This commentary is by James Harvey. He is a Vermont musician who grew up on a farm in Duxbury and now lives at Decker Towers in Burlington.
Will Eberle’s recent piece — “How to win ‘The Fight for Decker Towers’” — interested me as a resident of the Towers. I salute his empathy for the young, homeless people with substance use disorder who are stuck in a lose/lose situation, and share it in some ways. It’s not helpful or fair to put all the blame for our situation on them. However, his solution is frightfully naive.
The shift in Vermont’s economy from agricultural to primarily service/recreational has had an outsize impact on Vermont residents. Jobs that working-class people once relied on to feed their families have largely disappeared, along with family structures upended by joblessness, housing costs, the huge impacts of addiction, etc. Many young people now consider the idea of marriage and lifelong commitment to be outdated — even absurd. Without the social structures that once supported and encouraged young couples, unstable and even anarchic ‘relationships’ increase, and the effect on young people has been immense. Add the effects of COVID on education, shake well, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Of course not all people with substance use disorder are the same. A few are able to function and raise children in a loving way. Many more struggle with parenthood, getting caught up in the criminal justice system and often losing custody of their kids for varying lengths of time. They mean well, but their children suffer. Last, we have a group who can’t or won’t take responsibility for their kids at all, mostly because their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t either. This group is relatively small, but they have an outsize effect on the rest of society. It is largely their children who end up shooting dope in the stairwells and even sleeping there, among syringes, trash, urine and even human waste. Sometimes they threaten residents who object.
Why? Imagine that neither parent ever read a book to you, told you bedtime stories, said they were proud of you, clothed and groomed you properly, helped you with your homework, or discussed your future plans and aspirations. The list could go on, but the effects of such a childhood should be apparent to everyone. Those are the kids we see at Decker. Similar people have even gotten apartments here, but housing alone makes little difference; horribly, the last two tenants to move in died of ODs before their first month was over.
Derek Brouwer’s excellent journalism brought attention to our situation, so security is finally improving. The Weinberger administration’s focus until now has been to squeeze these kids out of the public eye like toothpaste from a tube. Miro has only woken up due to the PR disaster, but what happens next with these kids? Mr. Eberle’s prescription can’t work unless massive federal funding becomes available for mental health facilities, remedial education, job training and low-income housing — an unlikely scenario. Would private philanthropy help? Perhaps, but no one’s volunteering.
In the meantime, God help us all.
