Burlington, Vermont Is Going To Implode

By Roland McAuley

This is not another tedious rant about the homeless drug addicts downtown, though we'll get to that.

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It's not a "back in my day" lament from someone who misses the Burlington of 2007.

And it's not an anti-woke screed.

This is a fragmented but, I hope, honest accounting of why the Queen City is on a path to ruin, and why almost no one with any standing in local politics seems willing to say so out loud.

Let’s start with the biggest thing, because nothing else really matters if this goes sideways: **UVM is in trouble, and if UVM craters, Burlington craters with it.**

This is not a marginal observation.

The University of Vermont is the economic and demographic engine of the entire region.

Students fill the apartments, staff the restaurants, generate the foot traffic, justify the bus routes, and - through their parents' tuition checks - sustain a stunning percentage of the local economy whether anyone wants to admit it or not.

Higher education nationally is staring down a demographic cliff, and the schools most exposed are exactly the kind UVM is: mid-tier flagship publics with bloated administrations, an increasingly unaffordable sticker price, and a value proposition that gets harder to defend every year.

And there is, frankly, almost nothing the city can do about this.

It is upstream of everything. Burlington has hitched its wagon to an institution whose business model is structurally unwell, and the city has no Plan B.

Now layer the politics on top of that, which brings us to the second problem: **aesthetic-driven politics with no material results.**

This is not unique to Burlington, it's the disease of every small, well-educated, liberal regional city in America right now, from Ithaca to Asheville to Bend.

But Burlington has it bad.

I genuinely don't know what's more exhausting at this point: the people still LARPing 2021-vintage identity politics like nothing has happened in the intervening years, or the anti-woke chuds who have made "owning the libs" their entire personality despite having nothing constructive to add.

Both factions are dead ends.

Both are LARPing. Both are why nothing gets built.

The local progressive coalition, as best as I can tell, is composed of two archetypes who are barely on speaking terms with reality.

The first is the aging environmentalist hippie: well-meaning, often genuinely kind, but completely out of step with where any forward-looking progressive politics needs to go.

Their mental model of the city was set in 1995 and has not been meaningfully updated.

The second archetype is younger and worse: the algorithmically-radicalized, mentally-unwell, weed-addicted twenty-something with purple hair who treats using Facebook/FPF/Reddit to track where ICE is as a substitute for a civic life (not that I'm a big fan of ICE, but you get the point).

These are the people showing up to council meetings to argue, with absolute moral certainty and at extraordinary length, about whether the city should/shouldn’t accept a particular piece of Native American art.

Who *cares*.

I mean that earnestly, in a city with a visible humanitarian crisis on Church Street, who has the bandwidth for this?

Jonny Wanzer is a useful example, even if you don't know who he is.

He got seriously harassed outside a bar awhile back just for deciding that he wanted to do his YouTube-journo piece on Sarah George in a fair and even-keeled way, as opposed to a hacky way that just parrots the most angry and toxic grievances of seething, immature, far-left complainers (granted, this happened a long time ago).

These types do nothing but complain and aren’t serious about doing the real, slow, and often boring thinking required to actually solve problems.

They just want someone to scream at, and these types are a non-trivial percentage of Burlington. Anecdotal, yes.

But it tells you something about the social ecosystem.

Which brings me to the third thing: **the anti-police death trap.**

Look, I'm not interested in "tough on crime" Republican cosplay.

That's its own dead end.

But the liberal aesthetic that has calcified in Burlington, where hating cops is a non-negotiable identity marker, a kind of secret handshake you need to perform to be taken seriously as a card-carrying progressive… that is going to kill this city if it hasn't already started.

There is a specific kind of person who hates the police not because of any considered analysis of policing as an institution, but because they hate all authority figures, because, fundamentally, they hate themselves.

They are losers with a grievance looking for a vehicle, and "ACAB" is a more socially acceptable vehicle than admitting they are unhappy and lost. Burlington has an unusually high concentration of these people, and they have outsized influence over the discourse.

The result is a city where the cops have been so demoralized and second-guessed that basic public order is a coin flip, and where any attempt to course-correct gets shouted down as fascism.

Two things can be true at once: you can want a more humane, accountable police force, *and* you can want the people smoking fentanyl in the doorway of a children's bookstore to be removed from that doorway.

That this has to be said is itself a sign of how broken the local conversation is.

Speaking of which: **the homeless and addiction crisis.**

Empathy and enforcement are not opposites.

They are the two legs you need to walk on.

Burlington has spent the better part of a decade trying to hop on one foot, and the result is what you would predict: a downtown core that is functionally unusable for stretches of the day, businesses bleeding out, and a population of unhoused people whose conditions are getting *worse*, not better, under the current regime.

There is a rate of decay.

There is a self-reinforcing spiral where every business that closes makes the next closure more likely, every family that decides not to move here makes the tax base thinner, every story that gets out makes the next round of investment less likely.

You cannot empathy your way out of a math problem.

And the math problem is compounded by a **self-selection effect**, which might be the single most insidious thing happening here.

Burlington, through its branding and its online reputation, has come to attract a specific kind of new resident: young, progressive, often queer, often struggling with mental health, choosing the city primarily because it dangles lots of Pride flags and "Immigrants are Welcome Here!" signs and has a reputation as a tolerant place.

I want to be careful here: there are many wonderful, productive, ordinary people in Burlington, including plenty in those demographic categories.

But at the margin, on the new-arrival flow, the city is recruiting heavily from a pool of people who are net consumers of the very services that are already overwhelmed, while contributing little to the productive capacity of the region.

Meanwhile the people who would build things - start companies, raise families, fill the schools, pay serious taxes - are looking at the downtown and quietly choosing Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, or even Manchester/Stowe instead.

Also, the startup scene downtown is its own embarrassment: a small handful of legitimate companies surrounded by a clown car of grant-funded nonprofits and "AI for X" outfits whose pitch decks and goofy presentations given inside Hula read like Mad Libs written by an HR consultant.

*A startup-nonprofit hybrid that uses AI to match new immigrants with services!*

Stop wasting everyone's time.

Start building \*real\* companies that don't need to suck up public money to survive, and might actually get off the ground and move the needle some day.

Am I calling for a normie takeover that bulldozes Burlington's weirdness and turns it into Boulder?

No.

Keep Burlington weird.

But it needs to be an *updated* weirdness.

In with the old, out with the new, and rooted in the actually interesting parts of this place's history rather than a flattened, Instagram-ready version of progressivism that any other small city could produce on demand.

And underneath all of it is the question Vermont as a whole refuses to answer: **does it want to be a real place, or a theme park?**

A real place where people are born, work, raise children, get old, and die - with all the messy infrastructure that implies - or a curated experience for wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians to visit three or four times a year, leaves in October, skis in February, farm-to-table in July?

I am genuinely not arguing which is preferable.

I am arguing that *refusing to choose* is the path to ruin.

You cannot run the state as both at once.

The procrastination is itself the decision, and the decision it amounts to is decline.

I already know the responses.

*You're so mean. You're so cruel. If you don't like it, leave. I'd rather Burlington fail than become what you describe.*

Fine. Just be careful what you wish for. You may get it.

Roland McAuley's commentary first appeared on Reddit.