A year ago, the first residents started to move into a much-heralded emergency shelter in downtown Burlington, more commonly known as “pods.”
Paid for by federal Covid-19 relief funds, the shelter hosts up to 35 guests on a city-owned former parking lot on Elmwood Avenue. It consists of mostly single-occupancy dwellings — standalone modular units about 64 square feet large — supported by a community room, bathroom and laundry facilities.
The shelters are a new approach for a city that has struggled to find lasting solutions to the growing problems of homelessness and housing insecurity within its boundaries. At a press conference to mark the opening of the site, Mayor Miro Weinberger hailed the use of small, prefabricated units as innovative, emphasizing that it would give guests a greater degree of independence.
One year later, city officials and the site’s operators say that experiment is succeeding, but some neighbors remain opposed.
From day one, demand has never been an issue. And since residents moved in last February, the need for emergency shelter has only grown. As of January, the waiting list for the pods had more than 150 people on it, according to Champlain Housing Trust, the affordable housing agency that manages the site.
In an interview last month, two leaders at Champlain Housing Trust said they have several ways to think about success. For one, it’s about the things more difficult to measure: the connections being made and the trust being built, said Taylor Thibault, associate director of hotel operations and homeless prevention initiatives at the organization.
But there’s also something she can put a hard number on: the average length of stay for guests at the Elmwood Avenue shelter, which is 232 days. It’s noteworthy that guests have been able to stay that long because many of them were not successful in other forms of shelter, such as the state’s emergency housing program, she said.
That number also reveals one of the biggest challenges facing the Elmwood shelter’s managers — finding permanent housing for guests has been even harder than the organization’s leadership anticipated.
As of early December, 64 people or 55 households (some guests arrive as a pair) have stayed at the shelter, according to the housing trust. Of those, 32 households have exited the program. But in 25 of those cases, the people were asked to leave, and another five left on their own without housing lined up. Only two were moved to permanent housing, though Thibault noted that five others are currently in the pipeline to get housing soon.
Brian Bowles, 51, is one of the people who moved from a pod to permanent housing. In an interview on Friday, Bowles said he was happy to have his own apartment, but it was a long wait. In total, he stayed at the Elmwood shelter for about 11 months.
“At first, we were told it would take, say, six to eight months, but I think what happened was they’d get into the system and realize, like, ‘Oh shit, there’s hardly any housing in Burlington whatsoever,’” Bowles said in an interview on Friday.
One of the primary missions of Champlain Housing Trust is to build affordable housing — work that got a big boost with a $20 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott last September. But Michael Monte, Champlain Housing’s CEO, said that even with those added resources, building new housing takes time.
When the Elmwood Avenue shelter opened, the state was still operating an expanded version of the pandemic-era hotel emergency housing program. But last summer, when the state began winding down the program, the need for other emergency housing options grew.
Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness, said a January 2023 count of those sleeping unsheltered in Chittenden County was around 42 households. By November, that grew to an unprecedented 252, putting all shelters in the area at capacity and growing the waitlist for the pods. Russell attributed that rise to the ramp-down of the hotel program.
In a recent interview, Russell said the Elmwood Avenue shelter has been a success, in large part due to the population it serves. As a low-barrier shelter, it provides an option to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Guests usually arrive with complex health care and social service needs, and staff onsite are often able to connect guests with services.
One of the most immediate benefits, she said, is a sense of safety — “People who are living in tents don’t have locks on their doors.”
‘It changed my outlook on humanity’
Thibault said that the biggest need when someone arrives at the shelter is for human connection and feeling valued.
“A lot of these folks are written off and they’re told ‘no’ a lot of the time — like, ‘No, you’re not able to come to shelter because of X, Y and Z,’” Thibault said. “And we’re finally like, ‘Yes, you are. Here’s a pillow and a blanket so that you’re safe in your unit.”
Before Bowles landed a spot in the Elmwood Avenue shelter, his living situation was volatile. He arrived in Vermont in 2022 from Massachusetts, fleeing domestic violence. Once in Vermont, he lived in a U-Haul for a time before navigating the state’s emergency hotel housing program. He was kicked out of a South Burlington motel for having a service animal, he said, and later stayed in a tent near the Burlington waterfront, with his belongings in storage.
Visiting a food shelf one day early last year, he formally started the process of applying for a spot at the Elmwood Avenue shelter.
Bowles said he had reservations — after experiencing years of abuse in his family, he had a hard time trusting strangers. But his application was approved, and he moved in on March 1, 2023.
“I must say that it was a positive experience. And it changed my outlook on humanity because at that particular time, what I was going through, everybody was potentially a bad person to me, which is not a good way to live at all,” he said.
While he appreciated having his own space, Bowles had some complaints — break-ins happened on occasion, and the environment was noisy and occasionally messy, he said.
“I didn’t know how long I could continue to live there because it’s hard to live around all that stuff,” Bowles said.
Bowles is now settling into his apartment and is considering whether to look for work. He now looks back at his time dealing with homelessness with some surprise.
“I think the biggest regret in my life to be honest with you is just being homeless. Not because it’s that stigma — ‘Oh, that guy over there with all the bags is homeless.’ No, it’s not that,” Bowles said in an interview on Friday. “It’s ‘How the fuck did I get here? This shouldn’t happen to me.’”
‘A little bit of a scapegoat’
When the pods were first proposed, some of the loudest opposition came from adjacent properties, and at least some neighbors remain concerned.
McKenzie House Apartments is the name of two buildings located next to the shelter — one for senior housing and another for low-income families. The company’s management raised concerns with the city about the shelter community throughout the planning and permitting stages.
The first several months after the shelter opened were a “nightmare,” said Evan Langfeldt, CEO of O’Brien Brothers, the company that owns McKenzie House Apartments, in an interview on Thursday. However, the recent winter months have seen a slight improvement, he noted.
While Langfeldt credited Champlain Housing Trust with doing a good job managing the site, he accused the city of not living up to commitments made to the neighbors of the shelter.
“In my mind, it’s a dereliction of responsibility that the city has not put any resources towards what has clearly been a rise in bad behavior and criminal activity on all the adjacent properties,” he said.
Since the shelter’s opening, his employees have seen an increase in substance use and trespassing, Langfeldt said. In one instance, a staff member was chased by someone with a golf club and syringe. Also, in another case, a single mother with young children couldn’t access the front door to her apartment due to a group of people “sprawled out” and using drugs on the porch, he said.
In September, a shelter resident burned a fence erected between the shelter community and McKenzie House, Langfeldt, and the fence hasn’t been repaired yet. He said that his company also has security camera footage of alleged stolen goods being sold and of people appearing to overdose in the driveway.
The O’Brien Brothers company resorted to keeping a log of incidents and hiring private security at a cost of around $40,000 a year, Langfeldt said. Many of his concerns apply more broadly to the city and beyond, he admitted, but said that Burlington officials haven’t sufficiently responded to his company’s complaints.
Monte, the housing trust’s CEO, said that the public safety issues around the Elmwood community are being experienced throughout much of the city.
“I think that the overall challenge of safety and security has everything to do with a broader community safety and security that is happening because there are 200-plus people now without shelter,” Monte said.
The Burlington Police Department records show that 382 calls to police were reported in the vicinity of the Elmwood Avenue shelter during the second quarter of 2023, and 475 in the third quarter. Then, the incidents dropped to 274 in the final four months of the year.
Overall incidents in the city also experienced similar spikes in those quarters last year, according to the city’s website. In 2018, long before the shelter was even considered, there were around 400 reported incidents per quarter or more around the same Elmwood Avenue area for much of the year.
“It definitely seems like Elmwood could be utilized as a little bit of a scapegoat,” said Thibault. “Because just the downtown area is really feeling affected by the mass amounts of unhoused folks that we have, and other really challenging situations like substance use and mental health.”
Bowles, too, said the Elmwood community where he lived was often unfairly targeted. He pointed to other factors in the immediate neighborhood that contributed to the complaints of neighbors like McKenzie House: a nearby needle exchange program, a food shelf and the COTS shelter, which all could have contributed to increases in foot traffic around Elmwood Avenue, he said.
As for what’s next at the shelter, eventually Champlain Housing and city officials want to build permanent affordable housing at the site, after the “pods” community wraps up the final two years of its three-year lease on the property.
Monte said he expects Champlain Housing Trust to be “done” with the emergency shelter after the three-year lease is concluded. “We’ll see when we get there,” he said. “I mean, there’s also — in the city of Burlington, there’s going to be a new mayor. That could change things.”
