This commentary is by Seth Steinzor of South Burlington. He is a retired attorney, and the author of a trilogy, “In Dante’s Wake,” and a collection of poems, “The Dragon of Sassafras Mountain.”
This past Saturday morning I saw something shocking while walking in downtown Burlington.
I hadn’t been down to the Church Street area for months. I was prepared to see a lot of new stores in place of similar, previous stores: businesses cycle through this area; the main continuity has always been provided by a few restaurants and bars. I wasn’t surprised at how normal the area looked, although rather empty for a weekend morning.
What shocked me was a blue heap of fabric in an alcove. I couldn’t at first figure out what it was. Then it moved, and I realized it was a couple of sleeping bags, with a person in one of them. At that moment, I recognized that I was looking at something I had seen in other, more urban places, but hadn’t recognized here, because in Vermont, it seemed so out of context: a homeless person, sleeping rough, in the middle of the winter, in temperatures around freezing, with the wind blowing.
We read and hear a lot about housing these days. Burlington’s former mayor has signed on with a group of high-powered advocates to get more housing built in town centers. This developer and that developer are reported to be developing developments that will give lodging to this many or that many people. Pundits and politicos explain recent changes in the legislature as due to Democrats’ unresponsiveness in the previous session to voters’ concerns about “affordability,” conventionally summarized as being that rents are too high, mortgages too costly, property values too inflated, property taxes excessive. The word “crisis” is on people’s lips.
Despite which, hardly anyone seems to be talking about that person huddled on the pavement in that alcove. That person is there right now. That it should be so is shocking. That barely more than a month earlier we had turned people out onto the street to live like this is shocking. (“We”: our government did this, our legislature and governor, democratically elected by us.)
That the program which had temporarily sheltered people in motels could be cut back because it was “too expensive,” so that people could sleep in the open within yards of stores that sell sweaters for hundreds of dollars, is shocking. That over a hundred units of nearby housing were razed so that F-35s can make intolerable noise overhead, turning a neighborhood into a wasteland, is shocking.
That none of the “crisis” remedies currently under discussion has anything to do with alleviating the condition of that person in that sleeping bag, right now, is shocking. A change to zoning laws that will allow a developer to build more densely in some town center a few years from now, a few years earlier than might have occurred under existing laws, will do nothing to help that poor soul.
And when that housing development eventually might be built, is there any measure presently under discussion to ensure that those people currently inhabiting sleeping bags on our city streets will be able to move into it? I’ve seen prominent players refer to housing costing $400,000 and more as “affordable.” Affordable to whom? Affordable to a person who had to go to the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity to get a donated sleeping bag so that they wouldn’t freeze to death?
The invisible hand of the market, which snatched housing out of the reach of that person, isn’t going to open a new door to them. Build all the houses you want; which of them will that person have the resources to buy, or to pay first and last month’s rent for, and a security deposit, in competition with wealthier people who want that same place?
What sort of society do we want to live in? Through what horrible combination of ignorance and callous indifference have we created a Vermont where right before our eyes our fellows have no choice but to live like this? If the thought of it doesn’t sicken and disgust you, why not?
If you think that Vermont’s true housing crisis is all about demographics and zoning laws and regulatory burdens on development, think again. Until everyone in Vermont who wants shelter from the elements, and a warm, safe place to protect their privacy and belongings, can have these most basic of goods, the real crisis is unaddressed. Those other issues may present problems for policy to solve, but the true crisis is lying in an alcove on Church Street.
Sunday, I saw the movie about Bob Dylan. He sang, “How many times can a man turn his head, pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Judging by recent discourse in our state about the housing crisis, many times indeed. But willful ignorance of this sort is literally sickening. It causes the victims of the housing market to sicken in the stress of intolerable physical and psychological conditions, and it causes the rest of us to sicken from the withering of empathy and fellow feeling and the loss of what our homeless fellows might contribute to the community, if they were housed. We need to stop distracting ourselves from the real problem. We need to get well.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Seth Steinzor: ‘Blowin’ in the wind’.