BURLINGTON — Forty-five minutes into a meeting with city officials about their proposal to build a homeless shelter of 30 “pods” on an Old North End parking lot, a neighbor to the proposed site spoke her mind to the staffers from Mayor Miro Weinberger’s administration.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re thinking about this,” said Bari Kuhl, a resident of the McKenzie House Apartments. “All your answers sound like, ‘This is it. It’s a done deal.’”
Brian Pine, the city’s community and economic development chief, replied swiftly.
“I’m sorry if that’s not clear: We are under the mandate from the mayor and the City Council to move forward,” Pine told Kuhl. “This will be going forward, provided we get the permits needed.”
Those words were immediately followed up by another staffer from Pine’s office, Marcella Gange: “This is genuinely a conversation. I’m sorry if —”
Kuhl cut her off: “I really hope you don’t get the permit.”
The exchange highlighted the challenges City Hall faces in conveying its plans to handle an expected uptick in homelessness this summer. While Pine’s office said it has registered the blowback about the pods from residents and business owners, it doesn’t intend to amend its plan in response.
In an interview, Pine acknowledged that neighbors have a right to voice concerns about the city’s proposal. But he also pointed out that the city isn’t obligated to address those concerns, after his office gained approval from the City Council to host the pods at 51 Elmwood Ave. for three years starting July 1.
“It’s not in the public interest to have the city go solicit neighborhood support for something as important as this,” Pine told VTDigger.
With eligibility requirements for the state’s motel housing program set to become more stringent in July, Burlington is bracing for an influx of people who need housing — and by extension, officials argued, the pods.
But with less than a month until the pod plan goes before the Development Review Board for permitting, some basic information about how the proposed site would be run, such as who would manage the site and what would be required of potential pod residents, remains unknown.
Pine said those particulars will be hammered out before the permit hearing on May 17. The city already intends to have staff from the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity on the site every day to oversee the city’s daytime warming shelter — dubbed the “Community Resource Center” — which officials intend to relocate from its current location at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post on South Winooski Avenue to the parking lot.
The Elmwood Avenue spot was one of 10 that city officials say they looked at to host the pod community. The city-owned parking lot was chosen “because of its proximity to transportation, services and amenities and its ease of connection to municipal power, water and sewer,” according to a memo addressed to city councilors.
Still, Pine apologized to McKenzie House tenants at the April 5 meeting for not informing them of the project’s location sooner. He said his office held off on public engagement about the pods until the Public Works Commission and City Council had approved the plan.
“We have to get permission before we can go and plan anything at all,” Pine told the residents.
Any further lack of clarity about the project stemmed from the city’s inexperience in building the pods, he said.
“This is not something we’ve done in Burlington before, not something we’ve done in Vermont, so it’s not like there’s a package you can go out and purchase,” Pine told VTDigger.
At least the physical aspect of the city’s plan, however, will indeed be purchased in a package. A description of the city’s plan links to the website of Pallet, a company that sells the materials for pod communities to municipalities around the country.
According to the plan, each of the 30 pods (25 would be single-sized, while five would sleep two people) is slated to have a bed, electricity and a modest amount of space for residents to keep personal belongings. A separate structure on the lot would house six compartments equipped with a sink, toilet and shower.
Residents are expected to stay in a pod for three to six months while nonprofit organizations connect them to more permanent housing, Pine said. The city would admit new residents using the same guidelines followed by other homeless shelters in the state, he said.
Neighbors have bemoaned the pods’ arrival, contending that they would introduce more crime and noise to the area. Some have pointed to the mayor’s closure of the Sears Lane encampment — initially over crime issues, then over concerns about the safety of campers’ dwellings — as a reason not to place people experiencing homelessness next to a residential area.
In response to those concerns, officials said the site will be staffed by security around the clock, and that no illegal activity will be allowed at the site.
But Evan Langfeldt, who runs the development and property management company O’Brien Brothers, argued residents would go to places outside the community to engage in illegal activity, such as the apartment building his company owns next door.
“People are going to go off that parking lot to do what they can’t do there, elsewhere,” Langfeldt told VTDigger.
Downtown businesses have also expressed concern about crime stemming the nearby pod community, said Kelly Devine, executive director of the Burlington Business Association.
Devine said the pod plan flouts what the city laid out in “planBTV,” a 2013 community planning document that, among other things, called for social services to be “more removed from the challenges and temptations of the urban core, while remaining in a convenient location.”
“It’d be great if these folks had some access to green space instead of being surrounded by chain-link fence on four sides,” Devine told VTDigger.
Yet Pine said that planBTV is a “guiding document” that could not account for the housing shortage Burlington is facing nearly a decade later.
“We hadn’t experienced a pandemic, we hadn’t seen homelessness triple” when planBTV was written, Pine said.
Proponents of the pods also argue they would provide residents a more secure, healthy environment, and encourage them to engage in better behavior than they otherwise might.
“People (who are) unsupported, I’m just going to say ‘loose’ out there in the environment, that’s when you’re going to have problems,” said City Councilor Sarah Carpenter, D-Ward 4, at a March 21 meeting. “When you give them an opportunity to lay their head down at night and get support, that’s how you start to manage behaviors.”
But precisely because of its controlled nature, the pod plan does not have unanimous support among those who are currently without housing in the Burlington area.
Grey Barreda, a former resident of the Sears Lane encampment, criticized the plan as a “continuation of the language of management.”
“Suddenly, the city has dropped its solution in everyone’s lap,” Barreda said. “We’re still recovering from the city’s last solution.”
Barreda, who is currently suing the city for removing the Sears Lane camp, said he and other former campers would rather return to the spot that now serves as a staging site for construction vehicles involved in the Shelburne Street rotary project.
“I haven’t spoken to a resident that hasn’t felt a connection to that land, and hasn’t felt like we were called there,” Barreda said.
But opponents of the Elmwood Avenue location acknowledge that neighbors in the South End would likely oppose putting the pods at Sears Lane, which was one of the 10 sites examined by city officials.
“The reality is,” Langfeldt said, “there probably isn’t a neighborhood in the city that would be thrilled if this was being put up there.”
Correction: A previous version of this story gave an incorrect day for the pod project’s hearing before the Burlington Development Review Board and partially misrendered a quotation from Brian Pine.
