The time had come for Neil Preston to make Stephen move his tent.
Several weeks earlier, the 61-year-old man, like many of the homeless people who sleep outside in Burlington, had taken up residence in one of the city’s neighborhood parks. The predictable result resulted: Residents spotted Stephen’s green-and-gray abode in Calahan Park and quickly reported it to city officials. A pair of complaints were assigned to Burlington’s urban park rangers, a two-person enforcement team led by Preston.
The city forbids camping on public land, but Preston didn’t want to lean too hard on Stephen, who Seven Days agreed to identify only by his first name. He kept his site clean, didn’t bother others and eschewed hard drugs. He was on disability for PTSD and had a bad back that made walking difficult. For Stephen, picking up stakes was no small thing.
Preston, 49, had been checking on him and bringing water. Stephen explained that he had a lead on an apartment in New York. Preston listened and encouraged him.
Neil Preston is squeezed between the expectations of residents who want clean, safe and quiet green spaces and those whose lives are a daily struggle.
Then came a third complaint, two weeks after the others. Someone had uploaded a blurry photo of Stephen’s tent to an app called SeeClickFix, which city residents use to anonymously report graffiti, overgrown trees and, increasingly, homeless people. More than 40 complaints about illegal encampments were filed through the app last month. To accompany the photo of Stephen’s tent, the latest complainant cited the city’s no-camping ordinance. “Please help the public understand why it is or is not being followed in this case,” the user wrote.
Preston was out of time. But if Stephen couldn’t camp in this spot, where should Preston tell him to go? Neither the city’s written policy nor the growing legion of frustrated residents had to answer that question. Neither did Preston, but he felt compelled to try.
He’s spent the past four years as Burlington’s first-ever urban park ranger, charged with maintaining order in public spaces in the state with the fourth-highest homelessness rate in the country. The number of unhoused people in Vermont tripled during the pandemic and hasn’t budged since, even though the state has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to the problem. Gov. Phil Scott recently scaled back the spending by pushing more than 1,000 people out of emergency housing in motels, starting in March. Burlington and other small cities are bearing the brunt of that exodus.
Each day, Preston and his fellow ranger, Daniel “Jake” Payne, shuttle between 39 city parks that encompass more than 550 acres of public land, doing damage control wherever they can. They keep tabs on the city’s transient population and the places they call home: a waterfront tree house with a guard dog; in tents beside multimillion-dollar homes; in hammocks by a basketball court; on the lawn outside city hall.
The conflicts that Preston must mediate have soured the civic psyche and consumed his work. He is squeezed between the expectations of residents who want clean, safe and quiet green spaces and those whose lives are a daily struggle. He hears from homeowners who believe the public disorder is hurting their property values and homeless residents who want Preston to stop others from defecating near their tents.
Preston, meanwhile, is equipped only with a sweat-stained ranger’s polo, a can of pepper spray and his capacity for empathy.
“I feel like I’m in the center of a hurricane,” he said.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Preston and Payne walked through Calahan Park to deliver Stephen a notice to leave. He was camping along one edge of a short, sloped field, between a community garden and some tennis courts.
“Knock, knock, hello!” Preston announced. “Steve, how you doing? You got time to talk?”
“Yeah, for a minute,” Stephen quipped from inside his tent. “I got nothing else to do.”
Stephen stepped outside, and the sun lit up his greasy gray hair and white beard.
“We’re going to work out a solution,” Preston assured him, though the ranger was still unsure what that solution might be. Stephen is among the growing share of Vermont street dwellers for whom homelessness has ceased to be a short-term setback and become a way of life. The number of people considered “chronically” homeless, meaning they have been without stable shelter for a year or have cycled in and out of housing several times, has shot up from 150 or so before the pandemic to more than 900 today.
“My bigger concern,” Preston told him, “is that it feels like you’re kind of stuck right now.”
“I am,” Stephen said. He worked through his predicament aloud. An apartment that some friends had promised in New York had fallen through. To afford one in Vermont, he would need to use a Section 8 voucher, but local housing authorities had stopped issuing them because they were short on federal funds. He thought the homeless shelters made him sick, and he didn’t do well sharing a room.
When Preston confronts a problem that has no immediate answer, he falls back on the motto he’s adopted for the job: Make it less bad.
Preston looked toward a cluster of trees on the opposite edge of the field, about 100 feet away, where a portion of a wooded patch had been cleared. When the nearby homeless shelter used to close during the day, guests began hanging out — and sometimes causing problems — in that corner of Calahan, reshaping its terrain in the process. Preston pointed to the area.
“What is the capacity to just relocate this tent?” Preston asked. “I’m not saying that it’s OK or permanent,” he added, “but it’s a step in the right direction.”
“Right,” Stephen agreed. “At least it’s hidden, out of sight.”
Preston snapped his fingers, and Payne handed his colleague a Sharpie and a form titled, “Notice to remove possessions.” Preston gave Stephen three days to relocate. He zip-tied the piece of paper to Stephen’s tent and handed him some bottled water and granola bars. Then Preston and Payne headed to the next park, hoping Stephen would oblige them.
Dartboards and Guard Dogs
Earlier that day, Preston walked warily down a dirt trail that led to the waterfront encampment of his nightmares.
He was north of the towering Moran FRAME and kid-friendly Andy A_Dog Williams Skatepark, in an area dubbed the Urban Reserve. A few hundred yards to Preston’s left, sailboats drifted on Lake Champlain. To his right, cyclists whizzed along the Greenway, the crown jewel of the Queen City’s parks system.
Up ahead, a dog named Chopper awaited.
Within this dense stretch of woods that hugs the lakeshore, some campers have erected a sprawling compound using plywood and tarps. Spare wood pallets jut above piles of stuff: wagons, storage crates, a Vermont flag, pots and pans, hammers and nails, a bottle of salad dressing. The residents have stationed a portable sink up a set of stairs, next to elevated sleeping quarters. A Vermont Rail System sign warns: “Private Property No Thru Traffic.” Chopper, an unusually stout cattle dog, was enforcing that edict.
More than 30 tents can be found along one stretch of wooded understory by a gravel access road.
Chopper had sunk his teeth into Preston during one of the ranger’s earlier visits. Preston knew the dog had bitten others, too, and harassed a Canadian tourist.
The dog saw Preston coming up the path and charged.
“You’re going to need to get Chopper!” Preston yelled to its owner. But no humans were home.
The dog jerked at the end of its lead, baring its teeth and barking. Preston stood his ground. He reached for the pepper spray that he keeps holstered on his belt, worried Chopper’s lead might not hold, and squirted the irritant toward the ground. Chopper’s barks transformed into a whimper. “Get the fuck back in the tent,” Preston implored the dog. It scurried to the side, then replied with a low, defeated growl.
The Urban Reserve hosts the bike path, a dog park and one of the largest assemblages of homeless encampments in Vermont. More than 30 tents can be found along one stretch of wooded understory by a gravel access road. There are laundry lines, beach umbrellas, fence panels and even a dartboard tacked to a tree. Another 10 or so people have set up camp around an adjacent clearing where public works employees dump snow during the winter. Others live along the water’s edge, around the four corners of a field or, like Chopper’s owners, in wooded areas throughout the reserve.
The ramshackle settlements are the closest thing Burlington has to a sanctioned camping area for homeless people. Following the election of Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak in 2024, city officials adjusted their approach to enforcing the ban on camping in city parks. Preston acts more aggressively to shut down camps in neighborhood parks, such as Calahan. The Urban Reserve, while also parkland, has long been used by “rough” sleepers.
Here, Preston is much more targeted in his enforcement. The tacit message: Don’t cause problems, and the city will focus elsewhere. Campsite removals are slower. Before the heavy machinery could disassemble Chopper’s home, Preston would need to complete a written assessment of the site and take photos for review by the city attorney.
Make it less bad.
Large encampments, especially those shielded from public view, can quickly become unsafe or unmanageable. See “the Jungle” in Ithaca, the politically progressive small city in New York, where an out-of-sight, out-of-mind encampment village eventually fostered murderous violence. Closer to home, see the settlement on Burlington’s Sears Lane, the 2021 removal of which prompted a showdown between activists and the administration of then-mayor Miro Weinberger. See Decker Towers, the low-income apartment building that has been overrun by squatters and drug users during the cold winter months.
Preston and his partner, Payne, are trying to prevent the Urban Reserve from becoming a similar hazard — hence the visits to Chopper, whom a police employee has since helped relocate to a rural animal sanctuary.
The city has tried to give campers the tools to keep their spaces tidy. Last summer, Mulvaney-Stanak set aside $50,000 in city funds to install dumpsters and portable toilets in both the Urban Reserve and the Intervale, another high-density camping area. “I had been jumping up and down for three years, saying that people plus anything makes two things: poop and trash,” Preston said. “And I was supposed to not pick those things up.”
He does anyway. Preston regularly uses a bucket loader in the Urban Reserve to transfer piles of refuse to the city-installed dumpsters. The addition of basic amenities, however utilized, gives city officials additional justification to show up. While scooping a bucketful of trash near the shore, Preston checked on an older woman who was camping alone. He listened to another camper’s frustrations about her neighbors, trying to gauge whether the dispute would boil over into violence.
“They’re fucking using my path to shit and piss in,” the second woman told Preston. She gestured to a grassy area where she walks her dog. “When you start getting over that way, look on both sides. You got tissues on both sides,” she rasped. “I’m going to start fucking freaking out.”
Urban Mindfulness
Preston has learned to navigate these spaces as a rank-and-file representative of a small municipal parks department. Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, has fewer residents than Pawnee, Ind., the fictional setting of “Parks and Recreation,” a television show whose humor plays upon the smallness of small-town problems.
Burlington created its park ranger program in 2021 as part of a broader effort to reduce the need for armed policing by employing new kinds of frontline workers, including the community support liaisons embedded with the Burlington Police Department. The initiative was launched just as the pandemic was exacerbating Vermont’s housing shortage and fueling spikes in addiction and mental illness. Dealing with the effects of those social problems was always part of the park ranger’s job description.
Now it’s the whole job.
Preston, a former ski patroller and academic coach at Champlain College with no training as a social worker, remembers interviewing for the new position. “They were asking about ways to build community,” he said. “I was talking about doing mindfulness at Leddy Beach.”
Looking back, he laughs at his own naïveté.
Preston accepted the job, and someone drove him around to meet people and see the territory. He was introduced to a longtime maintenance employee named Ritchie Snow: “Ritchie goes, ‘Got a gun? You’re gonna need one.'”
Preston and Payne do not have guns. They don’t even have walkie-talkies — if they need backup, they dial 911. Preston drives a beat-up Ford F-250 affectionately dubbed the “Smoke Wagon” that features flashing rooftop lights. A rotting wood tailgate has “Keep back 500 ft” scrawled across it. The Smoke Wagon, of which Preston has temporary custody, is more practical than the rangers’ primary rigs, a pair of white Chevy Bolt electric hatchbacks not suited for hauling away trash and detritus. Preston calls them the “roller skates.”
His first summer in the field, Preston contracted scabies. During the second summer, someone broke into his Leddy Park office, rooted through his belongings and drove away with his roller skate. Preston later found the Bolt in a city park; the perp had left a long knife on the seat. Preston took note that the thief hadn’t used the knife to slash the upholstery. “He could have just really hammered me, and he chose not to, very specifically,” Preston said. “He just had to escape.” Although the lead ranger has felt Chopper’s bite, he has never been pricked by a needle, despite encountering thousands of them. Preston’s annual salary is $77,400.
Preston has a lean, not-very-imposing build, and his voice sometimes registers Muppet-like tones. He describes his brain as exceptionally hyperactive, which he considers an advantage when taking in his surroundings and a minus when he forgets to turn off the Smoke Wagon’s flashing lights. Taped to his personal cellphone is an unusual prediction from a fortune cookie: “You will live a long life with crazy hair.” His coif could be described as a mop, but at work, it’s typically covered by a ball cap. By July, his skin had a deep tan, in contrast to his colleague Payne, who manages to remain pasty white.
A University of Vermont graduate from New York, Payne said public service always appealed to him. Payne, 24, took the first job he could get in city government, as a parking services agent handing out tickets. The motorists he cited never gave him a hard time, he said, a testament to his gentle manner. Last summer he transferred to parks and became a ranger.
The pair have seen firsthand how the worst elements of street life create a vortex of misfortune. Preston served as best man in one homeless couple’s wedding at a downtown church in 2023. The bride has since died of cancer, and Preston has watched as her surviving spouse has slipped from a motel room to a bedbug-infested shelter to a tent in the Urban Reserve. Lately, Preston has been encouraging his vulnerable friend to return to the homeless shelter, but the streets have a way of sucking people in.
With the Urban Reserve more crowded than ever, the ranger has qualms about pushing certain campers, Stephen among them, into it.
“Even if you told me you’re gonna fire me, I wouldn’t send them there,” Preston said. “Because they would get eaten up, and I can’t do that, morally.”
One troubling reality of the camps is that many of those who pitch tents in neighborhood parks have done so precisely because they are trying to avoid danger.
Sabrina Kingsbury had been living in Oakledge Park for a couple of weeks when the rangers ordered her to relocate her tent. On a recent Monday, her deadline to move was approaching.
Kingsbury, 43, recently spent 18 months imprisoned on federal charges. She had shoplifted $1,200 worth of clothes from the Black Diamond store on Church Street. The case went federal in part because she threatened an employee with a knife. Kingsbury was using drugs at the time, she said.
After serving her sentence, Kingsbury ended up in state-funded motel rooms. The walls and fixtures in her last room, in Shelburne, were caked in blood splatter. A few days after she finished cleaning the room, Kingsbury had to leave; the state was shrinking its emergency housing program. She lugged her CPAP machine and a portable oxygen concentrator to Oakledge, where she set up camp. There, she met another homeless woman who had just gotten a job at a South Burlington restaurant. They pitched their tents next to each other, seeking safety in numbers.
Preston texted Kingsbury a location along the waterfront where he suggested she move. But the site was closer to downtown, which Kingsbury, wary of relapse, was trying to avoid at all costs.
She and her new friend decided to search for a quieter spot.
On the Steps of City Hall
In City Hall Park, Preston roused a man who was sleeping in the grass. The man had neither a tent nor blankets, but beside him lay a lawn mower, an electric trimmer, a snow shovel and a broom. It was 7:49 a.m.
“Knock, knock, hello!”
Preston asked the man to move his equipment away from the sidewalk. “You’re going to get way more attention than you want here,” he said. The man got up and pushed his lawn mower toward Church Street. He left behind a gasoline can, half full, that Preston placed in the bed of the Smoke Wagon.
More than 30 people were already using City Hall Park, where many sleep on the grass or on benches around the clock. Preston typically begins his workdays with a stop there. He asks people to clean up trash, checks them for signs of breathing and gets to know the regulars.
On this Wednesday morning, a young woman asked Preston if he could spare change for a coffee. A tattoo of a chain ran from her nostril to her left ear. Preston hadn’t seen her before. He bought her a cup at Kountry Kart Deli, but she was gone by the time he returned.
Preston approached a man who was holding a hatchet. “Will you holster that?” he asked.
“That foot looks like shit,” he said to a woman with open sores who was sitting on a bench with a pipe and a needle. Preston helped her walk across the street. On the opposite sidewalk, someone was blasting the rapper DMX from a speaker. Someone else, obviously intoxicated, was trying to pull down his pants.
“Harm reduction always makes sense, except that there’s too much harm to reduce.” Neil Preston
The suffering and dysfunction bother Preston. In City Hall Park he sees a “humanitarian crisis,” one to which he and Payne can only dedicate some of their day. A cast of public servants, outreach workers, police and citizen activists of all political stripes also rotate through the downtown green space.
In Preston’s estimation, it is not enough. He recently needed a police officer to cite a man Preston had kicked out of the park and issued a no-trespass notice. The man, Preston said, had threatened to shoot him. But a community service officer informed Preston that the cops would not be available to enforce trespass orders that day. Only four officers were on duty, and they had to focus on more serious issues.
“Harm reduction always makes sense,” Preston said later, “except that there’s too much harm to reduce.”
The City of Burlington spent roughly $8 million in staff time and services to address homelessness last year, according to city estimates. Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak listed the spending by department — including $3.4 million by the fire department and $1.7 million by police — in an October memo to Gov. Scott. The city bore these costs even as the mayor laid off 18 employees and cut other services to close a $9.8 million budget gap. She made a point to keep Sarah Russell, the city’s special assistant to end homelessness, who was originally hired using federal funds.
That was before June, when Scott vetoed the Democrat-controlled legislature’s bill to continue funding thousands of motel rooms for homeless people while transferring management of the program to regional nonprofits. Since then, federal funding for housing vouchers has also dried up, and President Donald Trump issued an executive order that threatens to yank federal funds from cities that don’t sufficiently crack down on public drug use or urban camping.
“A city can’t solve this issue,” Mulvaney-Stanak said in an interview. “We need strong state partnership.”
The mayor and the governor have met only once since Mulvaney-Stanak, a former state lawmaker, won election as mayor in March 2024. Last summer, administrators with the Vermont Agency of Human Services visited Burlington at the mayor’s request to discuss homelessness, substance use and mental health issues. They met with local officials, then took a walking tour of downtown, “just to see the state of Burlington,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
The mayor met with Scott himself last October, in Montpelier. She wanted her counterpart to hear how the statewide housing crisis was having outsize effects on Vermont’s largest city. His staff, who she said did most of the talking, cast Burlington’s problems as a matter of local public safety. The meeting has not led to better coordination. Scott still has not accepted her invitation to see the Urban Reserve or City Hall Park himself.
“I’m walking around my city all the time, and the governor is conveniently much more removed from a lot of this,” Mulvaney-Stanak said. “I’m losing my patience in that regard.”
The governor did not make himself available for an interview, but in a statement, spokesperson Dustin Degree wrote that Scott “is in Burlington often, and like everyone else, he can see open drug use, blight, disruptions, encampments, and crime.”
He blamed the city’s “failed progressive policies” for the conditions on the streets.
“Pairing pro-housing, pro-affordability policies, committing to strong community policing, and holding repeat offenders more accountable are the clear solutions to this problem,” Degree wrote.
The mayor has had to adjust how the city approaches its camping ban to reflect the overwhelming number of unhoused people, she said. While she does not think “sanctioned camping” is a smart use of resources, Mulvaney-Stanak acknowledged that she has tried to “lean a little bit more into leniency” in the Urban Reserve and other parklands that have a history of encampments.
Yet Burlington remains anything but unified on how best to manage homelessness. The city council has spent hours discussing Food Not Cops, a group that distributes hot lunch to homeless people. The debate continued at last week’s meeting, where councilors fought bitterly over whether the group’s exile from the downtown Marketplace Parking Garage had improved public safety there. The activists moved to City Hall Park.
In early July, following the state’s latest motel-room rollback, city officials announced a plan to allow overnight car camping in 12 spaces at Perkins Pier. Business groups were incensed by the central location; the mayor’s office canceled the plan within 24 hours, before any campers arrived.
Preston, caught between the purpose of city parks and the realities of the unhoused, sees the divisions in Burlington each day. He’s concluded that residents still don’t grasp the magnitude of the homelessness problem. How else could they expect a city employee to make tents go away?
In the Weeds
Back in the Urban Reserve, a small blue tent was staked in some very tall brush.
Days earlier, Preston had attached a “notice to remove possessions” to the zipper. He’d scribbled a personal note on the form, just to be sure. “EQ,” it read, referring to its owner, “If you are using this tent, call me — Neil.”
He hadn’t heard from EQ since, so Preston parked the Smoke Wagon along a gravel access road and prepared to dismantle the tent. Payne, who was in the roller skate, stepped out and joined him.
The policy for camp removals is governed by terms of a 2019 legal settlement between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, which sued in 2017 on behalf of a homeless camper. The settlement affords campers due process before their stuff is hauled off, which was why Preston had to affix a written warning to the tent.
It’s also why Preston and Payne were getting their hands dirty. Per policy, city officials must store seized belongings for at least 30 days. Anything wet or perishable gets tossed in the trash. Everything of apparent value gets bagged, labeled and trucked to a storage facility.
Preston and Payne dragged the tent from the brush. A hole in the fabric — either by slash or by tear — had left piles of clothes damp and stacks of personal files ruined. Preston uncovered a shaving kit, condoms and three unused overdose-reversal kits. He sifted out bottles full of cigarette butts and others that were full of urine. There were documents from the Community College of Vermont and a greeting card that read, “We’ll be friends until we can’t remember how old we are.” Ten minutes into his dig, Preston’s gloved hands brushed a hypodermic needle. It was still capped.
The rangers dropped the torn tent in the dumpster and hauled the salvageable items to the 10-by-20-foot storage unit in the South End that the city rents for this purpose.
“Jeepers!” Payne said as he rolled up the door. “This is fuller than I remember.”
The unit was lined with storage racks holding personal effects salvaged from 44 campsites disassembled since June. Rangers had stashed a shopping cart loaded with linens and a tarp upon which someone had written, in red Sharpie, “I love you with every breath I take xoxoxox.” Religious texts were piled in a red, faux-snakeskin tote.
This is where Stephen’s belongings would end up, too, if he didn’t comply with the rangers’ orders to move his Calahan Park tent.
Stephen came to Burlington three years ago from a small New York town, imagining the city would be a nice place to start anew. But he arrived without housing and spent the little money he had on campground fees and hotel rooms as he tried, unsuccessfully, to find an affordable apartment. Since then he has shuffled between homeless shelters, motels and encampments. Just before the Fourth of July, Stephen left the Champlain Place shelter because he couldn’t get along with his assigned roommate. That’s how he wound up in Calahan, a block down the street.
To comply with Preston’s order, Stephen turned to some friends he’d nicknamed his “homeless wolf pack.” The guys had brought Stephen food and water during a time when his disability benefits were delayed, so he trusted them to handle his stuff. He couldn’t afford to lose his possessions, even if, besides a cot, they could fit into a couple of large backpacks.
Stephen had no cookware at the moment. He was spending $360 a month on bagged ice and premade sandwiches from a gas station up the street, eating just one a day to save money. The food shelf, across town in the Old North End, was too far away, even by bus.
“Because I’m disabled, I don’t like traveling around, and I’m kind of scared of downtown,” Stephen said.
He didn’t know who lodged the anonymous complaints about his tent, which had been pitched next to a community garden. He got along with his neighbors, and no one had approached him with any concerns.
“It wasn’t these nice people at the garden, probably,” he said.
After Stephen’s deadline to move had passed, Payne went to check on him. To his surprise, Stephen and his wolf pack had staked the tent next to the clearing that Preston suggested, rather than inside it. In the process, they’d disturbed a section of vegetation. That created another headache for the rangers, but one that could wait for another day.
“We’re gonna try to get some folks connected to you to hopefully get you a more permanent spot,” Payne told Stephen. “Preferably an inside one.”
Meanwhile, a new problem had cropped up at Calahan. Someone had ripped out Brussels sprouts and other vegetables from a plot in the community garden near Stephen’s tent. The garden is fenced and locked. Regardless, some weeds had been flattened along the fence line near the affected plot, suggesting an intruder.
The gardeners have had run-ins with some of the people who loiter or live in the park. Some have hopped the fence to use the water spigot or sleep in the storage shed, longtime gardener Gordon Clark said. Others have argued loudly or behaved erratically just outside it. Clark, 65, has encountered people who broke inside to take a shower. Some gardeners have said they feel unsafe, but speaking for them, Clark said no one wants to tell a homeless person they can’t use the garden hose on a 90-degree day.
“We’re not trying to set up a little fortress that no one can touch,” he said. “At the same time, once the barriers become permeable…”
He continued: “It’s a difficult moral conundrum, as well as a sheer logistical and physical conundrum. I haven’t heard a good answer yet, short of changing our society’s priorities.”
The gardener who lost part of her harvest declined to comment and asked Seven Days not to print her name. But she called Preston about the damage to her plot. “She wanted me to go and sit with all the unhoused people in Calahan and keep my ear to the ground to see who had done it,” Preston said.
Mediating such conflicts has resulted in some of the more rewarding moments in Preston’s time as a ranger. He views them as chances to develop mutual understanding, to help housed residents see unhoused neighbors as something other than a threat and vice versa.
In this case, Preston tried to represent the unhoused occupants of Calahan — and his perspective as the worker trying to address resident complaints. “Well, it doesn’t sound like you have any evidence or reason to believe that it was these people,” Preston recalled telling the gardener. “Does that sound like an accurate statement?”
“She was like, ‘Well, yeah.’
“Well,” Preston continued, “does it sound like that might be hazardous and complicated and uncomfortable for me to go and then ask around or observe a group in a way that is just being suspicious of them?”
Later that day, Preston’s boss informed him that city officials had received a new complaint from a relative of the gardener. This one wasn’t about Stephen’s latest campsite. It was about the ranger himself.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tent City | Burlington has more homeless encampments than ever. Two men are tasked with keeping them under control.”
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This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
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