BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – With motel rooms full and temperatures not quite cold enough for emergency shelter, many people across Vermont will sleep outside on this Christmas Eve. And in Burlington, the community is protesting.
With lows of 14 degrees and inches of snow on the ground, people without homes and their advocates gathered outside City Hall for a speakout to extend emergency shelter.
A couple of dozen people spent their Christmas Eve calling out the city and sharing their trials and tribulations accessing shelter.
“A bunch of us don’t even qualify for shelters, there’s questionnaires, you have to have Social Security, you got to have a disability, you either got to have domestic violence or you got to be with children. There are people out here, most of us didn’t qualify on any of those,” said Windsong Young, who does not have a home.
The city says it doesn’t have the resources– specifically funding and staffing– to extend its emergency shelter. They want the state to take immediate action.
We asked the city how much this weekend’s emergency shelter cost to run but they said they did not know.