The Fight for Decker Towers: Drug Users and Homeless People Have Overrun a Low-Income High-Rise. Residents Are Gearing Up to Evict Them. 

A grim battle is being waged inside Decker Towers, the 11-story apartment building in Burlington for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. No one is winning. But in the drug-sieged corridors of Vermont's tallest housing complex, it's clear the 160 tenants are losing.

The vulnerable neighborhood is being overwhelmed by a surge of homeless people seeking shelter, many of them drug users. In the past two years, Decker residents have become collateral damage in an ongoing crisis.

Every day, dozens of people enter the building to buy and use drugs, or simply to escape the cold. Its twin stairwells are littered with used needles, crack pipes and glassine bags. They're streaked with urine and feces, etched with vulgar graffiti, and strewn with blankets and other meager belongings of the people who sleep there each night. Intoxicated visitors routinely stumble around or pass out on the stairs, in the hallways and in the laundry rooms.

"People in Burlington know there are problems at Decker Towers," longtime resident Bob Collins said. "They have no clue how bad."

Over the past few weeks, someone defecated in a hallway recycling bin, and the stench permeated nearby apartments. A vandal or thief ripped the door to a resident-run food shelf off its hinges. Someone tried to cut through a $600 steel cage installed to shield residents' packages from thieves. Laundry machines were ripped apart. In the parking lot, within view of surveillance cameras mounted on a mobile security trailer, a car windshield was smashed.

Burlington Housing Authority, the federally funded agency that owns and manages Decker, has fortified the front doors and wired common areas with security cameras, which Burlington police detectives can view in real time. The problems, however, are only getting worse.

In a city and state where homeless shelters are full, police are stretched thin, and the combination of fentanyl and meth has made available drug treatments less effective, Decker Towers is functioning as an unfunded warming shelter, an unmonitored injection site, and a hub for distribution of drugs and stolen goods.

Residents in low-income apartments have nowhere else to go; there aren't other vacant subsidized units in town. So those who live at Decker are barricading their apartment doors with chairs and security bars. Some are staying inside their units unless a friend can escort them to the laundry room or the bus stop. They are taking self-defense classes and buying weapons at Walmart. They are calling public officials and news outlets.

After hearing from several residents in January, I went to Decker Towers to see for myself. Over seven evenings, I planned to observe and listen but swiftly became enmeshed in a tangled net of chaos and community. I faced a few of the dilemmas that its residents routinely encounter, such as what to say to the angry man demanding to be let inside and whether to rouse an unconscious person in a common area.

Many of the residents I met expressed empathy toward their unwanted visitors; some tenants themselves have survived struggles with homelessness or addiction.

But they are getting desperate.

Last Thursday, Decker's elderly and disabled tenants voted to form a resident council, which then voted to establish a neighborhood watch. The council plans to deploy teams of residents as amateur security guards — a "tenant militia," as one resident put it, armed with pepper spray, stun guns and firearms — in place of professionals that Burlington Housing Authority says it can't afford and would not resolve the complex problem.

"I hope it doesn't turn into a bloodbath," Cathy Foley, a lead resident organizer, told me ahead of the vote, "but everyone who is volunteering understands the risks."

Those risks were apparent when I spent a recent Friday evening in the front lobby with Collins, 70, who was waiting for his son to take him to a movie. Collins boasts a white mustache and a quick wit. Since the amputation of his right foot, he's used a wheelchair. On this night, he wore a purple skullcap and a custom-ordered shirt emblazoned with his personal motto, "Peace and greed cannot coexist."

We watched as people who did not live in the building filled the glass-lined entryway, again and again, looking for a way past the locked double doors. As one resident walked out of the building, Collins spotted a woman trying to slip inside. "Tailgating!" he yelled, then wheeled himself in front of the entrance. The woman retreated.

Soon, though, five people stood outside the doors. Someone used the call box to ask a resident to let the group in. As they waited, the gaggle grew to six, then seven. Collins recognized one of the would-be guests.

"He got mad at me the other night when I wouldn't let him in," Collins said. "He was banging on the glass, going, 'You fucking asshole!'"

One of Collins' neighbors, 52-year-old Jeffrey Flores, sat down on a wooden bench.

"I'm through with being nice," he said.

The situation at Decker was bringing out the "other Jeffrey," he later explained, the "evil Jeffrey," who, when angry, could boom so loud that he frightened his neighbors.

Flores pulled a large pocketknife from his sweatpants and snapped open the blade.

"Don't take that out now," Collins urged.

"Oh, I don't care," Flores said. "If anybody messes with me..."

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'Open sesame!'

Minutes later, a resident came downstairs and let the crowd inside. A man in a Phillies jacket grabbed the door before it swung shut and entered, too.

Collins and Flores looked on, their cooler heads prevailing. Blockading the front door had become a losing battle, and they knew it. Decker has 160 residents who need to walk their dogs, step out for a smoke or catch the bus, so its doors are opening and closing all the time. Moments after that group entered, a toddler emerged from an elevator, her guardian trailing behind her, and pressed the big blue handicap button that activates the front door.

"Open sesame!" the little girl said.

The lobby at Decker is the size of a small living room. These days, it's a bare, forbidding space: no plants, no rug, one small bench. On the wall above the bench, a video monitor displays a live surveillance feed of the room, broadcasting to everyone who enters the building that they're on camera.

Near the rows of mailboxes, a letter board still lists every tenant by name. There was, on this Friday night, a landline phone for residents to make a free call, though it has since been removed. The letter board and landline are remnants of a time when Decker more closely filled its original role as a place of respite for people with limited means and special health needs.

The stuccoed high-rise on St. Paul Street opened in 1971 for low-income seniors. Residents were drawn by its location near downtown and across from Kerry's Kwik Stop, the shared amenities, and the majestic views of Lake Champlain. Later, Burlington Housing Authority opened the building to people with physical and mental disabilities, too. Decker residents pay 30 percent of their income toward the roughly $750 monthly rent; the federal government typically covers the rest.

Over the past couple of years, as the drug market has exploded in Vermont, some Decker tenants have become part of the trade, whether by choice or exploitation by a dealer looking for a place to set up shop. The housing authority evicted nine Decker tenants last year, all of whom the agency suspected of dealing drugs; more evictions are pending.

The eviction process often takes many months, during which time problems fester. Some apartments, housing authority officials say, have attracted dozens of daily visitors, whom tenants have a right to host as their guests. Police have managed to shut down only a few of the suspected dealers at Decker, according to the housing authority.

The environment is corrosive for tenants, especially those who have a substance-use disorder or are in recovery.

Before dawn on the Friday when I met Collins in the lobby, an ambulance had arrived for Victoria Morrison, one of two live-in resident managers. The 55-year-old had struggled with alcohol and drugs and was on the brink of homelessness when the housing authority hired her last fall, according to Charlie Morrison, her stepbrother, who also lives at Decker. In exchange for a free room, Victoria served as eyes and ears for the building after the daytime property manager went home each night. She mopped floors, locked up the laundry rooms, and tried to keep order among the revolving door of visitors and squatters.

Within a few months, Victoria appeared to have relapsed, Charlie said. On January 24, the housing authority had sent residents a letter informing them that Victoria was no longer employed and would be moving out soon.

Now, two days later, she was in the hospital.

A man who does not live at Decker picked up the courtesy phone in the lobby and dialed the University of Vermont Medical Center.

"Hello, this is Al Williams," he said. "I'm looking for Victoria Morrison."

Williams waited for a few moments. "So, she's over on ICU?"

Williams hung up the phone. He pulled a key to Victoria's apartment from his pocket and showed it to everyone who passed through the lobby. Williams, a frequent visitor to Decker, had been with Victoria shortly before she went to the hospital. He said she had been drinking and using drugs that he had not supplied to her.

Williams had met Victoria a week or so earlier, while he was visiting someone at Decker. They'd become friendly, Williams said, and he became her "caregiver." Williams said Victoria had given him a key to her apartment. Now he was asking residents in the lobby whether he could enter her place while she was in the intensive care unit.

"I don't want to just walk in. What's the rules around here?" he asked.

Soon the remaining resident manager, Mayank Nauriyal, came and convinced Williams to hand over the key.

Victoria died in the hospital three days later, on January 29. It's unclear what, exactly, caused her death. An autopsy is pending.

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Stairways to Hell

As Nauriyal retrieved the key from Williams, Decker's two stairwells were beginning to fill up.

By 7:15 p.m., nine people occupied them, including one woman who had rolled out a blanket on a landing and held a needle in her hand. A man was passed out lengthwise along the stairs to another floor. Drug paraphernalia dotted the landings and many of the steps. Harsh fluorescent lamps illuminated everything, including broken glass and a water bottle filled with amber liquid. The floor was sticky, and the air was sour.

Most residents avoid the stairs when they can. The stairwells may not be clean, but they are warm, and warm spaces are in short supply for the estimated 250 people who are living on the streets in Chittenden County this winter. During a cold snap in January, housing authority employees encountered 23 people sleeping in Decker stairwells, the agency said — nearly as many as the 30 or so who stay in the city-run warming shelter down the street.

The housing authority has installed sharps containers and Narcan dispensers throughout the building. The agency also locked the single-stall restroom on the first floor after squatters commandeered it to inject drugs and, presumably, use the toilets. Now they find other places to relieve themselves.

Each morning, housing authority employees walk the stairwells and tell the homeless people to move along. Throughout the day, they also tell unruly visitors to leave. Discerning who is at Decker visiting a tenant — a protected right — and who is squatting can quickly lead to confrontation. Someone escorted out of the building can easily get back inside a few minutes or hours later. Even if authorities filed trespassing charges, courts would typically not hold somebody on the low-level charge.

Keeping the building clear on a Friday night would be a Sisyphean task for the one remaining resident manager. Nauriyal had begun wearing a body camera during his rounds. He also installed a personal security camera outside his apartment door, next to a Buddha statue.

On this Friday night, two Burlington police officers arrived around 9 p.m. to do a mobile patrol of the building, known as a "walk-through." Nauriyal trailed the officers as they snaked between the stairwells and hallways of all 11 floors.

"You cannot sleep here, ma'am," Nauriyal told one woman. "If you're visiting, it is understandable. But no sleeping in the stairs."

"Why do you have a knife in your hands?" he asked another.

"Because I'm picking at my fingernails," the woman replied.

The officers encouraged some people to move along but did not ensure everyone left the building.

They did, however, arrest a 20-year-old homeless man who often spends time at Decker. Sylas Benoit had been charged twice in recent weeks for breaking into trucks in Burlington and stealing their contents, including a shotgun and a hunting rifle. While those and other cases were pending, the court required him to spend his nights at a King Street address where Benoit said he was staying. He was breaking curfew by wandering around the high-rise.

Some residents loathe Benoit, who they suspect of stealing their packages and breaking into cars, though he hasn't been charged for any thefts at Decker. Scott DeThomas, a 64-year-old resident, said he tackled Benoit in the lounge after seeing him rip open another resident's package. "I told him I was going to beat the shit out of him," DeThomas said. "He's a little punk."

Susan Miller, a 65-year-old retired nurse, has a different take. She also suspects Benoit has stolen her belongings — namely, $200 worth of groceries from Instacart — but said he "needs a hand up." As Decker's unofficial community cook, Miller fixed Benoit a plate of food during a summer barbecue, drawing the ire of some of her neighbors.

"I don't feel good about throwing people out of the building," Miller said. Instead of patrolling the stairwells, Miller wishes Decker residents would set up a structured space for the homeless people in the community room.

Benoit spent the weekend in prison for violating his curfew. But on Monday, when he faced a judge, his public defender asked the court to release Benoit and change the address for his curfew — to an apartment at Decker Towers. A deputy state's attorney did not object, so Benoit was released under orders to spend his nights there.

Only when a Decker resident called the cops on Benoit a week later did anyone check to see whether he actually had permission from the tenant whose address was listed on his curfew order. Benoit did not, police learned. Now they're looking to arrest him again.

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Wild, Wild Towers

A group of Decker residents gathered to play cards on a Sunday afternoon in late January. Several came armed with stun guns and pepper spray, which they never thought they'd carry. But they wanted to feel safe coming downstairs to the community room to play Exploding Kittens with friends.

Sarah Procopio, a 46-year-old painter, brought a special guest: her new puppy, Gizmo, a 3-month-old future service dog whose curly tail signaled the shar-pei in her.

"Do you want puppy therapy?" Procopio asked her neighbor, Abbie Wolff.

"Yes! Are you kidding me?" Wolff said, taking Gizmo in her arms.

Wolff, 34, worked as a user-experience researcher for a health care company before a car accident several years ago left her with daily migraines. Now she lives on disability checks, $279 of which goes toward rent each month. She's highly sensitive to light and wears sunglasses indoors.

Wolff explained the rules of the absurdist game to 71-year-old Victoria Carter, who did not understand the point of cat-themed cards that "attack" and "explode" but was happy to watch. She wore a big, round Trump button pinned to her shirt. The pair eyed a card in Wolff's hand and giggled to each other.

"Is it the multi-boob cat?" another friend, David LeBeau, asked.

"No," Wolff said, "it's the one with rockets coming out of its underpants!"

Between turns, Wolff demonstrated her new stun gun to Debbie Phelps, and 67-year-old Phelps showed off the pink canister of pepper spray she keeps with her walker. The pepper spray was part of a growing home-security arsenal that Phelps had ordered from Amazon. Wolff recently took a women's self-defense and empowerment class. Both Wolff and Phelps said they're afraid to leave their apartments alone. Phelps has been pushed through a doorway and caught in the middle of physical altercations.

Their decision to arm themselves has followed anguished reflection. Wolff has been torn between her progressive impulses — informed by the knowledge that, without family support while she waited for a housing voucher, she would have been homeless — and the creeping sense that the burden she and her neighbors are now shouldering is harmful and unfair.

"It feels like we're bleeding heavily after numerous paper cuts, of just so many tiny, endless, unpunished violations of our space," she wrote in an email to me.

Meeting in the community room to laugh is one way Wolff and her friends are trying to overcome their fear. Yet the conversation, inevitably, returned to problems in the building. Between bites of homemade chicken wings, LeBeau, 41, recounted the story of a man who was jiggling the doorknob of his apartment at two in the morning. Wolff tensed up.

"Do we need to stop?" Procopio asked her.

"No, I want to know about it," she said. "I just had trouble sleeping last night."

Procopio told the group that some Decker residents have started releasing pepper spray into the stairwells to deter squatters. It seemed to be aggravating her asthma, she said.

"I was spitting up blood yesterday because of that," LeBeau said.

"The worst one is called bear mace because it is designed to turn a bear, and it's nasty," he explained. "And there's somebody here who has it."

After the game ended, around 6 p.m., LeBeau carried his plate of chicken bones out of the community room and into the lobby. Three people stood near the elevators: a man with a covering over his face; a woman with a sleeping bag and a large wheeled suitcase; and a man holding an electric weed whacker, still sealed in the box.

The man with the trimmer swayed about the lobby as though he were balancing on a dinghy in choppy seas. Decker residents have become accustomed to telltale signs of drugs. They know the lingo and recognize when somebody is high.

"He's tweaking," LeBeau observed, dinner plate in hand.

---

'Call For Help'

Why hasn't this awful situation been forcefully addressed?

Steven Murray, Burlington Housing Authority's executive director, arrived at the Statehouse on January 17 prepared to recount the reasons. But first, Murray decided, he had to make sure the politicians understood what was really going on.

"Y'all don't see what we see," he began.

Murray was one of more than a dozen people to testify before a joint legislative committee as part of a daylong hearing on public safety issues. Speakers before him offered data points and jargon and chose their words carefully. Murray resolved to riff "from the heart," he told lawmakers. He mentioned feces in laundry machines. He talked about drug dealers using a woman's head "as a battering ram." In other words, he let it rip.

Residents, Murray said, "are living in terror." He was personally "ashamed."

But, he asserted, the housing authority was powerless to stop the drug dealing, trespassing and disorder that plagues many of its buildings, and Decker in particular.

"I don't have the tools," Murray told lawmakers. "I'm telling you right now: This is a call for help."

Evicting suspected drug dealers is taking far too long — up to 15 months for a tenant at a complex a block away from Decker. Police aren't apprehending those dealers, he added, and "no one's coming" when residents call them for help. The one thing the housing authority could do is hire full-time security guards, Murray said, but the agency cannot afford them. (Murray has since contracted with private security guards, part time, to conduct nightly walk-throughs of Decker and several other buildings.)

A little more than a week later, Murray heard from outgoing Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger's office. The mayor wanted to talk. When they met on January 29, Murray said, Weinberger chastised him for his comments to lawmakers about Burlington police.

Burlington Housing Authority operates as an independent government agency. It distributes $25 million in rental housing subsidies each year and manages nearly 700 low-income units in Chittenden County. Under state law, the mayor's sole formal role is to appoint the five volunteer commissioners who oversee the housing authority. They in turn have power to hire — and fire — its executive director.

Weinberger informed Murray that he would not be reappointing the commission chair, Mike Knauer, whose tenure on the board had stretched 30 years. Knauer had backed Murray's leadership during his two years helming the housing authority, which has cycled through five directors since 2016.

Last week, Weinberger replaced Knauer with Brian Lowe, the mayor's former chief of staff who later led the municipal COVID-19 response. Weinberger also appointed the recently retired executive director of HomeShare Vermont, Kirby Dunn, to fill a vacant board seat.

Murray told me that he thought Weinberger was exacting "political payback" for Murray's legislative testimony. The mayor, he said, had ignored his pleas for help at Decker during a private meeting in early 2023, during which he claimed Weinberger was "playing with his phone."

Weinberger told me that he did take issue with Murray's comments about Burlington police, which he called inaccurate: Law enforcement responded to every high-priority call at Decker last year, the mayor's office said, though police often do not show up to deal with lower-level issues that also plague the building. But Weinberger said his board appointments stem from his broader concern about Murray's management.

"This is the responsibility of the housing authority to get this situation under control," Weinberger said. "And they manifestly have not done that."

Weinberger said Murray's team has not done enough to control access to the building, a sentiment many Decker residents share. Weinberger said he is "deeply skeptical" that the housing authority can't muster the cash "to manage the building properly."

Following his meeting with Weinberger, Murray submitted a proposal for the city to help improve security at Decker Towers. According to the proposal, two around-the-clock guards would cost more than $600,000 per year. Weinberger described the request as "kind of absurd" in its cost estimates and limited scope of action.

Decker Towers takes in just $1.4 million in rent annually, Murray said, which yields about $90,000 in net revenue. Rent loss, security upgrades, legal expenses and more have already consumed that thin margin, Murray said. Because Decker Towers is not technically "public housing," the housing authority cannot tap the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for emergency funds. Any money Murray spends on private security will raid what's needed for maintenance and capital improvements to the aging buildings.

Murray's resistance to paying for full-time security guards aligns with the guidelines that HUD has issued for local housing authorities. The handbook discourages their use as a replacement for law enforcement and urges managers instead to make a "vigorous appeal" to public officials to expand policing services as needed.

Security guards may make it harder to trespass at Decker, Murray said, but they wouldn't stop drug-dealing tenants from inviting their customers inside.

And if security guards did manage to push people away from Decker, they would still have to find somewhere else to go. Murray took me to three other housing authority properties in the King Street neighborhood. Each showed signs of the same problems as Decker, albeit on a smaller scale. He showed me homeless encampments in a backyard, scattered needles, urine damage in a laundry room. We met angry tenants.

At one apartment building, next to a preschool on King Street, the housing authority had recently evicted a suspected drug dealer. Four people were using drugs in the stairwell leading to the now-vacant, boarded-up apartment.

Murray thought he recognized one of them as a man who goes by the street name "Richy Rich." He'd been arrested last year for assaulting another man inside a Decker Towers elevator.

Murray told the group to clear out. "Richy Rich," wearing one shoe, could barely stand. Murray called the police. He told them "Richy Rich" was "very intoxicated" and acting aggressively.

"Keep my fucking name out your mouth," the man yelled back. "I'm warning you. I'm not being aggressive. If I'm being aggressive, I'll be in jail for aggravated assault for fucking you up! Leave my name out your mouth, you fucking faggot."

"Richy Rich" was gone by the time two Burlington police officers arrived five minutes later. They determined that the man — who, at that point, had not been formally issued a trespass notice from housing authority property — had not committed a crime. I saw "Richy" inside Decker Towers later that night.

---

'Closest Thing We Have to a Home'

Two elevators service the apartments inside Decker Towers. The larger of the two has been broken for more than a month while the housing authority waits for a part.

On the afternoon of January 29, the other elevator broke down, leaving the stairwells as the only way up and down. Scores of residents with mobility limitations were stuck — for the second time in 10 days, they said.

Collins, in his wheelchair, was trapped on the first floor. So was a resident named Ella and her little black dog, Pepper, whom she pushed around in a stroller.

More than two hours passed, and the repairman wasn't there yet. Collins would need to go to the bathroom soon, but the first-floor bathroom was still locked. No one from the housing authority was there to let him in.

Another resident and I went to survey the stairwells, where we found 13 people sheltering. One woman was tipped across the width of a step, her forehead to the floor. There was a needle near her body. She didn't move as we approached.

The resident gripped handrails on both sides and hoisted himself over her. I followed behind; neither of us asked the woman whether she was OK.

Over the next hour, we carried Ella's dog and stroller up a few flights to her apartment, then escorted two middle school-age kids to a family member's unit. A repairman arrived and opened the bathroom for Collins.

By 7:15 p.m., the elevator was fixed.

I returned to the stairwells. On an upper floor, I came upon a woman leaning on some steps. The woman, who asked to be identified by her middle name, Eve, was trying to eat a melted popsicle with her fingers. That, plus some pudding and a miniature cup of Ben & Jerry's Americone Dream ice cream, were her dinner.

Eve said she has slept at Decker almost every night this winter. It's better than being outside, as she was most of last winter. That year, she laid cardboard in Church Street porticos and kept warm by cuddling with her sister, who is now in prison, she told me.

To get a bed at the city warming shelter, which is full every night, she must line up outside for hours with no guarantee she'll land a spot. Decker is a surer bet, and there's a certain camaraderie with others who use the stairwells. A friend gave her the popsicle, Eve said.

That morning, however, while Eve had been asleep, a resident sprayed mace in the stairwell landing. Suddenly, she couldn't see and could barely breathe. The irritant caused her to vomit. "It was a disaster," Eve said.

Eve questioned why homeless people had been forced from two abandoned buildings downtown — the derelict Memorial Auditorium and the old YMCA — where they didn't have to encroach on a residential space.

"If they were to open up one of those buildings to us, and obviously there would need to be some oversight and things like that ... we could make that into a home," Eve said.

Eve's friend, who also asked to be identified by her middle name, Mary, came down the stairs. Mary said she understands why Decker residents are frustrated; she would be, too. But Mary also gets angry when tenants make sarcastic comments about how she and other homeless visitors "make themselves at home" in the building.

"This is the closest thing we have to a home," she said.

"If they were in our position, if they had nothing and they were outside in the cold, what would they do?" Mary continued. "Pissing people off to stay warm? I'll make somebody mad any day of the week to stay warm."

"Absolutely," Eve agreed.

I went home to my apartment to sleep. Only later, while reviewing my notes, did I realize that Eve was the woman I'd stepped over in the stairwell earlier that evening.

---

Getting Organized

On election night for the new resident council, a crowd filled the community room and spilled into the lobby.

Miller had enticed nearly 40 neighbors to attend by organizing a potluck dinner. David Foss, a soft-spoken resident-activist, had arranged for Burlington Tenants United to serve as official witnesses for the vote. Also in attendance: Democratic mayoral candidate Joan Shannon; a representative of Progressive nominee Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, who was in Montpelier for legislative hearings; and independent Ward 5 city council candidate Lena Greenberg.

Foley, the lead organizer and proponent of resident patrols, called the meeting to order. Decker Towers had never before elected a council to represent tenants to the landlord and community, she noted. Doing so, Foley said, would give residents a "mandate" to "find common ground where we can work together to make Decker Towers safer."

The ballot asked residents to approve council bylaws and elect seven nominees for a board of directors. Voters were also asked whether the council should establish a neighborhood watch.

The nominees to the board of directors spoke.

"I want to be on the board because I want to have a voice in helping you guys and protecting you when I can," Susan Chadwick, 68, said to applause. Her sweatshirt read "We the People are pissed off."

"I want to continue to work with not only Burlington Housing but with city hall," Foss, 62, said.

LeBeau, of the card group, said, "I want to be on the board because I miss coming down here and having the activities in this room."

"I live here because I like the community," Miller popped out of the kitchen to say. "I want to keep building the community."

Foley opened the floor to questions. The first came from a woman who was worried about the neighborhood watch. "How are we going to ensure people's safety?" the woman asked.

Volunteers would patrol in groups, Foley said. They would "get some training." There would be guidelines. And T-shirts.

Some residents had actually tested the concept on the eve of the vote, Foley revealed. Just before midnight, they took the elevator to the top floor and worked their way through the halls and stairways, pressuring squatters to leave. The group then sat inside the front lobby until 3 a.m., Foley, 67, said, to prevent those people from returning.

Foley considered the trial run a "huge success," though, she said, there had been one "incident." A man who was sleeping on a landing didn't leave, so one of the residents released pepper spray into the corridor. His early-morning screams woke some residents; police officers and firefighters came. The man was back in the stairwell by morning when the building managers did their usual walk-through.

Two residents asked Foley about the Narcan dispensers that the housing authority had installed to reverse overdoses, which they thought were attracting drug users to the building.

Murray, the housing authority director, stepped forward. Before he joined the housing authority, he'd run homeless shelters for veterans, many of whom had histories of drug or alcohol use. "If you have an addiction and you're struggling with it, there's a large percentage of those people that will overcome that addiction," he said.

"I wholeheartedly believe that if you have an opportunity to save a life, please save that life," Murray continued. Other residents clapped.

One by one, residents filled their plates and turned in their votes. Of the 136 eligible tenants, 36 cast ballots. The Decker Towers Resident Council was approved unanimously. The neighborhood watch passed by a vote of 35-1.

Resident James Harvey, a legendary local jazz musician, voted with his dog, Minnie, in tow. Harvey, 67, said he wasn't sure whether the council would make a difference. But he was convinced of one thing:

"We're the only people who are really going to try."

Correction, February 15, 2024: Police have managed to shut down only a few suspected drug dealers in Decker Towers, according to the Burlington Housing Authority. A previous version of this story contained an error.