The Deeper Dig

For the past few years, Vermont has had the second highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of people counted as homeless more than doubled, and the numbers keep going up.

Lots of people are trying to grasp: Why is this happening? Why have we seen this huge, dramatic spike in the number of people experiencing homelessness here?

Carly Berlin was brought on by Vermont Public and VTDigger last year to report on Vermont’s housing crisis. She’s spent hundreds of hours talking to researchers, politicians, government officials and housing advocates to understand the situation here. And she’s spent a lot of time with people who don’t have a permanent home right now.

Her inbox is full of messages asking some version of this question: How many homeless people in Vermont are really from here?

And sometimes, the question is really more of an implied explanation — that Vermont’s recent rise in homelessness is driven by people crossing state lines.

Berlin worked with the Brave Little State team at Vermont Public to produce this podcast investigating that question, and its implications.

Updated: Sept. , 2024— We removed a caveat about data presented in this story to avoid repetition and the potential for misinterpretation.

For decades, Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant in Vernon, was the largest producer of electricity for the state.

The plant has been shut down since 2014, and the company that now owns it is in the process of deconstructing it. That company, NorthStar, has recently submitted a plan that describes in detail the final steps of decommissioning, which is projected to be completed ahead of schedule, by 2026.

However, national developments mean that radioactive spent fuel on the site is likely to stay where it is for the foreseeable future.

Host Sam Gale Rosen spoke to VTDigger environmental reporter Emma Cotton, who has been covering the decommissioning process.

Edi Abeneto is food shelf supervisor at Feeding Chittenden, a Burlington-based nonprofit that focuses on hunger relief and serves more than 12,000 people every year. 

Abeneto has worked at the organization for more than 17 years. He speaks six languages, and among other duties, he facilitates communication and provides interpretation for visitors from a wide range of backgrounds.

Over time, he said he’s built up trust with visitors that help him connect them to whatever help they need. 

“I was able to break down the barriers to food access, you know, and while building trust and communication with the new Americans,” Abeneto said. “So every time they see me here, I can say, be more comfortable because I speak the languages, you know, I give them more information about what we're doing.

Host Sam Gale Rosen talked to Abeneto about some of what his work involves.

Managing big emotions is hard for adults, so what must it be like if you’re 3 feet tall and still in diapers? Anyone who’s been around kids knows how they can get overwhelmed by big emotional reactions. Those can run the gamut from despair to rage to laughing fits, sometimes within the same five-minute period.

So, how can you teach kids to manage emotions in a healthy way? Especially if you’re still figuring it out yourself?

Deeper Dig host Sam Gale Rosen talks about this with Alyssa Blask Campbell, a Burlington-based expert on parenting, education and child development. She’s the CEO of Seed & Sew, which serves parents, teachers and caregivers with tools for mental wellness and building emotional intelligence. She also hosts the podcast “Voices of Your Village.”

Her new book, written with Lauren Elizabeth Stauble, is called “Tiny Humans, Big Emotions: How to Navigate Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Defiance to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children.”

Neshobe Island is a small island located on the Castleton side of Lake Bomoseen. It has two houses, a barn and some surrounding woods, and that’s about it.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, though, the island hosted a who’s who of celebrities and intellectuals most summers. These included Noël Coward, Thornton Wilder, Irving Berlin, Margaret Mitchell, Dorothy Parker, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Walt Disney and Harpo Marx.

Host Sam Gale Rosen toured the island with its current owners and talked about some of its surprisingly star-studded history.

At the University of Vermont, the share of in-state students is dwindling, and it’s raising questions about the role and mission of the state’s flagship public university.

VTDigger education reporter Peter D’Auria — with the help of data reporter Erin Petenko — has been looking at the enrollment statistics over time, as well as how they compare with those of other large public universities across the country.

Here’s the short version: Peter writes: “over the past two decades, the number of undergraduate Vermonters at UVM has decreased by about 300. Meanwhile, the university’s student body has added roughly 3,800 out-of-state students.”

That means less than a quarter of the school’s undergrads are Vermonters, as of spring 2023. That rate is near the bottom of the list of every large public university in the U.S.

Host Sam Gale Rosen talked to Peter about what we should take from these numbers.

Vermont’s oldest synagogue has been sold — and its new owner plans to turn it into a food hall and apartments. 

The nearly 140-year-old brick synagogue in Burlington’s Old North End served as an important center for the city’s Jewish community for decades. Now deteriorating physically, with its congregation mostly dwindled away, it has been sold to an entrepreneur who plans to redevelop the building.

Host Sam Gale Rosen toured the historic building with the new owner and visited the nearby, newer synagogue that has now acquired many of the historic artifacts from the older location.

On this episode of The Deeper Dig, we talk about the history at play, what’s planned for the building and what happens when a space for spirituality becomes something else.

Earlier this month, the Green Mountain Care Board made a decision that would affect most people and companies that get their health care through the state’s health insurance marketplace.

The board said that two companies that offer insurance through Vermont Health Connect would be able to increase premiums by double digits in 2024.

These increases will be less than insurers had asked for. Despite that, they’ll be among the highest annually since 2014, the first full year of the marketplace’s operation. 

“We had double digit rate increases last year and, from the looks of it, we are going to have double digit rate increases again this year, for insurance, for hospitals, for pharmaceuticals, clearly there is a nexus between these three things,” Charles Becker, a lawyer with the Office of the Health Care Advocate, said at a recent Green Mountain Care Board meeting. “To Vermont consumers, the dynamics of this system seem like a wildfire burning out of control.”

To find out about these increases, what they mean and where they fit into the wider conversation about health insurance, host Sam Gale Rosen spoke with health care reporter Kristen Fountain on this episode of The Deeper Dig. 

Vermonters are still coming to terms with the devastating toll of this summer’s flooding, which inundated downtowns, destroyed homes and businesses, and caused two confirmed deaths. Considered from almost any angle, the impact of this extreme weather on the state has been massive.

Among the issues that environmental reporter Emma Cotton has been looking into is how the floods affected wildlife and ecosystems — and in turn, how those ecosystems impact the way flooding affects humans and our infrastructure.

In this episode, host Sam Gale Rosen talks to Emma about fish, turtles, salamanders, birds, wetlands, water quality, river efficiency (it’s not a good thing), climate change and more. Plus they visit a swamp.

Early this month, heavy rains led to historic flooding in many parts of Vermont, causing massive — as yet uncounted — damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure. At the time of this recording, the state has confirmed that one person was killed by the floods.

Like in Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, many towns were under feet of water, and some were transformed into islands, with routes in and out cut off by floodwaters and damaged roads.

Against this backdrop, reporters and photographers from VTDigger fanned out, reporting from as many of the affected areas as they could reach. Today, we’ll hear from a few of them about what they found.