The Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity has abandoned a proposal to open a large homeless shelter in South Burlington amid stiff opposition from city officials.
CVOEO has been looking for months to open a 100-bed, low-barrier homeless shelter, and this summer identified a former mattress store at 1717 Williston Road as the most viable location.
The nonprofit’s executive director, Paul Dragon, met with South Burlington city staff last month to discuss the idea and planned to brief the city council next week, in hopes of securing enough support to justify purchasing the property with the help of the Champlain Housing Trust.
But six days before the September 8 presentation, Dragon called it off. His reason: a memo city staff sent to their council laying out why the project was doomed to fail.
The officials argued that the shelter would strain city services and lead to increases in retail theft, drug use and other unsavory behavior. They pointed to data from the large shelter CVOEO ran at the Holiday Inn on Williston Road during the pandemic. Over a roughly 14-month period, police responded to more than 575 calls and performed more than 200 directed patrols there, while the fire department responded to 286 emergency calls, according to the memo.
The officials further suggested that the shelter could make the lives of its guests worse by forcing them to travel several miles a day between South Burlington and Burlington, where many unhoused people receive services. Although CVOEO says it was working to find ways to help transport guests between the two cities during the day, South Burlington officials were skeptical of those plans coming to fruition. They said guests could end up needing to take two public buses — a 55-minute trip — or walk about 3.5 miles to get to CVOEO’s Community Resource Center in Burlington’s Old North End.
That could deter them from getting the help they need, especially during the winter months, according to Nicolas Storellicastro, South Burlington’s deputy city manager.
“We want nothing more than to help our neighbors in crisis, but we weren’t sure this was doing that,” he said in an interview.
Storellicastro said Dragon shouldn’t have been surprised by anything in the memo, as city officials had outlined the same concerns during last month’s meeting.
But in an email obtained by Seven Days, Dragon told the officials that he was caught off guard by their tone, which he said suggested that they did not share the spirit of collaboration he sought.
In an email to Seven Days on Thursday, Dragon said that the city’s resistance killed the proposal.
“We cannot successfully site and operate a shelter without partnership from local leadership and a common purpose around addressing homelessness,” he wrote.
“We will continue looking for viable locations and working with communities that are prepared to engage in collaborative problem-solving,” he wrote.
The decision to scuttle the proposal illustrates a central challenge in the widely-shared goal of expanding the capacity of Vermont’s homeless shelters: finding communities willing to host them. And the episode will do little to ease the frustration of Burlington officials, who have long felt that the Queen City is unfairly bearing the brunt of a borderless crisis.