless. When the pandemic began, COTS created their Motel Outreach Program to respond to the state's expanded emergency housing program, said Rebekah Mott, COTS director of development and communication, over email. At the height of the pandemic, eight case workers served 385 households, working to find permanent housing for clients and connect them with mental and physical health care. The program, overburdened with clients, was Izzo's first taste of systemic failure. 

Izzo said she met with her first COTS caseworker in February after waiting for two months to meet with someone. By August, Izzo had met with three different caseworkers, which the Free Press confirmed through reviewing texts and voicemails as well as through an interview with one of her former caseworkers, Isabel Suarez. 

When asked about Izzo's experience, COTS denied that Izzo had three caseworkers between February and August but could not get into the details of Izzo's case due to their privacy policy. After the resignation of Suarez, Izzo's third and last caseworker, Izzo said she called COTS for almost two weeks seeking to be connected with a new caseworker. She said she never heard back from them, which COTS also denies. 

Izzo was frustrated. Not only did having a caseworker keep her compliant for her hotel room, caseworkers were the liaisons between her and the programs and benefits that could help her get permanently housed. 

"The fact that I tried so many times to reach out to the program director for the information I needed, to no avail and only to be ignored time and time again, made me feel less than, worthless, dismissed, upset, bitter, angry and eventually furious," Izzo said. 

Mott said a relationship between a client and COTS may end for two main reasons: the client does not respond to repeated attempts to reach them, or COTS confirms that the client is now working with another agency. Either way, COTS communicates with clients about their plan moving forward before ending the relationship. Izzo said that she did not receive this communication. 

Suarez, Izzo’s last caseworker at COTS, quit their job in August 2021 for a variety of reasons but mainly because they could feel themselves burning out, even after being there for only a few months. They saw burnout all around them in casework, especially during the pandemic when caseworkers were handling 30 to 50 cases at a time as unhoused people flooded the system. Suarez also saw how burnout caused some caseworkers to have resentment toward clients, some of whom were not naturally easy to work with. 

“It’s really tough when people are responding to peoples’ suffering because there’s a lot of room for harm there,” Suarez said. 

Suarez doesn’t know what happened between Izzo and COTS before they arrived in May, but they knew Izzo was labeled by COTS staff as a problematic client. Suarez, however, had a good relationship with Izzo. 

“When people are going through the hardest thing of their life, how can you expect them to be a person that is easy or fun to hang out with and navigate the hardest systems to navigate with?” Suarez said. “I think she was holding up a mirror that a lot of the organization wasn’t ready to look into.” 

Suarez doesn’t know why Izzo never received another COTS caseworker but knows Izzo’s situation was not uncommon. Sometimes there would be information like phone numbers that would be dropped in the hand-off process when a caseworker would leave, and the client would become unreachable. 

There were also other ways that a client could be "ghosted." In the midst of serving a client, if a caseworker feels that their safety is not being respected by a client, Suarez said they can step away from or not respond to a client. When Suarez was at COTS, they also noticed cases could be deprioritized if a person was deemed extremely difficult to work with or if past caseworkers were unable to make progress with them. Mott said in an email to the Free Press that Suarez's accounts of her former workplace "are not an accurate description of our practices and procedures, and do not reflect the attitudes of our staff."

Tiny home dreams 

Soon after she lost communication with COTS, Izzo learned from a friend at her hotel about the Community Health Centers' Homeless Healthcare Program, an initiative that offers free physical and mental health care as well as casework for unhoused people. She was assigned to caseworker John Fealy. Izzo has been Fealy's client ever since.

Izzo likes how Fealy is honest about when he isn't certain about the details of a program or a benefit and seeks out answers for Izzo. He also sometimes asks Izzo how she navigated an issue in order to help another client. With Fealy's help, she embarked on the next step of her search for a home: buying a tiny house. 

It's in Izzo's nature to think outside the box. The state's Rapid Resolution Housing Initiative in 2021 promised unhoused people like Izzo money to pay for a deposit and the first few months of rent for an apartment or money for other barriers to getting housed like repaying debt or moving costs. Izzo, who couldn't finding an apartment due to the extremely low vacancy rate, began asking her caseworkers when she was still a client at COTS if she could use the money to buy a tiny house. 

She had always been interested in tiny homes. Her anxiety, which had only gotten worse after becoming unhoused, makes it difficult to live around people who drink, smoke or use drugs, and she liked the idea of living in her own stand-alone house out in the country, even if it was tiny. She also liked how they were portable. 

Her plan was to barter with a farmer or property owner in a rural area to exchange services for land on which to put the tiny house. She resolved that if worst came to worst, she could park it at camp sites. 

The process of filling out the application, finding a tiny house to buy and working with a contractor to fix it up and make it habitable took months. Izzo's friend and her friend's partner did the work on the tiny house, and the program gave a check directly to them before Izzo inspected the project. When she went to see the final product, it was clear the couple had swapped many of the agreed upon materials for cheaper alternatives, cut a cord to the propane leaving her propane heater unusable and left out some aspects altogether including an over $500 solar generator, Izzo said. The couple said they had used all the money the program had given them and Izzo was left with an unlivable tiny home. 

The experience, combined with the letdowns of the past two years, made Izzo lose blind trust in friends and advocates. 

"I trust to a fault," she said. "The problem is, I'm becoming more and more jaded, less trusting and bitter and angry." 

John Fealy, Izzo's caseworker, could not confirm or talk about his connection to Izzo due to privacy laws and the Community Health Centers' commitment to not speak publicly about their patients' care. He could however, speak to the Free Press about his three years of working as a case worker at CHC. Trust, Feely said, is something he has rebuild all the time with clients because of clients' past interactions with other social service workers or the system in general. 

"Trust building is hard to do, especially when somebody's learned over time that there are those gaps in the system," he said. "Why would they trust me to not lose touch?" 

What's next 

Izzo is now in a long-term hotel room. She has an oven, a stove, a dishwasher, a refrigerator and washing machines downstairs. Though the oven is too small to fit a full-sized cookie sheet, it's luxurious after the last six months of living in her car. 

The shift of Izzo's living situation came in the summer as the state began running out of federal pandemic money used to fund the hotel vouchers. 

Vermont's pandemic emergency housing program ended on June 30. Starting July 1, to get an emergency hotel room, a person must have lost their housing due to a catastrophic event or be a vulnerable person which includes seniors, people on disability income, pregnant people in their third trimester, children age 6 or younger or a combination of four other characteristics that count as "points" toward eligibility, according to the Vermont Department for Children and Families website. Izzo, who no longer qualified, began sleeping in her car, camping and couch hopping, not knowing about other programs that she qualified for that began July 1. 

Izzo had benefited from the federally-funded hotel vouchers for nearly the whole time she had been unhoused, so living out of her car was a new world of logistics. She had to figure out where to shower, do laundry and get food. She learned that grocery stores were best places to hang out: there were sitting areas, bathrooms, Wi-Fi and sometimes microwaves to heat up food she would buy. 

Sleeping in her car irritated the foot she had surgery on when she had cancer. Her doctor grew concerned for her circulation, but there was nothing she could do. 

Finally, in September, she learned that if she could find her own room at a hotel willing to take a three-month transitional housing voucher, she could get housed for the winter. After two months this fall of back and forth with nine hotels on signing an agreement to house her, Izzo finally found a room at a hotel in late November. The Transitional Housing Program will allow her to be there until the program ends at the end of March. She said within the first few weeks, she could feel a noticeable shift in her mental health. She was able to address stacks of mail she had ignored for months and reapply for food stamps. 

"Each day, my mind got clearer and clearer and clearer," Izzo said. "I'm like, oh my gosh, now I have a place where I know I'm going tonight." Izzo has not yet given up on her tiny house dream but has not yet found a solution to the predicament she is in. The tiny house is now parked in her motel parking lot as she goes through the process of trying to get money back to finish it, just another missing piece to the puzzle of getting housed. 

If rules stay how they are now, Izzo will lose her hotel room in March, along with hundreds of other Vermonters in transitional housing and winter emergency housing who are not the among the most vulnerable. Their futures, for the time being, remain uncertain as federal pandemic money wanes and state lawmakers decide what housing programs to fund next.

Suarez said there is no easy answer to the cracks Izzo fell through. Suarez doesn't blame individual caseworkers because of the tremendous workload they all had, but they now see how much more support caseworkers need to do their jobs effectively without developing resentment or leaving altogether. Unlike some of their other clients who were chronically homeless, Suarez had hope they could get Izzo housed. The fact that Izzo still isn’t in permanent housing is a testament to the human error and faults in the system, Suarez said, and shows how seemingly abundant resources at the state level are not enough.

“We’re all precarious,” Suarez said. “She’s really gotten screwed and it’s unfair.”

Izzo has found comfort in helping others through her journey of being unhoused. She tries to help people who, like herself, are navigating the nonprofit and state agency world of homelessness with the knowledge she has acquired. Not only does it make her feel good, but it also gives her purpose and agency when changing her own situation seems impossible. 

Someday Izzo hopes that there will be programming that connects unhoused people to those who have lived experience of being unhoused. The more advocacy and caring community a person can have, she said, the less likely they are to fall through the cracks.