Last winter, Debbie Phelps carried pepper spray whenever she left her Decker Towers apartment. The corridors inside the low-income high-rise had become a magnet for the drug trade and squatters, thrusting Burlington’s most urgent ills upon 160 elderly and disabled tenants. To feel safer, Phelps, who is in her late sixties and uses a walker, headed into the hallways with escorts and weapons for self-defense.
But on a recent rainy December evening, Phelps entered the community room on the ground floor feeling excited. The building, she said, felt different now. No longer did trespassers occupy the laundry rooms and stairwells each night. The hallways were quieter. Residents were gathering to eat and sing karaoke.
“It feels safe,” Phelps said. “I don’t have the stun gun or the pepper spray or any of that.”
Conditions at the St. Paul Street building have improved markedly from a low point last winter, when the building was overrun by drug users and homeless people looking for a place to stay warm. The changes have followed many months of dogged activism by residents. Their organizing last February prompted a coordinated response from public officials and led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in new security spending by Burlington Housing Authority, which owns the building, and the City of Burlington.
While the efforts to improve security brought relief to Decker Towers’ vulnerable tenants, the underlying regional crises of homelessness and addiction have not relented. So the challenges that its residents have endured are cropping up elsewhere. In recent weeks, squatters have taken up residence in office buildings, basements and apartment homes throughout the city.
But at Decker, last month’s karaoke night marked a return to neighborliness that residents say they had lost in recent years. The event was held in the same room where, last February, tenants voted to create a resident council to advocate on their behalf and form a neighborhood watch that would patrol the building to roust squatters.
The council purchased a microphone and strobe lights for this happier affair, and residents used the community kitchen to serve spaghetti and cake. Four “dining room rules” were published on a whiteboard, starting with “No conflicts — please keep the peace,” and ending with “Have a nice day and enjoy your meal.”
Standing at the microphone, council president Cathy Foley announced the evening’s run of show.
“Someone step up to the mic and tell me what you want to sing,” Foley said to the 20 or so people who had come downstairs for the event. She was holding another resident’s small dog by its leash.
Phelps was battling a minor case of stage fright. “I’m really nervous. I don’t want to be alone,” she said before her turn. Her friend and neighbor Sarah Procopio joined Phelps for a rendition of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.”
Resident Jeffrey Flores dedicated his version of Kansas’ “Dust in The Wind” to his mother, exclaiming, “That was for you, ma!” After ingesting some liquid courage inside his apartment, resident manager Mayank Nauriyal surprised everyone with his mellifluous voice.
“We’re getting back to the way things were,” a longtime resident who gave only his first name, Giles, said, recalling the activities that tenants used to do together.
City police data confirm residents’ sense that the building is safer. Police fielded nearly 200 calls for service at Decker Towers during the first three months of 2024, according to the city’s data analyst, Jeff Nicholson. Calls began declining last April and totaled just 153 for the remaining nine months of the year.
April is when the weather warmed and the city — in one of then-mayor Miro Weinberger’s final official acts — agreed to grant $38,000 to the housing authority to help pay for nighttime security guards inside the building. Last fall, the city awarded another $76,250 from its housing trust fund to support an ongoing security presence this winter.
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The city’s investments followed a Seven Days cover story last February that chronicled the grim conditions inside the building and residents’ armed patrols.
No single measure appears to be responsible for the near-normalcy that has since been restored. More frequent patrols of common areas by security guards and law enforcement have made them less appealing to squatters and people using drugs. Several raids by Burlington police and more than a dozen evictions by the housing authority have booted from the building most of the dealers and the tenants who were harboring them, residents and housing authority officials say. Residents themselves have been vigilant about reporting suspicious behavior and telling unwanted visitors to leave. The housing authority is less likely to approve rental applications for prospective tenants with recent criminal history, executive director Steven Murray said.
“We finally said, ‘Look, we need a drug raid.'” Steven Murray
Murray and the Weinberger administration had been at odds over what was needed to fix Decker and who was responsible for it. But last spring, Murray said, he began a series of monthly meetings with state and federal prosecutors, Burlington police, and Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s office to discuss issues at Decker Towers.
“I do think that finally getting us all in the same room and talking about what BHA can do, or what the city can do, made a huge difference,” Murray said last week.
During one of those meetings, Murray said, he asked Burlington police to target a drug-dealing tenant the housing authority had been unable to evict. The tenant was not dealing at a volume that the police would typically target for investigation, Murray said, but was drawing a lot of illegal activity to the building. “We finally said, ‘Look, we need a drug raid,'” he said.
Police arrested the tenant and an eviction case is due for a hearing later this month.
Police Chief Jon Murad acknowledged the unusual intervention in a recent email to officers.
“Some of the dealing in Decker was a lower order than we usually tackle. But the results were probably more impactful than larger operations with bigger seizures sometimes are,” Murad wrote.
Residents and officials had anticipated this winter with some trepidation, unsure whether plunging temperatures would lead people to seek warmth in the building. Homeless shelters are full, and nearly 300 people are sleeping rough in and around the city, according to city officials. Two seasonal shelters to be run by local nonprofits have yet to open this winter.
So far, Decker has not again become a de facto overflow shelter. That’s even though both a private contractor hired by the housing authority and the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Office have struggled to provide security staff at night, Murray said.
Mulvaney-Stanak has taken an accommodating approach to urban encampments and has opened emergency shelters on some bitterly cold nights, which may have relieved pressure on Decker. Last winter, the city razed a large encampment along Battery Street, which pushed many of its tent dwellers into Decker stairwells, housing authority and city police said at the time.
In the meantime, the Decker resident council now has an office on the ground floor with a small conference table, a computer, and a printer for creating meeting agendas and event fliers. The resident-run patrols operate on a limited basis, and reports of its activities are logged in a binder.
Residents are trying to organize movie nights and art groups, while the Greater Burlington YMCA will soon start a pilot version of a group fitness class inside the building. Phelps and Procopio have been pitching ideas for a trio of murals for several common spaces.
“People don’t seem to be trying to get in … It just seems like they’ve gone somewhere else.” Susan Miller
The building’s unofficial resident cook, Susan Miller, said she is focused on “trying to pull the community back together.” She thinks the focus on security has fostered some divisive and simplistic attitudes. Miller noted that one of the tenants arrested for harboring a drug dealer in his apartment was himself being exploited because he was addicted.
Miller stepped down from her position on the resident council because she didn’t agree with some of its decisions, but she acknowledges the situation has improved.
“People don’t seem to be trying to get in,” she said. “It just seems like they’ve gone somewhere else.”
Indeed, as temperatures have dropped, some homeless people in the Burlington area are finding other places to squat. Seven Days obtained surveillance video that captured a man using a metal device to break into a locked office building downtown one night earlier this winter. Once the door was forced open, several people followed him inside, carrying bags and a bicycle.
On December 26, police arrested four homeless people for squatting inside the basement of an apartment building on Buell Street. The group had set fires and defecated inside the building while tenants were out of town for the holidays, according to police. They also appear to have burglarized an apartment inside the building, police said.
Burlington Housing Authority is dealing with similar problems at its other properties. Murray showed Seven Days a video he filmed inside the basement of a BHA apartment building at 185 Pine Street. The space showed signs of squatting, including blankets and mattresses on the floors, litter, and milk crates. More than 10 people had broken into the basement just before Christmas, Murray said.
The housing authority removed the trespassers on December 26 — the same day Burlington police were arresting four others at the Buell Street residence.
Since then, it’s gotten colder. Temperatures dipped this week to single digits for the first time this winter.
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘It Feels Safe’ | After fighting to win their high-rise back, Decker Tower residents gather for karaoke, fellowship”
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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 Jan 8-14, 2025.
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