[B]URLINGTON — It’s morning, and an official notice with a police officer’s business card rests on the ground.
“All people living or visiting this area without the permission of the owner of this property (the city of Burlington) are being given notice by the owner that you are trespassing on the property and must take your things and leave and not return or face prosecution… and removal of the things you leave on the property,” it says.
The notice is surrounded by several tents in various stages of disrepair. Surrounding the tents are piles of discarded items — water bottles (but not beer bottles), old shoes, Mardi Gras beads, twin-sized mattresses, an exercise machine — beginning to sink beneath detritus from beneath a patch of birches.
The encampment is near downtown Burlington, in the city’s South End, a short walk from the shores of Lake Champlain.
About a block in one direction stands the world’s tallest filing cabinet. In another direction is the Burlington Earth Clock, a Stonehenge-looking affair built of boulders stuck upright in the dirt. A block in another direction is the Lake Champlain Chocolates factory store.
Several of the tents appear abandoned. Broken poles leave sagging bellies of unstrung nylon drooping earthward.
Some of the tents are fortified with tarps, and closed against the elements.
A hello elicits a woman’s voice from inside one of the closed tents. There is silence from the rest.
Pressed for an interview, she says to come back around 1 p.m., to speak with Nick.
This site is just off Sears Lane, on public property, in what authorities describe as an illegal homeless encampment.
The Burlington Police say they need to disband the camps because of illegal activity including reports of domestic violence, drug use, vandalism and arson.
Police Chief Brandon del Pozo has said neighbors have raised concerns. The chief said the camps could be disbanded this weekend or early next week.
There’s nowhere else for the camp’s inhabitants to go, say civil rights proponents with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Burlington’s homeless shelters are overcrowded, says Jay Diaz, an ACLU attorney who filed a formal objection to the city’s eviction notice.
When they have nowhere else to go, as appears to be the case for these folks, Americans are at liberty to live on public property, Diaz contends.
“When homeless individuals are on public property and have no other place to go within the city, punishing them for remaining and sheltering themselves violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Diaz wrote in a letter sent to Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and Chief del Pozo, among others.
“When these evictions include the indiscriminate seizure and destruction of all personal property left behind, as Burlington’s camp evictions have in the past, seizing and destroying personal property without due process violates the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” reads Diaz’s letter.
At 2 p.m. Friday, a couple of salutations brings Nick Walls out of one of the tents.
Walls, 35, grew up in Bennington. He says he “didn’t have much of a childhood.” He never met his father, and said he left his mother’s house in his early teens.
“I’ve been an adult since I was a kid,” Walls said. “I didn’t have people by my side. I didn’t have help, I had to help myself.”
Walls said the cops are cracking down in response to bad actions by drunks who used to live at the camp.
Walls doesn’t drink alcohol, and he quit using drugs eight years ago.
A drunk from another camp showed up one night recently, he said, and threatened him with a .38 revolver, so Walls called the cops.
The police told him that was the last straw, and soon after began trying to kick him and the five or six remaining camp inhabitants out, Walls said.
“They’re basically saying, ‘Don’t call the cops or you’ll get kicked out,’” Walls said. “It’s uncalled for, to kick us out because of someone else’s mistakes.”
Walls isn’t sure where he’ll go, once he’s evicted from this little plot, surrounded by concrete on every side. He doesn’t want to go downtown.
“The mayor’s saying it’s dangerous here — it’s safer here than downtown, where all the stabbings are,” Walls said.
But he doesn’t want to stay where he’s at, either.
“I don’t want to live out here,” he said. “Why would I want to live outside? I hate it out here. I have no other choice right now.”
His wife, who lives with him, doesn’t want to be there either.
“This isn’t what we want,” Walls said. “We never wanted this. This is hell.”
Walls said he can’t work because of a number of physical impairments. Walls wants to get a high school degree, take college courses, and open a business, but finding food and shelter have been much higher priorities.
Walls is hoping his brother can get him set up in a place in Barre next month. Where he’ll be between now and then, he said, remains unclear.
The written notice with the officer’s business card says the eviction will happen Oct. 10, but Walls said he’s heard it’ll take place next week.
Neighboring residents, workers and business owners say they’re sympathetic, but wary.
“It makes me uncomfortable,” said Pierre Marosy, owner of Pierre’s Repairs, an auto repair shop across the street from the camp. “I’m not blaming these people, but it’s just not a good thing. I think the problem is that a lot of these people have mental (health) issues. I have compassion for them, but I’m also trying to run a business here.”
Gasoline has been siphoned from cars at the shop, Marosy said, and people sometimes sleep in the vehicles or break windows. It’s hard not to worry that the new neighbors are a threat, he said.
Small children walk past the camp all day, and women frequently jog on the road between Marosy’s shop and the homeless camp, he said.
A neighboring homeowner shares some of Marosy’s concerns.
“They don’t have anything to lose,” said John Kirby, who owns two duplexes less than a block from the camp, and who on Friday sold another house just a few doors down the road.
“Someone who’s got nothing to lose, they’ll do anything,” Kirby said.
Two women who walk past the camp nearly every day said they’re “not at all” afraid of the people living there. But they work in the vicinity, and don’t live nearby. If they did, the camp might be more of a concern, they said.
There’s a feeling, too, that the city has perhaps been too lenient on homeless neighbors.
Marosy said there’s a stream behind his shop, and a lake just down the road, and several wells clustered in the area — all of which he’s spent years trying to prevent his shop from harming.
After all that effort, inhabitants of the camp across the street don’t have toilets, and so they’re obviously dumping human waste straight into the environment, he said.
Kirby said the lack of enforcement was unfair.
“I can’t have an unregistered vehicle on my property, but they can do whatever the hell they want. I totally understand homeless people need a place to stay, but all that is a problem waiting to happen.
“They can put up whatever the hell they want, but if I don’t have a railing on the three steps coming off my porch, I’m fined,” Kirby said.
“I have called the cops on them a couple of times, but the Burlington Police Department seems to care more about them than us,” he said. “That’s one reason I’m selling and moving out. The liberalism is ridiculous. When illegal aliens, homeless people and people who break the law have more rights than taxpayers, it’s time to move on.”
Marosy said he’s seen hypodermic syringes, which are typically associated with illicit drugs, left on his property. On the edge of the camp itself there’s a box of insulin syringes, and another bag of syringes, in a milk crate sitting in front of one of the visibly abandoned tents. This is where Walls points when he talks about “troublemakers” he’s kicked out.
Even some who want the encampment shut down see the problem as complex.
“Is it all their fault? Is it partly society’s fault? I don’t know,” Kirby said. “But it’s not an ideal situation, having that there.”
