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This is well known. It has been on the news and in the papers in the recent past. The big concern was that there was not going to be enough room to help people out once the cold weather hits. C.O.T.S. has been at full capacity and VHFA-Vermont Housing Finance Agency released its report, “Family Homelessness in Vermont.” Its two main findings: that Vermont leads New England in numbers of homeless, and that the fastest-growing segment is working families with children. Leading New England was shocking to me. I could not believe Vt was ahead of Mass and CT. This is not just a Burlington issue, but a state issue.
That's surprising to me considering the low number of foreclosures in VT compared to southern NE.
That's surprising to me considering the low number of foreclosures in VT compared to southern NE.
This info came from the VHFA report. Becoming homeless is an indicator of when a place becomes unaffordable to live. : The median purchase price of a home in Vermont reached over $200,000, slightly more than double the median price in 1996. A Vermont household would need an annual income of $65,000 (and $14,000 for closing costs) to afford that median-priced home. Sixty-five percent of Vermont’s households earn incomes below that figure.
Rents have been climbing as well. The Fair Market Rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment in Vermont reached close to $900 per month(this figure has grown since the report was releaed), a 49 percent increase from 1996. To afford that rent, a household would need an income of $33,342 a year. At least 66 percent of Vermont’s non-farm workforce — more than 178,000 people — was employed in jobs paying less than that.
Recent data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey shows 47 percent of Vermonters who rent have crossed over the 30-percent-of-income threshold and are not living in affordable housing, and one-fifth of all renter households in Vermont paid more than 50 percent of their incomes for rent and utilities.
A lack of affordable housing helps drive people into homelessness. Getting them out of homelessness means providing various services with housing, including mental health and substance abuse counseling, job training and financial literacy.
I actually think this was more of a problem in Portland, Maine of all places when I was in New England recently than in Burlington. I never saw such a high concentration of people who looked like panhandlers, drifters, homeless, "scruffy", etc. It seemed like a full half the city was this way. I guess Maine is no longer the "conservative" part of New England.
I found the Portland panhandlers (around the downtown indoor market) to be very aggressive, asking for money in an almost belligerent way. I don't think anyone in Burlington has come up to me and asked for money. Not once. They are usually just sitting with signs.
I actually think this was more of a problem in Portland, Maine of all places when I was in New England recently than in Burlington. I never saw such a high concentration of people who looked like panhandlers, drifters, homeless, "scruffy", etc. It seemed like a full half the city was this way. I guess Maine is no longer the "conservative" part of New England.
One reason I am getting out of Portland and moving to the midwest; I don't want to become one of them.
Portland's a fairly tough and gritty town, complete opposite of Burlington. If there was a fight between Portland and Burlington, Portland would kick our azz in about five minutes.
I found the Portland panhandlers (around the downtown indoor market) to be very aggressive, asking for money in an almost belligerent way. I don't think anyone in Burlington has come up to me and asked for money. Not once. They are usually just sitting with signs.
This was our experience as well, and the townspeople there sort of seemed to "embrace" it as Portland being "different" or "ahead of the curve." Weird. Portland was okay, but I wasn't as impressed as I thought I would have been, given the huge amount of "hype" I had heard prior to visiting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evan_Lanctot
One reason I am getting out of Portland and moving to the midwest; I don't want to become one of them.
HA! I don't know if you've ever watched the South Park cartoon, but this comment reminds me of the one episode where the homeless start to invade the town of South Park, and gradually people start walking around aimlessly cooing "Change? change? change?"
Quote:
Originally Posted by quickdraw
Portland's a fairly tough and gritty town, complete opposite of Burlington. If there was a fight between Portland and Burlington, Portland would kick our azz in about five minutes.
Location: Overlooking the vineyards, olive groves, cattle and horses in the hills of San Miguel CA
167 posts, read 336,330 times
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Chips off the flatlander monolith...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evan_Lanctot
The homelessness in Burlington has been an issue for at least a decade. The city has become so relatively expensive the average person cannot afford an apartment there. As this homeless camp demonstrates, the homeless mostly camp in the woods, so they are "hidden away".
Good point about the "fake" Vermonters making it impossible for the real natives to be able to continue to afford to live there.
As someone who was born in CA, grew up in the South Bronx and New Haven, CT, and graduated from The Vershire School in 1979 (I had a scholarship, one of the only white guys attending who *needed* one, but that's another story...
I've always lived here on and off since then, a few years in Warren,a few yaers in Burlington, a few years in Tunbridge and a few years in Fairlee as well as Cherryfield, ME over the intervening 31 years 'til today, and I've always lived here with the intent of learning something verey day from the folks who grew up here, and who go back 6 or 7 generations... the biggest reason I live here still is that one... although I've lived near a few 'Stretchpants Hills' as Hap Gaylord, now gone but not forgotten Vermonter/Swamp Yankee in the MRV used to say, I learned to plow from him, I learned to build post & beam houses and barns from his brothers and sons, and all the skills that I ever had from other places I've lived and other people from whom I've learned I brought those back here, shared 'em where I was asked to and learned new ones that fit in with the old ones whenever I needed to, which was most of the time... I've learned everything from how to sugar to how to stack wood so it will season properly without a shed to how to get 1700 bales of hay into a barn in one day with one other guy, a hayrick and a tractor, and stack it so it stays green and gold instead of blackening over the winter and spring I learned to stay off the back roads on certain nights so that the local kids could 'run the roads' in more safety with fewer cars coming at them, and to look the other way when someone in town had a few deer in the back of their pickup halfway under the canvas in mid-summer... and a million more things that I cherish, and use, every day. It's mainly how to live around other people and to let them live around you in such a way as to be relaxed, committed and alert to what other people are doing and saying, what other people need, and what I can do to help and how to ask for help when *I* need it.
My point is that there's probably more than a few of us Flatlanders who also value courtesy and respect... who go about living here in similar ways to Vermonters and just never get around to startling everyone at Town Meetings with requests for an Expresso Machine and a wireless Router at the General Store, Flatlanders who decline the chance to request that a certain section of town road be paved where it gets *particularly* full of potholes and skitter bumps in the summer and ruts in the spring, or who want a vote for a State Trooper with a methane probe and a warrant to scan the 'back 40' of a neighbor who makes part of his annual income shooting deer over a pickup truck windowsill and a floodlight and for restaurants in Burlington and Montpeculiar... Flatlanders who maybe just stand next to the Sheriff and the guy who runs the wing/V plows by the back wall and shut up and listen, get there early and help put the chairs and refreshments out and take 'em back in and clean up afterwards at Town Meetings for a few years before they start sharing their thoughts; Flatlanders who until their neighbors start waving at 'em with one finger off the steering wheel and THEN doing likewise... I know that's what I did.
My first neighbor in Tunbridge, an old farmer with 70 acres who had much steeper hills than his 3-wheel rig could plow in a contour pattern very safely, relied on skill, experience and the ring chains I gave him when he asked me for a length of rope one morning so he could use his pickup (2WD, of course, 'cause $WD '...just gets ya twice as stuck...') to pull his tractor out of the muddy ditch next to the town road we shared with no one else for 2 miles in either direction... he didn't ask for them, just peeked at 'em while I walked out of the mud room... I was careful to ask him for permission to sight in my rifle using an old stove as the target about 150 yards across the draw midway that ran lengthwise from one end of his property to the other, the stove was on the opposite hill dead ahead of my front porch... it sat above his highest plow line by a good 200 feet. When he said 'Yeah, I guess... just pick up the cases if you fire from the road on my side, the brass gets into my equipment', I asked him if he'd like those ring chains as I walked outside and down to his tractor with them over my shoulders... anyway, that old man and his tractor with his rifle scabbard next to the seat and no roll cage above him was a wonderfully familiar sight for the years I lived next to him...
Anyway, maybe there's enough people 'from away' here that do like me to get the percentage of Flatlanders who'd rather 'blend' than 'stir' up just above the exceptions that prove the rule... Culturally, I'm unlike Vermonters and unlike other Flatlanders by nature... by income, habit and philosophy, I'm more like native Vermonters, though... but I'll always remember my roots outside the state lines, though, even if I sometimes forget...
My first child, Lila, now 13, was born in Randolph... the first thing my neighbor in Fairlee said after I'd answered his question of "Boy or girl?" with "...a girl we named Lila, and thank God she was born here, rather than down in Amherst where we were the day before, visiting her Grandparents!", was: "Just because a cat has kittens in the oven don't make 'em biscuits."
Amen.
Last edited by threepounduniverse; 08-29-2010 at 10:37 PM..
Flatlanders who maybe just stand next to the Sheriff and the guy who runs the wing/V plows by the back wall and shut up and listen, get there early and help put the chairs and refreshments out and take 'em back in and clean up afterwards at Town Meetings for a few years before they start sharing their thoughts; Flatlanders who until their neighbors start waving at 'em with one finger off the steering wheel and THEN doing likewise... I know that's what I did.
While I appreciate what you're saying, you have a right to speak up the second you move to a new town, no matter where you're from. That town is now your home and you should be taking part in local politics.
That said, I would never move to a town if I didn't appreciate the local values. But I would never purposely stand quiet in the back of the room just because I hadn't lived there very long. The most annoying thing I hear from people at local meetings is "I've lived here ___ years". While it's nice that someone has lived in the area that long and obviously has some passion for it, it really doesn't meant what those people have to say should trump what the guy who has lived there ___ weeks has to say, and that's the only reason people throw that line in before they speak up.
Location: Overlooking the vineyards, olive groves, cattle and horses in the hills of San Miguel CA
167 posts, read 336,330 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RunawayJim
While I appreciate what you're saying, you have a right to speak up the second you move to a new town, no matter where you're from. That town is now your home and you should be taking part in local politics.
That said, I would never move to a town if I didn't appreciate the local values. But I would never purposely stand quiet in the back of the room just because I hadn't lived there very long. The most annoying thing I hear from people at local meetings is "I've lived here ___ years". While it's nice that someone has lived in the area that long and obviously has some passion for it, it really doesn't meant what those people have to say should trump what the guy who has lived there ___ weeks has to say, and that's the only reason people throw that line in before they speak up.
I go by the dictum of Lincoln's (the President, not the Gap ;^), that "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to op[en one's mouth and confirm the suspicion." Maybe I wasn't clear enough- I'm perfectly willing and capable of speaking up whenever and where ever I wish, and I understand my right to do so- you're absolutely right, everyone, the guy who's lived there for 6 generations has no more right to speak than the guy who's lived there six weeks.
I just prefer to learn, watch and listen first, because it takes me awhile to understand what's going on and why, who's doing what and why, and how long things have been that way and why they are still probably gonna be that way or they're gonna have to change... You're free to be annoyed by the well-worn prologue of how long someone'd lived where, but I prefer to look under the surface, including the reason people start with that statement, not just that its *annoying* to me. Of course it's annoying to hear that canard over and over... but *why* it's being said by virtually everyone is what I want to know... I can't learn that by focusing on how annoyed it makes me, so I focus on the 'sub-rosa' as much as I can instead, which I think is far more important and interesting, at least to me- the dynamics of Town Meetings, as well as small rural communities who are forced by many outside forces to consider their options, all of which have significant downsides... how to avoid becoming primarily a pine-tree filled theme park with tourist oriented service industries, or how to move forward, away from a monoculture of extraction-based, subsistence- scaled farms and other farm-based industry, in many ways being a hostage of the price of hundred weights, etc., and considering the leap into alternative energy, small-scale tech (like the solar, wind energy research, development and sales and deployment, Mad River Canoes' high-tech construction techniques, Yestermorrow's design/build schools and Small Dog Electronics MRV springboards), as well as programs that include 501c3 money and locally-based leadership by & for locals to perhaps, among other projects, more aggressively branching out into the certified organic farming and dairy and beef that's far more profitable, etc., etc... these questions are in many ways at the heart of the 'I've lived here for _____ years, and..." prologue, IMO, and it's helpful for me to keep those things that I've learned primarily by watching and listening first...
I made the mistake in my first post of speaking too much in absolutes, when I meant to express my that post's point in more nuanced terms, sorry.
No matter what the methods we all use to face these issues and many others, longtime locals and brand-new Flatlanders are all in the same precarious boat together... and who rows and who steers is something that can & should be sgared by everybody with a stake in the navigation & destination... IOW, everyone who lives in each VT town, newcomers & old-timers alike!
the transplants are a certain breed -again I'll bring up the "liberal" thing.
most of the "real" vermonters would probably toss them out.
That's not really true. I think the traditional New England way would have been to just wait until winter when they would either move on or freeze to death.
Some one started feeding the bears though!
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Chips off the flatlander monolith...
