Over the past few months, VTDigger and Vermont Public reporter Carly Berlin has been looking into the changing landscape of transitional housing in Vermont. We’re excited to be able to share the results of that reporting in this podcast, produced by the Brave Little State team at Vermont Public.

Note: Brave Little State is made for the ear. We recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.

Josh Crane: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.

Every episode of this show begins with a question asked by a listener. Sometimes people submit those questions online — you can do that at bravelittlestate.org — other people ask them in person at one of our live events. But for this episode, we did something different.

Reporter Carly Berlin covers housing for Vermont Public and VTDigger. You might remember the BLS episode she did last year about the state’s motel voucher program. In that episode, she addressed, and ultimately disproved the idea that Vermont’s recent spike in homelessness is caused by out-of-staters coming here for a motel room.

That story was driven by questions she was hearing from readers and listeners who have housing about people who don’t. And the whole time she worked on that piece, she wondered: What if we went directly to people experiencing homelessness and asked what they thought we should investigate? Where might that lead us?

So, for this episode, that’s exactly what we did. Carly takes it from here.

What are you curious about?

Carly Berlin: It’s kind of unusual as a news reporter with regular deadlines to begin a story with a simple, open-ended question: What are you curious about?

I made that pitch with Brave Little State producer Burgess Brown at a Burlington homeless shelter and at a daytime resource center that gives food and supplies to people who live outside.

We held office hours. And we repurposed a suggestion box for people to submit their ideas to us after we left.

Burgess Brown: And we’ve got these notecards that says, “What’s a question you have about housing and homelessness in Vermont? And why’s that question important to you?“

Carly Berlin: On one of those question-gathering days, I spent a few hours at the resource center cafeteria during the morning breakfast rush.

I pulled up a chair at a crowded table, and made my ask: What are you curious about?

The people at the table started batting around their questions — questions about lengthy housing waitlists and city policies around encampments in public parks. And then the man sitting next to me, who introduced himself as Manny, asked me this one: “Why are there no halfway houses anymore?”

Halfway houses. Not a term that gets used a whole lot these days. But historically, these were places for people leaving prison or rehab to live half way on their path back to society and independence.

I spend a lot of time covering Vermont’s response to homelessness. And sometimes I think about that response as links in a chain. There are all of these links in our housing system, in a person’s life, where things can fall apart that can land someone sleeping in a tent, or in a shelter or motel.

Manny’s question struck me because I didn’t know a lot about this particular link in that chain, when someone’s just gotten clean, or served their time, and now it’s their moment to start piecing together a new life.

Manny was in this moment when we met. He had been released from prison just two weeks before. He was looking for housing, and he wanted to find somewhere he could stay sober. He was worried about overdosing. A halfway house, he seemed to imply, would be the right place for him to get back on track. Or at least to have a place to sleep inside.

There’s an implication in Manny’s question that halfway houses in Vermont have disappeared altogether. Spoiler: That’s not quite true. What I learned is a lot of group homes for people leaving prison or drug treatment have closed up, just in the last couple years.

But soon after that wave of closures crested, an effort to open up more of these homes is picking up momentum.

So there’s some yo-yoing happening. And that’s because there’s not a clear consensus about the best way to get people back on their feet — people who are experiencing homelessness and addiction, who’ve committed crimes. The debate centers around priorities: whether sobriety is priority number one, or getting people into housing.

Looking at the story of halfway houses in Vermont, and particularly in Burlington, is a way of examining how we’ve sorted through those priorities in the past and how we’re trying to do that now, in the middle of a historic housing shortage and an opioid epidemic. It’s a way of looking at how we try to balance accountability, and compassion, and giving people choice.

A mirror to the present

(Public access TV intro music)

Carly Berlin: Burlington in the 1980s feels like a mirror to the present.

Bernie Sanders: There is a housing crisis in Burlington. People can’t afford new housing. People can’t afford skyrocketing rent. People are sleeping out on the streets.

Carly Berlin: That is then-Burlington mayor, Bernie Sanders, speaking on public access TV in 1987.

Burlington was experiencing a housing crunch that would feel very familiar to residents today. And it’s critical to understanding why halfway houses started springing up all across town.

Erhard Mahnke: Burlington was making its name on the map. People were excited to come move to Burlington.

Carly Berlin: Erhard Mahnke is a longtime affordable housing advocate. He says this was a time of intense real estate speculation. People were buying old houses, fixing them up and flipping them. Lower income residents were getting displaced. Rents doubled over the course of the decade.

Erhard Mahnke: The 80s were, you know, a time of rapidly rising rents, much as we’ve seen over the last few years.

Carly Berlin: And at the same time, then-President Ronald Reagan slashed funding for public housing across the country. Here’s Bernie again.

Bernie Sanders: They are stopping federal aid for low-income housing. They are stopping federal aid for Section Eight. So the bottom line is that in terms of future housing programs, the situation regarding Washington is totally dismal.

Carly Berlin: Erhard says it didn’t take long for more and more people to become homeless.

Erhard Mahnke: What we look upon and consider as modern-day homelessness was basically created under the Reagan administration. 

Carly Berlin: Newspaper stories started to note the existence of, quote, “street people” in Burlington — people who were sometimes drinking and using drugs, who were sometimes mentally ill.

And business owners on Church Street were not happy. A few of them got fed up with the homeless people who they said harassed their customers and staff. So, they decided to get rid of the problem themselves.

They started a nonprofit called “Westward Ho!,” which gave unhoused people in Burlington a one-way ticket out of town. Erhard says the business owners were roundly criticized.

In 1988, Burlington business owners started a group called Westward Ho! that provided unhoused people with one way tickets out of town. Image from Burlington Free Press, December 30, 1988.

Erhard Mahnke: It was a lot of outrage around that. It’s like, oh yeah. Let’s ship our problems somewhere else. No, we should deal with it here.

In 1988, Burlington business owners started a group called Westward Ho! that provided unhoused people with one way tickets out of town. (671×728, AR: 0.9217032967032966)

Carly Berlin: And Burlington did decide to deal with it here. The city’s first homeless shelters opened during this time. Its leaders came up with new ways to fund affordable housing that relied less on the feds.

And organizations started opening up group homes for people who were leaving prison, or recovering from addiction. These were different than the shelters popping up. Their purpose was not just to put a roof over people’s heads, but to rehabilitate people back into public life. Recovery meetings were often required. Sometimes prayer. Volunteering.

These places were often called “halfway houses.”

The Burlington Dismas House, a home for people leaving incarceration, shortly after its opening. Image from Burlington Free Press, December 4, 1986.

CCTV video: (music) While I was locked up, one of my biggest fears was where I would go and what would happen to me when I got out. And I don’t know what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t come to Dismas House. It scares me to think about it.

Carly Berlin: That’s from a video made by Dismas House, a home for people without a place to stay after being released from prison. It opened up in Burlington in 1986.

And then in ‘89, a homeless shelter announced plans to open, quote, “northern Vermont’s first halfway house for alcoholics and drug abusers,” claiming it would be a place to, quote, “confront the causes of their homelessness.”

The Burlington Emergency Shelter set out plans to open “northern Vermont’s first halfway house for alcoholics and drug abusers.” Image from Burlington Free Press, February 14, 1989.

The same year, Burlington got its first Oxford House, a recovery home run democratically by residents. By the early 90s, there were seven of these in town. Similar houses popped up around the state too.

But it was hard to keep these houses open. They faced budget shortfalls and pushback from neighbors. Even when some of them closed, though, new houses sprouted up in their place to meet demand.

And then, just a couple years ago — another spate of closures happened. A big one, centered in Burlington, just as a new homelessness and substance use crisis was beginning to reach a boiling point.

WCAX: An update to a home for mothers and babies in crisis facing financial troubles. Today, the Lund Center announced Independence Place will be closing after 20 years…

WCAX: Two homes in Brattleboro and this one here in Burlington will be closing after losing a majority of their funding. Now, residents tell me that this is disappointing … There’s nothing out there, there’s no vacancy anywhere. All the programs are full or overcrowded. So, basically, they’re on the streets. 

Carly Berlin: There’s no comprehensive count of halfway houses in Vermont — and the term itself has fallen out of favor. But based on our research, as recently as 2019, there were about 30 group transitional houses for adults across the state — the vast majority of them clustered in Burlington. By 2025, of those 33 homes, more than a third have closed.

We’re going to come back to why this string of closures happened a few years ago. But first, I want to take you to Buell Street in Burlington. Because, in the face of all sorts of pressure from NIMBYs and tenuous funding, one of the original transitional homes from the ‘80s is still welcoming new residents.

Dinner is served at Dismas House in Burlington on Friday, November 21, 2025. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Dismas House

It’s one of those November nights that started in the afternoon. Snow is already blanketing everything. I walk up to a big Victorian house and knock on the door. Inside, there are deep, comfortable couches and the table is set for dinner.

This is the Burlington Dismas House. Since the mid-80s, its mission has been to reconcile former prisoners with society, and society with former prisoners.

Every weeknight, volunteers bring a meal here to share with the residents, all recently incarcerated men.

Tonight, one of them — Ryan Laflin — is acting as our host.

Ryan Laflin lives at Dismas House in Burlington. Seen on Friday, Nov. 28. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Ryan Laflin: Thank you for coming to Tuesday night dinner everyone. I’m your host, Ryan. I’d like to thank the cooks, Dean and Valerie. (Clapping)

We can go around and introduce each other. I’m Ryan…

Valerie: I’m Valerie …

Carly Berlin: There are about a dozen people sitting around the table. Ryan serves us plates full of chicken, potatoes and squash.

Ryan Laflin: Now we’ll go around and whoever has gratitude they could share it. I’ll go first. I’d like to thank the house, the program, everyone here, the guys. Salt for the roads.

Other resident: I’m grateful for the house, for second chances, getting out of jail and all that stuff. You know, it’s good to be here.

Carly Berlin: Living here comes with a lot of structure. Residents pay $85 a week to stay here. They’re expected to come to group dinner three nights a week. They all have assigned chores. Staff help them find jobs. They volunteer in the community.

When I ask what volunteering has been most meaningful for them, Ryan pipes up.

Ryan Laflin: I don’t know. Probably the laundromat. I like the laundromat. 

Carly Berlin: Every Wednesday, the laundromat has a free laundry day geared toward people experiencing homelessness.

Ryan Laflin: It’s pretty nice, you know, everyone was like, so happy, you know, excited to do it, you know, to be there to get their laundry done.

Other resident: When you don’t have anything, it’s amazing the little things that make you happy, right?

Ryan Laflin: Put a smile on my face, just watching them be happy.

Carly Berlin: I ask how many of the guys have been homeless before, and hands fly up around the dinner table.

And they know many other people in prison who are waiting to be released but don’t have a home to go back to, they say.

According to Department of Corrections data, as of late October, 72 people were held past their minimum release date because they lack appropriate housing to move into.

Other resident: It’s crazy the amount of people that sit there on lack of residence. 

Ryan Laflin: Yeah. There’s a lot of them. 

Carly Berlin: When someone’s leaving prison, they might have a home to go back to with a parent, or a spouse. But other times, there’s nowhere for them to land. In those cases, the state helps fund two routes.

One are group homes like Dismas. The other are subsidized apartments. Both routes are just temporary places to live – for a couple months, or a couple years, before people move on to, hopefully, a permanent home.

Many of the guys say Dismas was just convenient, that it had a shorter waitlist than the apartments.

But it’s clearly more than just a way to avoid sitting in prison longer. Ryan says there’s a lot of support baked into living here.

Ryan Laflin: We all have each other’s backs, you know. Someone needs something, or, you know, whether it’s emotional or whatever, physical, we’re there to support everyone. It’s kind of nice. 

Carly Berlin: After eating hearty slices of carrot cake, I sit down with Ryan on the deep couches in the living room. I ask him to tell me the story of how he ended up here. Around twenty years ago, he says he got into a snowmobile accident.

Ryan Laflin: I was holding up the back of it and the track broke. And a chunk of it took me in, the leg broke in, ripped out a bunch of muscle and tendons and stuff. So they gave me a lot of painkillers, and then when they stopped giving them to me, that was, you know, because I was abusing them. I found the next best thing. You know, it was cheap and everywhere. And I did that, I did heroin for probably a year, and then got on Suboxone. 

Carly Berlin: He was clean for a while. He got married, had two kids. Then his dad died. He fell into a depression, and one day he decided to get high again. Things went downhill fast.

Ryan Laflin: We lost our house. You know, we ended up losing our kids. 

Carly Berlin: He was sentenced for a burglary he committed in 2019, among other charges. In prison, Ryan says he realized he’d chosen drugs over his children. He says he got sober. And when it was time to figure out where to go after prison he heard about Dismas from someone inside.

Ryan Laflin: I looked into it and, you know, realized how good of a program this really is, you know, and if you put your mind to it, you really want to do it, you can succeed. You know, you could stay clean in here, you know, they help you, and they have all the tools. 

Carly Berlin: Staying sober is one of the rules at Dismas House, though using drugs or drinking doesn’t automatically get someone kicked out. Dismas staff say they work through options with residents.

Ryan says every once in a while, someone moves into the house who’s just not ready to be clean.

Ryan Laflin: You just got to, you know, avoid it, go to your room, or, you know, go for a walk or something, just to, you know, clear your head and you know, so it doesn’t trigger you.

Ryan Laflin in his room at Dismas House in Burlington on Friday, November 28, 2025. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

From zero tolerance to ‘Housing First’

Carly Berlin: This conundrum — what to do when someone relapses while living in sober housing — it played a big role in why many of these homes closed their doors a few years ago.

The Vermont Department of Corrections was seeing a pattern. People were being released from prison into these sober houses. And then they’d relapse, violating the zero tolerance policies that many of these homes had towards substance use, says Jill Moore, the housing program administrator for the Department of Corrections.

Jill Moore: Zero tolerance, in plain language, looks like: You’re given a drug test, and even if you test dirty for something like marijuana, you were kicked out of the program.

Vermont Department of Corrections Transitional Housing Program Administrator Jill Moore sits for a portrait at the Waterbury State Office Complex on Nov. 12, 2025. Photo by Carly Berlin/Vermont Public and VTDigger

Carly Berlin: After someone was kicked out — or ran off — they’d often be homeless. That would mean they violated the conditions of their release from prison, which stipulated that they have housing. That violation would often land them back in prison.

One study found that those sorts of violations were the main reason people on furlough — who were finishing their sentences outside prison, in the community — were put back behind bars, rather than people committing new crimes.

So in 2021, the department decided that the zero tolerance stance in transitional housing was not working. Officials made a decision that caught a lot of people off guard. They decided to drastically reduce the number of beds the state funded in these group homes and put the money toward that other route — transitional apartments.

The theory here was the top priority for people leaving prison should be stable housing. Meaning, having housing shouldn’t be a condition of staying sober.

Jill Moore: Really as a department, as a whole, we shifted to harm reduction, right? And saying, like, we understand that relapse is a part of the process.

Carly Berlin: This philosophy — that getting access to housing should come before sorting through other problems, like drug use — it’s a major idea that’s guided the response to homelessness and addiction across the country over the last two decades. It’s called “Housing First.”

When the Vermont Department of Corrections embraced “Housing First”, and pulled funding for many groups homes in favor of individual apartments, the dominoes started to fall.

Phoenix House, a Rhode Island based nonprofit that had been the largest sober living provider in Vermont, closed all five of its homes in the state following the funding cut in 2021.

So did Northern Lights, a transitional housing program in downtown Burlington for women struggling with substance use.

And, right around this same time, as housing prices were starting to soar, some owners of other sober houses in Burlington shuttered because it was just too expensive to keep them running.

The Department’s pivot away from sober houses wasn’t absolute. It kept funding Dismas House. The DOC’s shift on zero tolerance pushed Dismas to change how it handled relapse and drug use in its houses, the Dismas of Vermont director told me. The homes have a less punitive stance now. They give residents more options for treatment, more second chances — and third and fourth ones.

By some metrics, this big shake up at the Department of Corrections brought success. The number of people landing back in prison because of violations like loss of housing has dropped over the last few years.

But just avoiding prison isn’t the only goal of transitional housing. It’s also to find permanent housing. And by that measure, not a lot has changed. The share of people who’ve been able to move out of transitional housing into permanent homes has held steady.

Right now, this push and pull between “Housing First” and zero tolerance — between prioritizing housing, and prioritizing sobriety — it’s playing out at the policy level.

Meanwhile, people are caught in this balance. People who are navigating the reality of relapsing in the early stages of recovery.

Relapse in sober houses

One person I spoke to for this story used to live in a sober house. We agreed to keep his identity anonymous because he’s still under state supervision and fears getting re-incarcerated.

He told me that when he first moved in there, after leaving prison, his roommate was actively using drugs. He claimed substance use was common in the house, despite the rules.

This person said he’d struggled with substance use since he was a teenager, but he’d gotten clean again while in prison.

Within a week of living at this house, though, he relapsed. He started to spiral. He was sent to inpatient treatment for a couple days, but when he came back to the house, all the same problems remained.

He felt stuck. Between keeping a roof over his head and staying sober.

Tom Dalton: People very commonly say that when they go to a recovery residence that they immediately encounter multiple people who are using in the house. 

Carly Berlin: Tom Dalton is the director of Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform.

Tom Dalton: You know, we have to understand what the real context is, and what risks we’re putting people in if we don’t make sure that there are mechanisms in place to keep them safe. 

Carly Berlin: As part of his advocacy work, Tom regularly meets with people who are looking for help while living in sober houses — or “recovery residences,” the current term of art.

Some have struggled to maintain their recovery when they’re living under the same roof as people who are still using when, Tom says, there should be a more robust system to stabilize people and keep the house environment safe. Other people have been kicked out after a relapse — or because they were simply told they weren’t a good fit for the house, he says.

Tom Dalton: We need to make sure that there’s adequate oversight so that if decisions are being made in unfair ways, people have real recourse, because what’s at stake for them is very, very high. Often somebody, if they lose their housing, might lose the ability to parent. They might be forced into a setting where they have to return to an abusive partner. They might have to sleep outside. They might be returned to incarceration.

Carly Berlin: Tom thinks the “Housing First” model is often the better option for people. He was happy to see the Department of Corrections make its big shift a few years ago, toward individual apartments and away from zero tolerance in the recovery houses that remained.

He still sees a lot of room for improvement, though. And now, he’s watching as officials in other realms of state government are pouring resources into opening new recovery residences.

About ten of them have opened up in the last couple years, and more are in the works. They’re spread across the state, not concentrated in Burlington like the earlier era of sober homes — something many recovery residence advocates say is a good thing, even if it leaves fewer options available in the state’s most populous city than there once were.

David Riegel: The power of recovery residences is in the peer to peer connections.

Carly Berlin: That’s David Riegel. He’s the executive director of one of the biggest recovery residence organizations in the state, called the Vermont Foundation of Recovery.

Today’s recovery homes are different than the ones David looked at back when he was leaving treatment and looking for a sober house in Burlington, in 2007.

This newer crop of recovery residences, they’re generally not zero tolerance. They tend to have some fallback systems in place for when relapse happens.

But David says that doesn’t mean handling those situations is straightforward.

David Riegel: Yeah, it’s not easy. It’s not black and white. It’s very nuanced and complicated.

Carly Berlin: Dealing with someone relapsing in one of these houses takes balancing the needs of the individual struggling — with that of their housemates. And some recovery residence operators have pushed for legal loopholes they say are aimed at protecting the housemates, though not everyone thinks those loopholes are best for protecting the individual.

David says all of this is like walking a tight rope.

David Riegel: It’s not terribly dissimilar from the tightrope you know that Burlington has pretty publicly been struggling with for a period of years now, right, where they’re trying to say, how do we have policies that, you know, are not stigmatizing, they, you know, respect individuals as they are experiencing homelessness, as experiencing substance use disorders, experiencing, you know, mental health challenges. How do we also acknowledge and understand the impact that that has on our community as a whole?

Carly Berlin: To David, offering people choice is the key. For some, the structure of a group house might be exactly what they need. Others might be ready for an apartment of their own.

David Riegel: We owe it to our citizens to have as many different smaller steps as possible, to have as many different “Choose Your Own Adventure” paths as we possibly can.

Carly Berlin: Offering real options can be really challenging when our whole housing system in Vermont is as gridlocked as it is now. When David tells me this, I think about Manny, our question-asker, trying to find a place to live after coming out of prison, and wondering if a halfway house would be a good option.

And I think about someone else I met on my question-asking search, who told me he’d recently been offered an apartment — a ticket out of the shelter where he was living — but he was so worried about slipping into alcoholism due to the isolation of living alone that he turned it down.

David says not seeing a way out of your circumstances, that can lead to despair. But presenting people with actual options — it’s the basis for giving people hope.

David Riegel: I’m a firm believer that hope is the most powerful thing that we have, and that hope is contingent on seeing a linear path between where we are now and what our dreams are. Like, this belief that I am able to grow, my life is capable of improving, there are tangible actions that I can take. And if I do these things, it is a logical outcome that I’m going to achieve my goals.

Credits

This episode was reported by Carly Berlin and produced by Burgess Brown. Editing and additional production from the rest of the BLS team: Sabine Poux and Josh Crane. Our intern is Camila Van Order González. Our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Special thanks to Phil Edfors, Liam Elder-Connors, April McCullum, Susan Pullium, Glenn Russell, Paul Dragon, Tiffany Rich, Brenna Bedard, Jeff Moreau, Mary Verner, Jess Kirby, Jim Curran, and all the residents of the Burlington Dismas House.

Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.