As the contenders for eight Burlington City Council seats on the March 1 ballot pitch their candidacies to voters, one issue in particular has received lots of attention: housing.
With a well-documented homelessness problem, roughly 1% vacancy rate and climbing rent prices, there is a political consensus in Burlington that more affordable housing is needed. But proposals about how to achieve that goal, and what to do with those who don’t have housing in the meantime, are not so uniform.
Perhaps no neighborhood is as central to that debate as the South End — represented on the city council as Ward 5 — which hosted the city’s largest encampment for those without housing in years, and could be rezoned for more development if Mayor Miro Weinberger’s plan to “end homelessness” is successful.
Running to claim the open Ward 5 seat left by outgoing Democratic Councilor Chip Mason are three candidates: Democrat Ben Traverse, a lawyer who’s been endorsed by Mason; independent yet Progressive-endorsed FaReid Munarsyah, a web developer who manages the free-meal-serving collective The People’s Kitchen; and independent Lenora Travis, a formerly houseless retail worker.
While the three candidates’ ideas for how to fix Burlington’s housing woes differ, there’s still some overlap between them.
Both Traverse and Munarsyah, for instance, criticized the way in which city officials demolished the Sears Lane encampment. More than one month before they became opponents in the Ward 5 race, the two stood at Sears Lane while city officials razed makeshift dwellings and hauled away debris from the site.
“I think FaReid and I agreed that it was tragic to see what was happening that day,” Traverse said. “I think it could have been dealt with with more openness and more transparency … with more empathy.”
Munarsyah, for his part, said that Weinberger should have tried harder to manage the encampment before he forced it to close.
While he acknowledged that the mayor did offer the campers a dumpster and port-a-potties, Munarsyah — who frequently spent time at the camp serving food — said the receptacles were seldom emptied, and other efforts such as installing electricity and running water at the site never came to fruition.
The mayor’s office sought to contract with a local nonprofit that would manage the site in September and October, though officials said that any organization capable of bidding on the work wasn’t interested.
Traverse and Travis both told VTDigger they want more shelters around the city where those without housing can spend time during the day.
Travis, who was without housing for a year in 2015 and 2016 because the place she had agreed to live suddenly became unavailable, said shelters can often be chaotic, making the experience of living on the street that much harder.
“When I was going through it, I didn’t really know if I was gonna make it because I was so stressed all the time,” she said. “There’s no place to really sit and get comfortable. There’s no place to relax.”
Travis still frequents the city’s warming shelter, though not because she doesn’t have housing. She now helps serve guests who stop by Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 782 on South Winooski Avenue, handing out coffee and making calls for people who are in the position she has been in.
Travis’s experience with homelessness has made her a supporter of rent control, the practice of adjusting people’s rent based on their income, she said.
“A lot of people are just struggling to make their bills,” Travis said. “If you could get somebody into a one-bedroom or a family into a two-bedroom apartment and say, ‘This is your rent,’ they have a little something to stretch things out.”
Traverse, on the other hand, said rent control would not be an appropriate policy for Burlington, though he said the idea has “value” and is “deserving of respect.”
“I think it would be difficult for Burlington to go it alone on rent control or rent stabilization,” he said.
Rent control is not part of Weinberger’s 10-step plan to end homelessness in the city, though building new housing in the South End is. There are obstacles to doing so; the neighborhood — which has seen home prices skyrocket amid its transformation from working-class borough to cultural hub — has a history of pollution, and some in its arts community are wary of further development.
Traverse, who said he was pleased by the mayor’s proposal, thinks there is an appetite for new housing in the South End. Still, before the cranes and scaffolding appear, the chair of the city’s Parks, Recreation & Waterfront Commission wants to ensure that neighbors get a voice in the discussion about new development.
“My sense is that the consensus in Ward 5 is that we need additional housing. The question is where,” he said. “I cannot support an amendment to rezoning the South End until I know we’ve done a really robust community engagement process.”
While the candidates say housing is an important issue for them, it’s not the only issue they’re running on.
Munarsyah said the main goal of his campaign is to raise awareness about two proposed amendments to the city charter he supports.
One, dubbed “Proposition Zero,” would allow city residents to gather signatures and place a question before voters without the intervention of elected officials, a process that can be done now only with proposed amendments to the city charter.
The other would establish a citizen board to investigate and discipline police officers accused of misconduct. It mirrors the language of a proposed amendment passed by city councilors in 2020 but vetoed by Weinberger before it could reach voters.
The two proposed charter amendments have about 600 signatures each, Munarsyah said. He hopes to gather 2,400 more through the exposure drawn by his campaign for city council.
While Munarsyah said he’s still trying to win the Ward 5 seat, he sees the likelihood of a victory in the historically Democratic Ward 5 as “a long shot.”
To Travis, the concept of running for office itself seemed unlikely, she said. Yet when friends encouraged her to run, she jumped at the opportunity to, in her eyes, have a bigger impact on the community.
“I didn’t see myself ever doing anything like this,” she said. “But I’ve always helped people, no matter what state I lived in. And I’ve always been the one to (say), ‘Let’s do this,’ or ‘This isn’t right.’ ”