The Housing Crisis Part 2: Consequences
This is part of a series on the housing crisis that is impacting Burlington, VT. These are all of the published parts of this series:
In Part 1, I outlined the history of housing policy in BTV/VT and how it has impacted population growth in the Greater Burlington Area. In this post I will outline the consequences of the past 75 years of housing policy.
First and foremost is the story of supply, demand, and affordability. Burlington is the most desirable place to live in the region—it has access to jobs, culture, transit, urban amenities, and the lake. But since our housing supply has been largely stagnant for decades, we've been "full" for quite a while. This makes housing costs here high, and pushes those with less means to consider peripheral towns. This has been going on long enough that even most of our suburbs are full, and people will live as far away as St Albans or Montpelier while commuting to work in Burlington. When the sharp migratory shock of COVID-19 hit, this at-capacity system couldn't absorb the inflow of new residents and costs skyrocketed as those with means outbid each other for access to housing.
But beyond just the cost of housing, taxes have also impacted affordability. As I outlined in the last post, the region has been growing rapidly, but Burlington has not. We now serve as the anchor city for a region of over 200,000 people, while having roughly the same tax base as when it was a region of 60,000 people. We are fundamentally doing *too much* for a city with so few tax payers. (Note: this should read as an argument in favor of increasing our population—not for cutting services.) The end result of this reduction of affordability and lack of housing supply is that the most vulnerable of our neighbors are being pushed out onto the street.
This brings us to public safety. There is a common belief that the source of our public safety issues stem from a single vote by a progressive city council to "defund the police". Never-mind the fact that the vote in question had bipartisan support, or that it did not actually cut the budget of the police department; my main worry is that this narrow way of looking at our issues misses the forest for the trees. It simplifies the problem, which lets people believe in a simple solution. Here's the messier, more complicated, and—in my opinion—more realistic version of the story:
The Burlington region has had steadily growing pressure on its housing system for decades. Chronic homelessness has been present for a long time, but not in quantities high enough for the general public to fixate on it. However, housing insecurity often manifests out of sight. People may choose to live out of their car or with a friend when their rent spikes, thinking it is only a temporary problem. But losing stable housing may eventually cost them their job, or push them into situations in proximity to drugs. Unhoused communities can grow on the sidelines in encampments, where people on waiting lists for "official" help meet their own needs in the mean time. A long-running and increasingly dangerous opioid epidemic was waiting for anyone vulnerable enough to fall into its grasp. This is where Burlington was at when the pandemic hit.
Because housing is so scarce regionally, when the COVID-19 housing shock hit in 2020/2021, it was the entire county and beyond that was pushing the most vulnerable people onto the street. And since Burlington is often the best—or only—place to access services, we attract the entire region's population of people who have been denied housing. Couple this with the city's efforts to clear out and dismantle the homeless encampments that sprung up, and we end up with the sudden influx of unhoused neighbors in our downtown.
When we look at the public safety issues we have today, they are largely crimes of poverty and desperation: shoplifting, rifling through cars, stealing vehicles, public substance use. Another large part of the issue is "public discomfort", where no crimes are committed, but that the act of being visibly homeless makes others uncomfortable. These are not situations that were caused by having fewer police officers, but are caused by a housing system that has taken away stability from our most vulnerable neighbors. The conversation in 2020 about the role of policing was just an unfortunate coincidence. Without solving the issue of housing, no police budget will be big enough to stop the flow of people being ejected onto the streets.
Finally, we can not humanely solve our homelessness and substance use crises without having housing for people to stabilize and recover. We also cannot humanely solve these issues without increasing the number of people who are working towards solving them: new mental health councilors, medical service providers, community support liaisons, and even new police officers will all need somewhere to live, and we are losing applicants to these critical roles due to a lack of housing.
In my next post I will outline the numbers behind how much housing we need, and the barriers that are preventing us from moving forward.