BURLINGTON — Two years ago, Brooks, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was riding his bicycle when it broke. And when he stumbled upon an encampment on Sears Lane, off Pine Street, one of the guys living there fixed it for him.
Brooks has now been living at the encampment for the majority of the past two years. It’s about a one-square-block-sized plot, in between a parking lot and a small patch of woods in Burlington’s South End.
“You know, it was just kind of like a weird lifestyle. It’s interesting. It’s like a hobo lifestyle,” he said. “I like being outside. I like being in a mixture of the city and the woods. I mean, what better than a little wooded area in the middle of the city?”
About 10 people live at the site, Brooks said, though that number has fluctuated over time. Some people living at the camp collect materials that they use for building shelters or fixing up motorbikes and go-karts. But there’s also trash at the site, and it just keeps building up.
Last month, Mayor Miro Weinberger called the trash buildup unacceptable. After WCAX reported a story about the site, the city sent down a crew to assess the situation. The crew plans to come back this week to help clean up the trash.
“It was all about how the mess is building up and building up, but he didn’t mention anything about how we all pitched in money out of our own pockets to get that dumpster,” Brooks said of Weinberger’s comments to WCAX. “Tell our mayor he’s a bunch of bullshit.”
Weinberger said Burlington has had problems with encampments for years, including the one at Sears Lane. But over the past few months, he said, there have been a significant amount of complaints about the site — enough to get the city’s attention.
“Encampments, often when they have sort of arisen around the city, I mean, we have numerous times seen them relatively quickly become problematic,” Weinberger said. “Unacceptable, dangerous public health and public safety situations can evolve.”
That’s why the city worked with the ACLU to develop a policy to ensure that the city could remove encampments when “unacceptable levels persist,” he said. It’s “always a very unpleasant duty” of the city, Weinberger said, but sometimes it’s the best option. It’s his hope that cleaning up the trash at Sears Lane can help avoid that this time.
“We’re trying to do it in a way that works with the individuals that are camping there,” Weinberger said. “They support this, is my understanding. Many of them think of this as a positive for them as well as the surrounding neighborhood.”
So far, the people living at the encampment have already contributed their own money — with the help of Food Not Bombs — to pay for three different dumpsters that have been filled and hauled off — each costing between $500 and $700.
The people living there say they’re happy to help clean up — but they don’t like paying for trash that is not theirs.
“Everyone here wants to see it clean,” Brooks said. “But it’s hard when outside people keep bringing their trash. So some of us are taking our hard-earned money that we could be putting toward savings for housing and whatnot, and we’re putting it toward these people on the other side of the tracks to clean their trash.”
Brooks said the problem really started when the snow melted, revealing a fresh layer of trash underneath. All of a sudden, he said, the site started to look like a “frickin junkyard.”
But he said even the current state of the site is much better than before the residents got their first dumpster. Back then, he said, there was four times the trash that there is now.
Sarino Macri, who lives in a quasi-tiny home at the camp, said he just wants the city to give people at the site the opportunity to make things right. He said none of the trash is his, and he doesn’t want to have to use his own income to pay for dumpsters full of other people’s trash.
“I love this place. I want the opportunity to stay here,” Macri said. “For some people, we must pay to haul (their trash). But I don’t want to pay for those people. I just want to pay for me.”
Weinberger said the city proposed to the state a kind of tiny home solution for the site last summer, before the state created a year-round, low-barrier shelter with Anew Place at the former Champlain Inn.
“We’re putting real, focused effort in here and trying to work with the individuals camping at the site to try to get them better, more stable housing support,” Weinberger said. “And that is not an easy task. There is lots of demand for those housing spots, but perhaps particularly right now with the state hotel program shifting out of the pandemic, but it’s something we’re putting focused effort into.”
Weinberger said he understands why people are skeptical that the city can make institutional progress with homelessness, especially as pandemic-era housing policies begin to expire. But he said the amount of federal funding available to cities to address issues such as homelessness is vast.
“We can finally get serious about building the amount of new homes that’s going to be necessary if we’re really going to house everyone, and I am an optimist on that,” Weinberger said. “It may be that we are having to deal with trash again in a few months, but I think homelessness is a problem that a growing number of cities have essentially solved, and I think it’s something we could solve here too.”
But the people living at the site said they would like to see more than just trash cleanup from the city. They want the infrastructure to make the encampment a place where people can live with dignity.
“I would like the city to bring a place where you can go to shower, a place where you can go with dignity to the restroom. This place,” Macri said, referencing the port-a-potty currently onsite, “it stinks like dirt. It’s not for us. It’s for animals. But if they give me a chance to improve this place, I will do it. I will start by tomorrow morning.”
But he also warned the city workers who stopped by that their help cannot be one-time-only, or this won’t be the last time something like this happens.
“We’re going to need a dumpster, not just today. We need a dumpster every 15 to 20 days,” Macri said. “It’s not just, you come here to clean because after a few months, we’ll be back here all over again.”