Church Street Needs Help

[Re “‘Burlington Is Back,’ Mayor Proclaims,” June 22, online]: In response to Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak patting herself on the back, I would like to say that although the “patient” is no longer on life support, downtown still has quite a lot of recovering to do. Look at the number of unoccupied retail spaces on Church Street and adjoining streets. The businesses that replaced many of the now-closed legacy shops and boutiques are mostly weed shops, tattoo parlors and fast-food joints for college students. Where are the anchor stores? How about an Old Navy? A decent shoe store? An ALDI to replace the terminal City Market? A Trader Joe’s? Affordable family dining establishments? A music venue?

The reason these places don’t exist is because the mayor just isn’t business-friendly. How about an independent, business-led initiative to get some anchor stores on the Church Street Marketplace? A one-year tax holiday on new businesses that are opened? Working with building owners to offer affordable retail spaces?

No Seniors?

The “24 Hours on Church Street” article [June 24] painted a picture of the marketplace in a favorable manner. I feel that it was a bit deceptive.

Normal days, this summer in particular, aren’t hot and sunny. World Cup contests don’t happen often, especially causing watch parties in City Hall Park projected on a large screen.

After reading the article, I realized there weren’t pictures or references to middle-aged or senior people. We’re the “people who say they no longer go downtown.” We don’t feel safe and don’t want to be subjected to panhandling and evidence of drug use. We’re a large, important part of our community who weren’t represented in the article.

Limited View

The web headline on your June 24 cover story [“We Spent 24 Hours on Church Street. Here’s What We Saw”] missed the mark. I’m not bothered by “what you saw” but “where you looked.” The article doesn’t represent “the 1.5 million visitors [who] annually stroll its bricks,” the customers who go into restaurants and shops instead of idling or carousing on the street. A story entitled, for example, “36 Hours in Montréal” would describe the features and places to visit and pleasures to have, not the people who are struggling or inebriated there. As a Burlingtonian who regularly goes to Church Street, I see a fuller picture, not just the small part the article described. The article needed a different title or a different perspective.

Accurate Picture of Church Street

[“24 Hours on Church Street”] is an exceptional piece of journalism that lays bare the recent pronouncements of city officials that “Burlington is back.” Seven Days’ decision to devote 11 staff members’ time to the investigation is more than significant.

Seven Days’ detailed and documented hour-by-hour chronicle of “a day in the life of the marketplace” reveals facts that establish that Burlington’s downtown is still riddled with pervasive abnormal behavior that violates any reasonable concept of socially acceptable behavior — abnormal behavior that most families and visitors would opt to avoid.

Before I was educated by the article, I assumed that Burlington was, in fact, “back,” based on the government officials’ pronouncements. I now know that the rose-colored-glasses spin painted by Burlington’s hierarchy is highly inaccurate. I strongly recommend that all Burlington lovers read the article to obtain an accurate sense of what Church Street is really like from dawn to dawn on any given day.

Bad Visit to Burlington

[Re “24 Hours on Church Street,” June 24]: We visit Burlington once a year. It’s an annual day trip we take while visiting my parents’ place near Lake George, N.Y. The drive is always beautiful. We love to stop at the local shops along the way before having lunch in Burlington. Yesterday was warm and sunny in town, so we decided to eat lunch in the park. We could not sit on the benches because they were all occupied by homeless people. We wanted to sit under a tree, but there were drug addicts huddled or sleeping under most of them, and when my daughter (entering college next year) got a whiff of a woman who walked past us talking to herself, we decided to walk back to the restaurant and eat indoors.

We’ve been taking day trips to Burlington for 40 years, and they’ve always been something we look forward to, but on the way home yesterday, we decided to visit someplace else next year. And we scratched Burlington off the list of college towns for my daughter.

Stalking Is ‘Unpatriotic’

I was unaware when Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak stood on the stage, shaking my son’s hand after he received his diploma at the new Burlington High School, that she was in the midst of being stalked [“Man Accused of Stalking Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak,” June 15, online]. I deeply appreciate that, in our beautiful state, we enjoy freedom to engage in healthy, respectful discussion and disagreement. Predominately, our spiritual communities coexist, respect each other’s differences and are harmonious neighbors. One beautiful example is Temple Sinai and the Islamic Society of Vermont sharing a parking lot when needed for overflow.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Aryeh Moskowitz has felt religious discrimination. I wish him peace. Aggressively controlling or threatening a public servant isn’t going to bring about peace in the Middle East or anywhere. His lawyer defending the actions, claiming First Amendment rights and our mayor’s disinterest in tolerating differing opinions, is disrespectful to the Constitution and fundamentally unpatriotic.

I understand the confusion, given how our national and world leaders are behaving. As a health care provider, I encourage my colleagues to be brave like Mulvaney-Stanak in response to unreasonable and unproductive behavior and to use whatever institutions of justice we still have standing to hold healthy personal boundaries, while respecting perspectives or feelings of an increasingly traumatized public that lacks healthy mentors.

Our mayor demonstrated courage, clarifying the difference between discourse and threatening behavior. Thank you, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak, for your service and upholding not just the letter of the law but also the true intent of creating healthy community discourse about difficult topics, at a time when community has never been more important.

‘What Democracy Looks Like’

Your reporters missed the boat on covering the incredible engagement this season of Vermonters in their representative democracy [“‘The Vermont Way’: Seven Days’ Final ‘Ways & Means’ Story Considers Whether the Vermont Legislature’s Tradition of Civility and Compromise Can Endure,” June 17]. I am so proud of what Vermonters accomplished. Acts that pass in the Vermont legislature, such as Act 181, are not just hyperbole and virtue-signaling, as your reporters see them (with the nonsense about “modernization” versus “alter[ing] the character” of small towns). Act 181’s rules, which came out this winter, were extremely ill-conceived and would have had real, economically regressive effects on some of Vermont’s most vulnerable citizens and likely no measurable environmental gains.

A diverse group of citizens organized and testified to the House Committee on Environment, and their testimony was so illuminating that the committee recommended repealing parts of the 181 legislation. (I so wish your reporters had actually listened to the testimony. Then they would have understood.) The Vermont House followed through with a unanimous vote on the repeal.

Thousands of emails and phone calls went out to all representatives to help make this happen. There were no incidents of threatening behavior found after an investigation. That is what democracy looks like, and I hope more people can celebrate the difference Vermonters made to help craft good legislation and be a part of the legislative process. If not us, then who?

Let’s Slow Down

[Re Nest: “The Building Dilemma: A UVM Study Says Constructing More Homes in Burlington Won’t Bring Down Costs — as Investors and Buyers With Cash Compete for What’s Built,” April 29]: Miro Weinberger is a developer who advocated for building more homes as Burlington mayor and continues to do so today as the executive chair of Let’s Build Homes.

As a result, we have two 11-story apartment buildings in the former pit. Two four-story apartment buildings in the South End are approved to be built. And a multistory apartment building looms over the former YMCA and surrounding neighborhood.

We need more info on public-private partnerships and how much the taxpayers are paying for infrastructure for these embedded multistory boxes.

Do we want developers to continue to define our future housing stock like this? Do we want investors to drive homebuyers out of the housing market as the April article reports?

So far, the results we see are not scaled to the surrounding neighborhood or cityscape, nor do they create traditional Burlington-style neighborhoods. And single-family-home buyers are outbid by investors. Should we legislate to protect homebuyers against investors’ overreach?

Correction

Last week’s cover story “Pleading Their Case,” about the electoral contest for Chittenden County state’s attorney, misstated where Bram Kranichfeld lives in Burlington. He resides in the New North End.

This article appears in The Cartoon Issue • 2026.