By Gary Winslett
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
It’s a little after 11 a.m. on Sunday. I’m standing
outside the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House at the top of Church Street in
Burlington, Vt. In many ways, it’s very classic New England. Outside the
church, there’s a crowd and a speaker; it’s a little hard to tell what’s actually
going on — is it church, or a political rally, or maybe a political rally
pretending to be church? The speaker is very clearly talking about Trump
without saying his name. Washington, D.C., is more than 500 miles away.
But if you walk around the corner, you quickly get to a
blighted, abandoned building. It used to be a very nice L.L. Bean store. The
retailer left, in large part due to the public disorder, drugs, and crime in
that area. That L.L. Bean, the president of the Burlington Business Association
testified in Montpelier, experienced the
highest theft rate of any L.L. Bean in the United States. You look down in
front of this retail cadaver, and you see trash and needles, the detritus of
the drug problem that plagues the city.
I think it’s rude to take pictures of people addicted to
drugs to post online, so I chose not to do that; you’ll have to take my word
for it that you see quite a bit of that in the area as well. The park next to
City Hall nearby is consistently, perpetually populated by homeless people. The
drug use there is more or less nonstop; one woman was revived with Narcan five times in one day.
City Hall Park is across the street from the Flynn
Theater, and it is essentially unusable for law-abiding citizens. It’s
certainly not a place you take children. And it is not just that one park. The
Fletcher Library has a similar story. You should be able to take your child to
the library; but that library is so overrun with homeless people and the
antisocial behaviors that they bring with them that it also is not a place
where regular people are going to feel safe and welcome.
How did this happen? How did we get here? Answering that
is important for Burlington if it is ever to reverse its decline, but it is
also important for a more national audience because it’s a warning of how a
city with significant advantages can undermine itself with grievous
self-sabotage in regard to public order.
Politics Is About Priorities
Every policy decision a city makes is a choice about who
matters more. Burlington’s leaders have consistently deprioritized middle-class
voters’ experience and businesses’ safety in favor of feeling “compassionate”
toward drug users. They did this for all kinds of political reasons that I’ll
get into, but it is near-undeniable that they did it.
In 2020, the city council cut nearly a million dollars from the police budget; six
years ago, Burlington fielded around 100 officers, and today it has fewer than 70. The county’s top prosecutor, Sarah George,
has declined to seek cash bail and has centered restorative justice as an
alternative to the traditional criminal legal system since taking office in
2017, reducing the volume of cases that result in charges or jail time. The
result is a catch-and-release approach so lenient that one Burlington man has
had more than 1,800 recorded encounters with police. George has
also acknowledged that for a stretch, her office deprioritized low-level cases
such as retail theft, saying “I absolutely own that we prioritized crimes of
violence during that time.” Burlington hit a ten-year high of 467 theft incidents in 2023. These
are not unrelated facts.
Local businesses feel abandoned. Outdoor Gear Exchange,
an anchor store on Church Street, lost more than $400,000 to shoplifting in 2024 alone; workers
opening up shop have to deal with needles, feces, and people passed out in the
entryway before they can deal with customers. When a group of businesses wrote an open
letter pleading for help, the city’s leftist coalition — pro-Palestinian
groups, trans-rights activists, the local DSA chapter — denounced them for it.
When police have pulled over cars for broken taillights
or tinted windows and found drugs, George’s office has generally declined to
prosecute those cases too, reasoning that the stops themselves might have been
tainted by racial bias — never mind what turned up once the car was stopped.
Ask George what should happen to the people occupying the
city’s parks and sidewalks, and she doesn’t talk about moving them. She talks
about opening a supervised injection site downtown, over neighborhood
objections. “They cannot be disappeared,” she has said. “They are part of our community.”
Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak has said much the same thing in
different words, opposing a plan to station police in City Hall Park on the
theory that displacement isn’t a solution. Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special
assistant to end homelessness, is opposed to arguments that prioritize the public’s safety
over the needs of the homeless.
In the city’s priority hierarchy, the drug user’s
experience seems to reliably outrank the middle-class normie’s. As one mother told The Atlantic this summer: “Everyone talks about
needle exchange and harm reduction. I mean, okay. But it’s like my children and
I are living in the zombie apocalypse.”
The zombie apocalypse. That’s what these upside-down
priorities get you.
You Can’t Redistribute Your Way Out of Disorder
Burlington’s left sees everything as a vertical
distribution of resources and privilege. The problem is always about
inequality, and the solution is always to find someone rich to shake down so
that you can spend the money on the people at the bottom. They are so committed
to that being the conceptual structure of everything that it creates a litany
of intellectual pathologies.
The first is that they’re so busy being mad at the top
and virtue-signaling about the bottom that they can’t see the middle. This is
one of the main ingredients in the middle class’s desire for safety and order
becoming invisible as a political demand. It also means that they don’t tend to
see crime as a morally interesting problem, and they can’t hold people at the
bottom of the social order morally culpable, even when they’re doing drugs in
public and being a real burden on the community. You can hear it in their own
words: When a coalition of Burlington’s left (pro-Palestinian groups,
trans-rights activists, the local DSA chapter) wrote to denounce the business
owners asking for help, they argued that calling for more police would “sacrifice
the most vulnerable members of our community.” Note what that sentence does.
The addict smoking fentanyl in a doorway isn’t a person making bad choices that
hurt others; he’s a vulnerability to be protected from consequences, full stop.
Because the local issue of public order doesn’t fit well
with the problem structure they like focusing on, they don’t really want to
look it squarely in the eye, so this bizarre thing happens where hyperlocal officials are arguing about Israel and
Palestine, as if an intractable conflict on the other side of the world is in
any way germane to the duties of their office. They’re animated about Trump but
yawn at their own city’s slide into blight.
And they’re so busy making sure that no one would ever
accuse them of being conservative that they’ve negatively polarized themselves
into accepting disorder and squalor as some kind of inevitable fact of life.
They don’t want to be seen as judgy. But sometimes you should be judgy. It is
good and appropriate to have enough judgment to understand that doing hard
drugs is a bad, self-destructive, antisocial choice, and doing them in public
is even worse. But they can’t bring themselves say that, even to themselves. So
what you get is this real paralysis around being tough on crime.
Likewise, as I’ve written about extensively elsewhere, Burlington — and Vermont
generally — has a severe housing shortage because these officials make it
nearly impossible to build new housing. But you can’t redistribute your way out
of a shortage. Who does the shortage hurt the most? The people at the bottom
who get pushed into homelessness. It’s a big reason why Vermont has the third-highest homelessness rate of any state. Whereas
states such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia have homelessness rates of between 9 and 12 per 10,000 residents, Vermont’s is 53. We have
more than three times as many homeless people per capita as New Hampshire.
One does not need a Ph.D. in restorative justice studies
to understand that homelessness is a criminogenic phenomenon. When you combine
high homelessness with a lax attitude toward drugs and crime, you get public
disorder. Fixing it requires understanding that problems can be problems even
if they don’t fit into that vertical framework that sees everything through the
lens of inequality.
This Was a Choice
Burlington didn’t stumble into this. It chose it,
decision by decision, each one small enough to defend on its own, but in sum
they were devastating. A budget cut here, a declined prosecution there, a park
no one will clear, a library no parent can use. None of it required malice,
only a value system that ranked the discomfort of judgment and the thrill of
self-satisfaction above the safety of the people who have to live downstream of
the consequences of those choices. That’s the real lesson, and it isn’t really
about drug policy. Cities don’t collapse into disorder because they lack
resources or good intentions; Burlington has plenty of both. They collapse when
compassion curdles into an inability to hold anyone accountable for anything
and disorder gets rebranded as the price of virtue. That’s the warning of
Burlington.
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