News tips come to Seven Days in the form of emails, phone calls and old-fashioned letters, often posted from prison. Some are full of off-the-wall conspiracy theories; others point us in the direction of Vermont’s most important stories. There’s only one reliable way to tell the difference between the two: Check it out.
That’s how reporter Derek Brouwer found this week’s cover story about the shocking deterioration of living conditions at Decker Towers, an apartment complex run by the nonprofit Burlington Housing Authority. On St. Paul Street, three blocks south of city hall, it is home to 160 low-income, elderly and disabled residents. And it has unwillingly become a go-to winter refuge for people who are unhoused.
Several residents reached out to the paper in January, and, Derek noted, “the things they were telling me seemed a lot more severe” than what had been reported in earlier media coverage. “Specifically, they were talking about how many homeless people were actually living inside the building.”
He added: “I went to Decker Towers to see for myself.”
Derek saw enough drama the first night — a blaring fire alarm that no one reacted to; residents showing him the steel cage they use to protect their packages — that he decided to come back for more. The next night he witnessed people trying to force their way into the building. He also learned that one of its managers had earlier been rushed to the hospital, where she later died.
“Within two hours, it was pretty clear that this was total chaos. And that the stakes were pretty high,” Derek said.
He returned five more times, interviewing some of the people who have been sleeping and using drugs in the stairwells of the 11-story high-rise, stealing property, and vandalizing the building’s amenities. Freelance photographer James Buck spent nearly as much time shadowing security patrols and wandering the stairwells. James and Derek got to know Decker residents who are too scared to leave their apartments, as well as others forming what one termed a “tenant militia” to fight back.
“I didn’t feel like one night was enough,” Derek said. “It was clear there was bad stuff happening, but I needed to spend enough time there to know that this was a daily occurrence and not a one-off … [that] I could go any time of day, any day of the week, and the stairwells would look the same.”
There are no shortcuts in a story like this one, which aims to accurately observe and document the dynamics in a large, complex community. With details gleaned from being there, night after night, Derek’s story shines a light on system failures; it also reveals that all the players in this particular conflict are vulnerable and, in the end, seeking the same thing: reliable shelter.
Seven Days invests time and resources in crafting such stories because it’s not enough to explain what is happening in our community; our writers and editors set out to bring the news alive, to make the case for why readers should care. Derek took a similar approach last year when reporting a cover story about evictions. He spent more than a week shadowing Chittenden County Sheriff Dan Gamelin, whose job is to deliver mostly bad news to tenants. One was barricaded inside an apartment at Decker Towers.
This reporting experience was different. “It’s one thing to see the day a person is being evicted,” Derek said. “This was seeing the daily collateral damage that is coming from those problems.”
One detail that didn’t make it into his story: Mayor Miro Weinberger has not visited Decker Towers since residents began complaining of problems last year. Two who hope to replace him got invites to a recent meeting in which residents voted to organize volunteer security patrols. As Derek notes in his piece, one tenant sported a sweatshirt that captured the mood. It read: “We the People are pissed off.”
PS: Got a news tip for us? Visit sevendaysvt.com/news-tip to send it.
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The Fight for Decker Towers: Drug Users and Homeless People Have Overrun a Low-Income High-Rise. Residents Are Gearing Up to Evict Them.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2024.
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