PLAINFIELD – I didn’t mean to become a landlord. My husband and I simply had extra rooms in our old farmhouse. As we began spending part of the year away, and with Vermont in the midst of a housing crisis, we chose to rent those rooms to four individuals.
We charge an affordable rate, cover utilities and try to work with tenants who cannot afford a security deposit up front. Most cannot. It is a vulnerable position for us.
Taking in tenants also meant pushing past a certain social stigma. For all we were taught in kindergarten about sharing, we seem to forget those lessons as adults. More than once, people who care about me have discouraged this choice.
When someone can’t pay on time or at all, or breaks house rules, we bear real financial risk. Landlords, especially small in-home ones like us, need workable systems when tenants are unable to pay.
At the same time, living alongside my tenants has exposed me to vulnerabilities far greater than my own. I’ve come to see myself, whether I like it or not, as a kind of weathervane for broader social conditions. One tenant survives on less than $1,000 a month. Another is navigating separation from their child tied to health and housing instability. A third recently attempted suicide in their room. Two tenants had their food assistance cut last year, even though their income did not change.
These are not isolated stories. In my own home, I see the consequences of these gaps every day.
Rehabilitation facilities lack available beds. Drug recovery programs remain limited and difficult to access, even as the opioid crisis has worsened over the past decade. The hotel program for unhoused Vermonters is insufficient and often administered in ways that fall short of basic standards of dignity. Our property tax structure makes it increasingly difficult for people to remain in their homes, while our health care system continues to shrink, especially for those who need it most.
And yet, this is still our home, and our costs are rising. After two months of nonpayment from one tenant last year, I began the eviction process. It was convoluted and slow, involving a maze of paperwork, court delays and unavailable lawyers, many of whom told me they were… overloaded with eviction cases.
Over time, I found myself unexpectedly relieved by those delays. The process can place landlords in a position that feels deeply at odds with basic human dignity: pursuing the removal of a mentally vulnerable, soon-to-be unhoused person.
H.772, which has passed the House and is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, would make evictions easier. Vermont Legal Aid has warned that, “as written, this bill guts tenants’ procedural due process rights in a variety of ways.”
This is not the time to weaken tenant protections.
But the answer is not simply to preserve a slow system either. What I have come to understand is that we are asking the wrong question entirely.
Right now, the system offers two blunt options: eviction, or asking untrained landlords to navigate complex mental health, financial and interpersonal crises alone. In practice, this means that small landlords are already functioning as an informal extension of the social safety net: absorbing risk, improvising care and, at times, becoming de facto providers without recognition or support.
Importantly, I am speaking here about small, in-home landlords: individuals quietly absorbing risk to house people who might otherwise have nowhere to go.
A small, targeted intervention could change this dynamic entirely.
In many cases, only a narrow margin separates stability from crisis. A modest, state-supported system for example, a rotating housing counselor with access to flexible funds, could bridge the gap between small landlords and tenants falling through our fragmented safety nets.
Such a role would not require a vast new bureaucracy. It could work through existing, under-resourced organizations, stepping in early to assess situations, mediate conflict and connect tenants to support while they are still housed. In some cases, temporary rental assistance would stabilize a tenancy at a fraction of the public cost of homelessness. In others, small, practical interventions like addressing health-related housing needs or basic household requirements, could prevent situations from escalating at all.
But there is something deeper at stake here that we rarely allow ourselves to consider.
We tend to frame vulnerable people only in terms of need as burdens to be managed somewhere else, by someone else, someday. But vulnerability exists on a spectrum that includes all of us. We are living in a society that is, in many ways, hardened and strained, one that drives the nervous system of us all into a kind of constant overdrive. Those who break first are not separate from us; they are often simply further along that same continuum.
Their needs are not random. They are signals.
In that sense, they are not just recipients of care, but sources of information, even insight, about what is not working and what must change. If we continue to cast them out, we are not only failing them. We are discarding something we may, in fact, urgently need.
Without support, the burden of responding to that reality falls unevenly and often invisibly. As landlords, we are left choosing between eviction or entering, unguided, into situations that demand skills far beyond what we were ever meant to provide.
In effect, tenants become our dependents for stretches of time: not by design, but by default. This reality is quietly embedded in our current system, yet unacknowledged in policy. Accelerating evictions does not resolve that tension; it simply displaces it.
And increasingly, displacement is becoming formalized. In parts of this country, homelessness itself is being criminalized, with enforcement mechanisms that funnel people into carceral systems or state-contracted facilities rather than stable housing. When we fail to invest in keeping people housed, we are not avoiding cost: we are choosing a more punitive and often more expensive path.
Vermont’s state budget has grown dramatically in recent years from roughly $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion in about seven years. And yet, the kinds of small, precise interventions that could prevent human and financial crises remain largely out of reach.
Vermont now faces a clear choice about the kind of future it is building. We are not addressing the root causes like poverty, hunger, chronic illness, addiction, mental health challenges and housing instability, and how deeply they intersect.
It requires courageous leadership at the Statehouse. We need the political will to build systems that uphold human dignity, not just in principle, but in practice.
We do not necessarily need to spend more. We need to spend earlier, more precisely and with a clearer recognition of shared responsibility and shared value.
Because the question remains: where, exactly, are people supposed to go?
Jax Brown is a writer who splits time between Florida and Plainfield, where she rents rooms in her home and has firsthand experience navigating the state’s housing challenges. Brown has been previously published as Jaquelyn Rieke.
