Crowds grow at Burlington City Hall Park amid rising homelessness

Read the full article at burlingtonfreepress.com. Below is an excerpt.

As the late lunch crowd ate in the 75-degree sun, dozens of people milled about Burlington's City Hall Park, alone or in groups under trees and on benches.

Those folks in the park chatted and sifted through items in wheelbarrows or tarp-covered piles. One person sat on a bench nearly concealed, their head between handles of a walker. Nearby, sleeping bags lay along walls and in crevices.

Nearly 850 people were homeless in Chittenden County as of the latest count, a fifth of them under 18 years old. It's hard to say how many of the dozens in the park that recent sunny day were included in the total, but local leaders are worried the warmer weather may exacerbate downtown Burlington's combined struggles with homelessness, overdoses and safety.

“It’s going to be a difficult summer,” said Central District Councilor Melo Grant in a May 28 safety committee meeting, calling the number of people in the park an “ongoing issue” for her district. “I saw that we had just a big shift again — there’s a lot more people than are normally at that time.”

That's now on the agenda for the committee's meeting June 25.

What is Vermont's homelessness rate?

The number of people in Chittenden County who are unsheltered, or living entirely outdoors, has “been very, very high," Sarah Russell, the city's former special assistant to end homelessness, told the Burlington Free Press.

Russell now directs emergency services at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity and sits on the executive committee of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. The latter group works with others to conduct a point-in-time count, or PIT, each January. That's where data about people without housing comes from.

"Last year, Vermont had the fourth-highest rate per capita of homelessness" in the country, Russell said.

The data the local alliance helps collect goes to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, and typically gets published as a "State of Homelessness in Vermont" report in the summer.

The statewide report had yet to be published as of June 24, but Chittenden County numbers were available online.

Going back to 2015, according to HUD data, the number of homeless people in the county was just under 500, with a low of 260 reported in 2020.

Following a spike to 700 in 2021, and a dip to 654 in 2022, the number has gone up each year from 758 in 2023 to 811 in 2024 and 826 in 2025. The total rose a bit more in this year's count, coming to 834.

The count this January found 113 people with no shelter at all. That's down from the "all-time high" a few years ago of 380 people sleeping outside.

Russell said Burlington's reputation of having an outsized population of people without housing was “not entirely accurate.”

But Burlington is “more the epicenter” of those experiencing unsheltered homelessness, she said.

“When people see unsheltered homelessness, it's quite visible,” she said.

One reason the number is higher in Burlington is because there are more ways for people to get basic needs met, such as food and medical care, she said. She also pointed to the city's proximity to the state's emergency motel arrangements in Colchester, Williston and Shelburne.

“We see people kind of cycling in and out of motels," Russell said. "That’s a lot of the flow.”