Author’s note: this piece is the second in a two-part series on homelessness in Burlington. The first installment can be read here.

I first met Sasha Mayo at a Food Not Cops lunch distribution in City Hall Park. Mayo, easily recognizable by her pink-laced boots, said she has been involved in political activism since the Gulf War, pulling down her sock to show me the scar she’d gotten while trying to protect redwood trees from loggers.

Mayo doesn’t live in Burlington anymore, but she stopped by the park to eat and catch up with friends. She told me she became homeless after she was evicted from her apartment in the aftermath of a fire on North Winooski Avenue in May 2024. 

Mayo is one of more than 4,500 people who experienced homelessness in Vermont in the past year, though this estimate is likely lower than the true number, according to the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont’s 2025 State of Homelessness in Vermont.

Although Mayo experienced significant mental health challenges in the wake of her eviction, she is allowed to stay in a motel near Middlebury, Vt. for 80 days thanks to support from the Howard Center’s Mental Health Urgent Care clinic, she said.

“By the time the 80 days are up, it’ll be cold and I’ll probably be able to stay there until I can find a place to live again,” she said.

Vermont’s hotel-motel voucher program, formally known as the General Assistance Emergency Housing program, has undergone significant upheaval in recent years, leaving many without shelter.

The state’s homelessness rates have increased by 200% since 2020, and in 2024, Vermont had the nation’s fourth highest rate of unhoused people per capita. Need for housing far outpaces emergency shelter capacity, which sits at just 602 beds, according to the report. The hotel-motel voucher program was intended to fill this gap.

This summer, debates over homelessness and public safety took center stage in Burlington, as residents, politicians and advocates clashed over how to address Burlington’s growing homelessness crisis.

While these debates have quieted in recent weeks, the crisis is far from over. 

Under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, Vermont received significant funding to address homelessness via affordable housing development and expanded shelter and assistance services, said Sarah Russell, the City of Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness.

“I think that [the pandemic] allowed us an opportunity to really understand the scope of our challenges around lack of affordable housing,” Russell said.

COVID-era homelessness policies prioritized keeping homeless people sheltered as a public health measure. Vermont used ARPA funding to provide shelter to anyone in need through the hotel-motel voucher program, said Russell.  

Although the City of Burlington has invested in local shelters and nonprofits, the number of people experiencing homelessness is far beyond its capacity, said City Council President Ben Traverse.

A version of the hotel-motel program existed prior to the pandemic. During COVID, the program’s annual cost increased from $5 million to nearly $50 million, according to a June 11 article in Seven Days.

In June, Gov. Phil Scott vetoed a bill aimed at extending and revamping the hotel-motel program, citing concerns about cost and efficiency, according to the Seven Days article. 

Hundreds of Vermonters who had passed the program’s 80-day limit were evicted from their motel rooms earlier this year.

“Pre-pandemic, our number of unsheltered folks had always remained really low,” Russell said. “What we’ve seen with the winding down of that motel program that sheltered folks during COVID … it’s really removed the stability of shelter for people, and now we are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people unsheltered.” 

This upheaval, coupled with rising homelessness rates, has left Burlington non-profits and city agencies buckling under demands for support that they are not equipped to meet, Traverse said.

Though officially, the city prohibits camping on public lands, it has opted to permit encampments along the waterfront in an out-of-view area known as the “Urban Reserve,” and installed dumpsters and a water spigot to improve sanitation conditions. 

Traverse, who has been critical of this hands-off approach, emphasized the need for state-level support in building additional affordable housing and shelter space to address the homelessness crisis. 

“Burlington can’t do that alone,” Traverse said. 

Recently, Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak has clashed with Gov. Phil Scott on these issues, with the Mayor calling on the state for additional support, and the Scott administration blaming “failed progressive policies” for the conditions on Burlington’s streets, according to a Sept. 11 VTDigger article.

In response to requests for support from Burlington leaders, on Oct. 23, Gov. Scott announced his Short-Term Action Plan to Address Challenges in Burlington. The plan includes 14 measures centered on accelerating the city’s backlogged court system, expanding police presence and prioritizing care for addiction and mental health concerns. 

Earlier this month, state troopers began additional patrols as part of Gov. Scott’s plan to improve safety in downtown Burlington.

In an interview with the Cynic, Shawn Burke, interim Burlington police chief, noted that there were limits to the police department’s ability to address public safety concerns, citing Chittenden County’s court backlog as an exacerbating factor of conditions downtown. Enforcing city ordinances and no trespassing policies are central to the BPD’s role in addressing public safety complaints, he said.

“We find that we’re displacing behavior out to either Saint Paul Street or down at King Street, and oftentimes those are areas that are privately held. And again, we’re going to trespass you from there,” Burke said. “I don’t feel as though the police ever offered the solution to fully address the conduct, because there’s so many complicating factors.”

Russell and other advocates have pushed back against the framing of Burlington’s homelessness crisis as primarily a public safety issue, questioning narratives that were centered in community debates this summer.

“Why are people not complaining because members of our community don’t have a place to live?” Russell said. “I’m not saying that those concerns are not real, because they’re absolutely real, but the answers to those concerns are, ‘where are you when we need you to advocate to the state to keep people sheltered?’”

While Russell acknowledged the fear many residents have about public safety risks from individuals who are mentally ill or using illicit substances, she urged that more attention should be placed on the needs of homeless people. 

“I do think that there is a perception and a conflation that seeing people suffering on our streets equates to not feeling safe,” she said. “I can’t overstate enough that people who have to sleep outside are at far greater risk of assault, theft, danger.”

There is consensus across the political spectrum that Burlington, and the state of Vermont, need more affordable housing. While recent projects are underway to build additional affordable housing units, historically, zoning policies and “Not-In-My-Backyard” attitudes have stalled additional development, Russell said.

The cost of living in Vermont is high. Even though the number of homes on the market in Vermont has increased since the pandemic, the median home price has continued to rise, according to a Sept. 11 VTDigger article.

City Council President Traverse emphasized the importance of updating zoning codes to expand shelter and affordable housing, citing the newly-reopened Champlain Place in Burlington’s South End as a success story. The shelter was created as a collaboration between the Champlain Housing Trust and Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.

“The reason why CHT and CVOEO are now able to operate Champlain Place there is because the council, with the support of the former mayor, supported an update to our zoning code that allowed for shelter space to be built along that sheltered road corridor,” Traverse said.

Although its cost of living is expensive, Vermont stands apart from other states with high homelessness rates, which tend to be larger and more urban. 64.9% of Vermont’s population resides in rural areas– the highest of any U.S. state, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. 

Because it is one of the only cities in a wide rural radius, Burlington bears a disproportionate weight in serving the state’s homeless population, Traverse said.

“Burlington is really one of the only communities in the state, or at least in the immediate region, that have stepped up to the plate in the way that they have,” he said.