Is Any Town Willing to Host a 100-Bed Homeless Shelter?

For months, the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity has been looking for a place to put a 100-bed, low-barrier homeless shelter. Of all the possibilities, a former mattress store on Williston Road in South Burlington seemed like the best fit.

No dice.

Shortly before CVOEO executive director Paul Dragon was set to propose the idea to the South Burlington City Council, the city’s staff raised objections.

They argued that the proposal would strain city services and lead to increases in retail theft, drug use and other unsavory behavior. They further suggested that the shelter could make life harder for its guests by forcing them to travel several miles a day into Burlington, where many unhoused people receive services. As a low-barrier shelter with no sobriety requirements, the proposal would serve some of the county’s most vulnerable residents, most of whom do not have access to reliable transportation.

Six days before the September 8 council meeting, Dragon pulled the plug.

“We cannot successfully site and operate a shelter without partnership from local leadership and a common purpose around addressing homelessness,” he wrote in an email to Seven Days.

The outcome illustrates a central challenge in the widely shared goal of creating shelter for Vermont’s growing population of homeless people: finding communities willing to accommodate them. The episode will also do little to ease the frustration of Burlington officials, who have long argued that the Queen City is unfairly bearing the brunt of what is a borderless crisis.

Burlington spent more than $6 million in 2024 to help people experiencing homelessness, “many of whom come from communities across the state,” Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said in a statement to Seven Days.

“I will continue calling on municipalities to join us in developing regional solutions to our shared challenges,” she said.

South Burlington deputy city manager Nicolas Storellicastro disputed the idea that the city’s resistance reflected a broader trend.

“We’re willing partners,” he said. “But we want to be willing partners to a solution that works, not a shelter for shelter’s sake.”

Vermont’s rate of homelessness soared during the pandemic and remains alarmingly high: At least 4,000 people were without housing as of May, according to state data.

Vermont municipalities are routinely confronting problems connected to more people living outside, from unsanctioned encampments to quality-of-life concerns. Ground crews were so frequently encountering trash and human waste outside of Montpelier’s Pavilion Building — which houses the offices of the governor, the state treasurer and the attorney general — that Gov. Phil Scott’s administration installed bird noise devices this summer to dissuade people from sleeping on the porch.

In Chittenden County, local leaders have responded to the surge in homelessness by scrambling to open new shelters. And yet the need continues to outstrip supply. An estimated 300 people still live on the streets or other places unsuitable for habitation, according to CVOEO. That’s far more than pop-up emergency shelters can accommodate when they open on the coldest winter nights.

Last month, the Burlington City Council called on the state to help CVOEO secure a 100-bed shelter somewhere in Chittenden County. Gov. Phil Scott criticized the request, suggesting that a shelter of that size would only invite problems. He said he’d prefer to see a handful of smaller shelters spread across the county. But CVOEO maintains that one larger shelter would be much easier to operate.

State lawmakers and the governor set aside $83 million this year to build out Vermont’s shelter system. CVOEO hoped to use some of that money to purchase a building for the new shelter and pay for its operating costs. But first, Dragon said, the nonprofit needs to identify a potential site, which is a key part of the grant review process.

The agency has been working with the Champlain Housing Trust since April to identify potential sites. Michael Monte, the trust’s CEO, said they’ve toured at least a dozen properties across Burlington, Colchester, South Burlington and Shelburne.

“Really just throwing a wide net to all possibilities,” Monte said.

Some are too expensive or would require a large investment to accommodate a shelter. Others are poorly located or lack the right layout.

“The Roxy theater, that’s just sitting empty,” Monte said, referring to the former movie house in downtown Burlington. Yet the space is too tight.

Another frequently mentioned property — the state-owned office building on Burlington’s Cherry Street — is too pricey, too large and in poor physical shape.

“Most folks who look at that building say it simply needs to be torn down,” Monte said.

The property at 1717 Williston Road checked all the boxes. The 17,000-square-foot building had an open floor plan with half walls that would offer some privacy while allowing staff a clear line of sight. It sat on a bus route less than four miles from Burlington’s Old North End, where CVOEO runs a daytime center.

On August 31, Dragon sent the city council a nine-page memo explaining how the shelter would operate.

It would be open and fully staffed from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m., with security guards on-site, he wrote. The shelter would not enforce strict rules around sobriety, but guests would be required to adhere to a curfew and would not be able to come and go throughout the night.

At least 60 beds would be permanent, providing consistency for guests while also leaving room for walk-ins. Beds would be grouped into “neighborhoods” to accommodate different populations, such as couples or people with pets.

The shelter would serve as a “triage hub,” Dragon wrote, stabilizing people enough to transfer them to other shelters in the area, such as those intended for families or people recovering from substance use.

In his memo, Dragon acknowledged that the shelter could lead to more calls for emergency services, but he said the impact should be limited.

“Staff will be highly skilled with de-escalation, behavior modification, and trauma-informed care,” he wrote. “Clear behavior expectations and agreements and onsite supervision will mitigate the need for emergency response in most instances.”

CVOEO would also erect fencing to create a boundary between the shelter and abutting properties, including a pizza restaurant and a dog training center. A wooded area separates the site from a nearby condo village.

Once the shelter opened, Dragon vowed, CVOEO would continually evaluate its effects on the community through ongoing meetings with the city.

But South Burlington officials weren’t persuaded. Their own memo, written a day later, outlined a host of concerns, from increased crime and drug use to strained municipal services.

They pointed to data from the large shelter operated by CVOEO at the Holiday Inn on Williston Road during the pandemic. Over roughly 14 months, police responded to more than 575 calls and conducted more than 200 directed patrols, while the fire department answered 286 calls.

Dragon defended that effort, saying the Holiday Inn shelter was opened virtually overnight in response to “the biggest public health crisis in modern times.”

“Our staff did amazing work that few others will do,” he wrote in a text message to Seven Days.

South Burlington officials also argued that a large homeless shelter could prompt other communities — potentially even outside of Vermont — to send people there. That would be difficult for the city, which lacks support services to help them.

CVOEO expected that most guests would head into Burlington, where they could use the daytime centers, eat at the food shelf, or meet with agencies that help them apply for permanent housing or public assistance programs.

As part of its proposal, CVOEO was working with Burlington, the University of Vermont Medical Center and other organizations to find funding for passenger vans. Staff would also likely give guests rides in their personal vehicles, Dragon wrote in his memo.

South Burlington officials expressed doubts. Public transportation seemed like the only real possibility, they wrote. Getting from the shelter to CVOEO’s resource center would require two buses — a trip that can take more than 50 minutes at certain times of day — or a 3.5 mile walk.

That could deter guests from getting the help they need, especially during the winter months, said Storellicastro, the South Burlington official.

“We want nothing more than to help our neighbors in crisis, but we weren’t sure this was doing that,” Storellicastro said.

Despite CVOEO’s decision to withdraw the proposal, Storellicastro said city staff still planned to discuss it with the council. He said staff might have been more receptive if the shelter were meant for people on the verge of obtaining permanent housing, who might have an easier time getting around.

Would a low-barrier shelter work at another South Burlington site? Storellicastro couldn’t say definitively.

“We’d evaluate it under the same threshold: Is this location setting up the shelter to succeed?” he said.

With winter quickly approaching, CVOEO may need to find a temporary site for an emergency shelter as it continues searching for a permanent one, said Monte, of CHT.

South Burlington will likely be low on the list of potential partners.

“We will continue looking for viable locations and working with communities that are prepared to engage in collaborative problem-solving,” Dragon said.

But such communities will be hard to find.

In Shelburne, selectboard chair Michael Ashooh noted that his town already hosts Harbor Place, a Shelburne Road motel that has provided temporary housing for the homeless since 2013. The recently opened Bay Ridge apartment complex, meanwhile, features more than 80 perpetually affordable apartments and condos.

He hadn’t heard Shelburne mentioned as a potential location for a low-barrier shelter. Such a proposal would create an “uproar” in town, he said.

“A lot of people would feel that Shelburne has done its part and that this would be asking us to take on more,” Ashooh said. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Not in My Suburb | South Burlington doesn’t want a 100-bed homeless shelter in town. Will anyone?”

This article appears in September 9 • 2026.

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