Cailyne Crowder called Winooski home. She had moved to the upper half of an old duplex on Lafountain Street in 2015 because the $1,150 rent, cheaper than what she’d pay in Burlington, suited her budget as a single mom. The lower cost of living enabled her to open Atlas Hair Studio, a downtown salon where she built a loyal clientele.
While raising her son, Crowder met and married Dakota Burr, whom many locals know by his deejay name, DJ Dakota. The Black couple decorated their kitchen with a framed photo of Malcolm X alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and a sign that read, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” They exchanged garden vegetables with neighbors and regularly visited one who’d suffered a stroke.
Then, last December, their landlord sold the duplex. The buyers gave Crowder and Burr four months to leave. The couple were thrust into a rental market far more expensive than the one Crowder had navigated a decade earlier. The few open units in Winooski had high rents despite cramped living quarters. They expanded their search to all of Chittenden County and, still feeling discouraged, decided to look outside Vermont.
Burr worked a day job for an airline company and had the ability to transfer to Charlotte, N.C., where apartments are much cheaper. Burr, 42, and Crowder, 40, are Vermont natives who don’t know anyone in North Carolina, but last month they put down a security deposit and reserved a 22-foot truck. Neighbors helped them load up their belongings.
“We’re moving away from all of our families,” Crowder said at the end of a full day of hauling boxes.
“Starting over,” Burr phrased it.
Winooski’s modest homes and lower rents have long attracted first-time homebuyers and low-income families. The supply of relatively cheap apartments large enough to accommodate families with several children also made the city a convenient location for resettlement agencies to place refugees from Africa and South Asia. But in recent years, zoning changes have spurred construction of hundreds of studio and one-bedroom apartments along main thoroughfares. Roughly 8,000 people now live in Winooski, more than during its early 20th-century heyday as a mill town, making the 1.4-square-mile riverside burg one of the most densely populated cities in northern New England.
In a state that’s 94 percent white, nearly 20 percent of Winooski residents are Black, Asian or multiracial. The community has embraced its distinctive demographics, touting itself as Vermont’s “Opportunity City.” Teenagers sometimes refer to it simply as “our town,” a reference to “Winooski, My Town,” the anthemic song about Winooski’s diversity, released in 2012 by local Afro-pop group A2VT. The city lacks a chain grocery store but has an assortment of ethnic markets. Winooski’s K-12 school system, the only majority-minority district in Vermont, offers culturally sensitive curricula and language support that students learning English would likely not receive in other Vermont towns. Noncitizens have the right to vote in city elections.
Once thought of as Burlington’s grittier blue-collar neighbor, Winooski has developed a fresh identity as a vibrant community. The city’s push to redevelop its commercial district has produced trendy shops and restaurants around the downtown rotary. But many residents and city leaders worry that a rapidly transforming housing market is spurring gentrification and undermining the city’s inclusivity. Rents and property values have soared. Dozens of homes have been converted into Airbnbs or broken up into smaller, more profitable apartments. Homeownership rates, already low in Winooski, dropped to just 30 percent in the 2020 U.S. Census.
These trends have hit the city’s lower- and moderate-income residents — especially new American families — the hardest. The school population has declined, and refugees are rarely resettled in the Onion City anymore. Some residents, including Crowder and Burr, are being squeezed out.
After a decade of encouraging new housing in key corridors, city officials are searching for ways to preserve and increase the supply of affordable housing suitable for larger families. They are grappling with a difficult and urgent challenge: how to align the profit-driven regional housing market with the city’s social values.
“I feel like that foundation of who we are — being a welcoming, working-class community — is eroding,” Mayor Kristine Lott said.
Outside the Lafountain Street duplex last month, Burr said he didn’t know what to expect in North Carolina. Then again, he didn’t know what the future held for Winooski, either.
“It’s not going to be the Winooski it’s been for the last 10 years,” Burr said. “The people that made this place fun and safe and vibrant — we’re leaving.”
‘Tiny, Tiny Units’
Around the corner from Crowder and Burr’s former apartment, dozens of other Winooski residents are being displaced. Landlords Rick and Mark Bove have told these tenants they must leave a 24-unit town house-style complex at 300 Main Street to make way for a new development with 69 apartments. Most of the new units, according to submitted plans, will be smaller and more expensive to rent.
The Boves’ redevelopment plan follows a yearslong tussle that city officials believed had been resolved in a way that would allow residents to stay. A few months after Seven Days and Vermont Public reported in 2021 on substandard conditions at Bove rentals, the brothers sent eviction notices to all 300 Main tenants, explaining that they planned to renovate the units and raise rents to market rates. That threatened to displace numerous refugee families, including 29 school-age children. Public outcry followed, and the Boves rescinded the eviction notices, saying they would instead renovate the units without displacing low-income occupants.
Last fall, they changed course again. The renovation plan was no longer “financially viable,” Mark Bove told Seven Days in an email. This time, rather than sending legally binding eviction notices, the Boves appear to have verbally encouraged tenants to leave and, in some cases, provided relocation assistance, advocates say. Mark Bove said their rental company has “worked very hard to make transitions as easy as possible for the current residents.”
City leaders and local housing agencies say the market in Winooski is too tight to accommodate so many displaced families. When organizers with Burlington Tenants United, a renters’ union, met with residents in January, more than half of the units had been vacated. Some tenants had moved to other towns in Chittenden County. Tenants organizer Grace Pfeil said several immigrant families have left Vermont.
“There is absolutely no reason why this displacement needs to happen,” Pfeil said. “It’s a choice that’s being made so that the Bove family can increase their profits.” The project, she said, is “really destructive to our community. And it’s also part of this larger picture, which is gentrification.”
The townhouses at 300 Main are in one of three city corridors where Winooski has fast-tracked large-scale redevelopment. In 2016, hoping to spur new, denser construction, the city adopted zoning rules along East Allen Street, Main Street and Malletts Bay Avenue that streamlined permitting and removed red tape. The city dubbed the areas “gateway districts.”
The strategy worked: More than 500 new housing units have already been created or permitted. Developers have knocked down old, single-family homes and duplexes to cram much larger, modern apartment buildings in their footprints.
Yet most of the new apartments are studios and one-bedroom units for people with at least a middle income. The number of three-bedroom units in the gateway districts would have actually decreased since 2016 if not for one heavily subsidized project that Champlain Housing Trust built in 2022, which includes 18 three-bedroom condos. The plan the Boves submitted for 300 Main calls for three such units, plus 10 middle-income studios.
Local developer Nate Dagesse and his wife, Jacquie, have built more than 160 of the new units in Winooski. Their five mixed-income and upscale buildings don’t include any three-bedroom apartments. With current construction costs, the numbers don’t pencil out, Nate said: “We’re looking at tiny, tiny units.”
The Dagesses have had no trouble finding takers for these small spaces. Their tenants, Nate said, tend to be young and mid-career professionals. Roughly half relocated to Winooski from other states.
Officials had hoped that the flurry of construction on the main drags would ease housing pressures in other neighborhoods, where zoning rules are more restrictive. But house prices citywide have shot up 34 percent over the past five years. The market has remained hot, in part because the median price of a Winooski home — $375,000 last year — is still among the lowest in Chittenden County. Yet advertised rents in the city are on par with those in Burlington, where the average home cost nearly $500,000.
The number of short-term rentals in Winooski has tripled since the pandemic. There are now 80 or so listings on Airbnb, many occupying homes or apartments that were previously rented long-term.
Some Airbnb listings tout the city’s proximity to Burlington. Others market Winooski itself as an attraction. One chic local outfit, the Traveling Bohemian, entices guests with a custom map of downtown Winooski that features icons for local bars, a cannabis dispensary, tattoo parlors and salons — including Crowder’s hair studio.
The block where Crowder and Burr lived hosts at least six short-term rentals. Another, abutting 300 Main Street, sleeps 10 guests and costs more than $400 per night on Airbnb.
Meanwhile, lower-income residents are struggling to find apartments where they can use federal subsidies that can only be applied to units with rents that are under certain price points. Dozens of Section 8 vouchers available through the Winooski Housing Authority go unused each year due to the lack of affordable units.
That shortage, plus rising costs, has virtually halted the flow of refugees into the city. In 2014, the local office of the resettlement agency U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants placed 32 refugee households in Winooski. In the past three years, just 12 households have been placed there, according to agency data.
Winooski offers a “really wonderful environment” for refugees, Amila Merdzanovic, executive director of the group’s Vermont office, said. But recently, “the affordable part sort of became — what’s the right word? — an illusion.”
‘My Town’
As the sun went down on the 19th night of Ramadan, more than 200 children, parents and teachers gathered in the Winooski Middle and High School cafeteria for a community iftar, or break-the-fast meal, to mark the holiest month for Muslims. Middle and high school students, some wearing traditional headscarves and tunics, took turns sharing what the holiday meant to them.
It’s “not just about food,” one said. “Ramadan is a time to forgive and understand … a time we can all sit together.”
Muslim attendees dispersed to classrooms to pray, then guests filled their plates with an assortment of homemade dishes — mounds of rice, tangles of noodles, chicken in savory sauces and triangles of baklava.
High school senior Nick Ferdinand, one of the Muslim students who spoke at the event, said the school district had held an iftar for the past three years but this one was the biggest yet. He noted that the school district had recently hosted a celebration of Holi, a Hindu festival. Revelers packed the gymnasium to enjoy the tradition of covering one another in brightly colored powder. He said he was proud to live in a place where he and others could share their traditions at school.
“I feel like Winooski is building something … We’re making things better for everyone,” Ferdinand said. “‘Winooski, my town.’ That’s it. That’s our motto.”
Nowhere is the city’s embrace of its cultural diversity more visible than in the Winooski School District, where more than one-third of roughly 770 students are learning English. The district’s seven multilingual liaisons provide a critical bridge between home and school — assisting refugee families with interpretation services, helping them fill out paperwork, and accompanying them to appointments or grocery shopping. Students participate in a district anti-racism steering committee formed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder.
Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria and multilingual learner programs director Mohamed Diop, who hail from Nicaragua and Mauritania, respectively, regularly visit other school districts to share advice for working with English language learners and their families.
But in recent years, district leaders say, housing instability has impeded students’ ability to learn. The administrators worry that if students are forced to move out of the city, they may not get the specialized support Winooski provides. And if fewer families live in the city, the school may lose funding that allows it to maintain robust services for English language learners.
At the heart of the district’s newly renovated K-12 campus is a spacious atrium with a community health center and the Necessity Store, where students and their families can pick up free food, clothing and toiletries. The building boasts modernized classrooms, sleek common spaces, and a new performing arts center and gymnasium. The upgrades were funded by a $57.8-million bond that voters approved in 2019. In the bond proposal to the community, the school district pointed to projections that enrollment would grow by 15.2 percent in the next decade.
But since then, the district has lost approximately 100 students, and projections now indicate Winooski will likely lose upwards of 100 more in the next decade. Should that happen, the district figures it would have to cut 15 percent of its staff.
Chavarria worries about a citywide reappraisal due to be completed this summer. Higher property assessments could lead to tax increases and more residents being displaced. The reappraisal and declining enrollment are likely to erode the benefit the school district has reaped from Act 127, a state law that steers additional state aid to districts such as Winooski, with many English language learners and low-income students.
School district administrators see their community under threat — and they’re speaking out. In December, the school board unanimously passed a resolution in response to the renewed risk of families being told to leave 300 Main.
Board members called on the Boves to “abide by [their] commitment not to displace Winooski residents” and urged elected officials to adopt policies “that preserve, protect and produce housing” that meets the needs of refugees and immigrants.
The ongoing housing crisis, the board wrote, is disproportionately affecting Winooski’s refugee and immigrant families. “Therefore these governmental entities each bear responsibility to take urgent action to remediate this harm.”
‘I’m Really Suffering’
School administrators say they never envisioned housing case management as part of their job description, but they had to step up.
“It’s hard to worry about academics when students are struggling to have a home,” Diop, the multilingual programs director, said.
In October, the district and local organizations held workshops in Somali, Swahili and English to teach residents about their rights as tenants.
Patrice Lumumba, the school district’s wellness coordinator and a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo himself, said more and more students and families have been coming to him for help with housing issues.
So last fall he appealed to superintendent Chavarria for more help. Working with the city, the district obtained money from the state’s Agency of Human Services to hire a part-time housing case manager. Jennie Davis, who also works part time in the Champlain Valley School District, helps families with the daunting task of finding a new place to live or, in some cases, keeping their homes. In six months, Davis has worked with 37 Winooski families. More than half spoke limited English.
In a private study carrel in the school’s library earlier this month, Davis discussed housing with a Winooski mother of six who wore a hijab and appeared to be on the verge of tears. Multilingual liaison David Nyanda sat between the women to provide Swahili interpretation.
The mother told Davis that her home was in major disrepair and unsafe for her children. The landlord, she said, had not responded to her pleas to fix the problems. Despite her full-time job, she said, the $2,400 monthly rent was too expensive, and she’d gotten behind.
“I’m really suffering,” she said. “I don’t have peace.”
Davis helped the woman figure out that she already had a housing voucher that could pay part of her rent. Davis pledged to ask the Winooski Housing Authority to help cover back rent. And she said she would contact the Burlington Housing Authority to try to find the family a new place to live.
“We’re in a very tight housing market,” Davis told the woman, “so I can’t give you a timeline.”
Winooski high school students Noblette Irakoze, 17, and Pascaline Furaha, 18, know firsthand the stress that comes with housing insecurity. The Congolese friends lived in the same refugee camp in Burundi before coming to Winooski in 2018 and 2019, respectively. They’ve each been forced to move several times since.
Irakoze said her family of six was abruptly kicked out of a house they had lived in for three years after getting behind on rent. Lumumba helped them find a new place to live in Winooski. It is affordable, she said, but very cramped. The thick marijuana smoke that wafts in from a neighboring apartment is also hard to bear, she said.
The resettlement agency initially placed Furaha, her father and five siblings in a two-bedroom apartment at 300 Main Street. A fire forced them out two months later, and the agency moved them to a four-bedroom unit that had roaches and flooded when it rained. Community volunteers helped the family find motel rooms to stay in and eventually secured them a new place, but that landlord soon evicted them. They are struggling to afford their current three-bedroom apartment, even though Furaha’s older brother and father work. Furaha said her brother is preparing to move out so the family can qualify for a housing voucher.
“I feel like a lot of African parents, they wish to go back to Africa,” Furaha said. “Even though life was kind of hard, we were not really struggling with housing like how we are in America.”
Both young women said the school district has supported them and their families.
“They are willing to sit and listen to your problems,” Irakoze said.
Furaha plans to go to the Community College of Vermont next year, then hopes to attend the University of Vermont and eventually law school so she can help others who are struggling, she said.
Tapping the Brakes
When Lott was elected Winooski’s mayor in 2019, she believed new housing in the gateway districts would ease a citywide shortage and prevent prices from skyrocketing.
She doesn’t think so anymore.
“I think that we need to actually slow down,” Lott said.
If Winooski continues along its current path, the mayor now says, ongoing redevelopment in the gateway districts will displace more residents without providing the housing that working families need.
Facing criticism for failing to prevent displacement at 300 Main, city officials have begun looking for ways they can gain more control over future projects. Still, officials worry the tiny city’s government can’t effectively address the housing crisis on its own. Others warn that stymieing growth would make matters worse.
The mayor now convenes a monthly housing roundtable with city staff, area housing agencies, community organizers and school district officials. It formed in response to the initial eviction threat at 300 Main in early 2022.
In April 2023, the city hired a social worker, Jazmine Hurley, as its first full-time housing initiative director. Hurley’s first order of business: figuring out how to rein in the explosion of short-term rentals. Hurley said she tried to draft regulations that would balance “supporting our renter-heavy, lower-income, diverse, vulnerable population” with the fact that city government has limited staffing available to enforce new rules.
City councilors approved the regulations in February. Airbnb operators will soon have to pay an annual licensing fee that the city will invest in housing initiatives. The fee for “non-owner occupied” rentals is $1,400 per year. The ordinance gives the city council the authority to cap the number of “non-owner occupied” short-term rentals, which it is expected to do next year.
More regulations are in the works. Last week, the Winooski Housing Commission continued its early-stage efforts to draft a policy of inclusionary zoning, which mandates that new buildings include affordable units. The city is also exploring how it can require developers to replace the housing units they demolish. The City of Burlington has versions of both regulations, passed to slow gentrification that was occurring in the 1980s, during the administration of then-mayor Bernie Sanders.
Winooski officials are also studying whether they can create incentives for the development of three-bedroom apartments. Not everyone is optimistic the for-profit market will deliver on that goal.
“Solving that problem,” Winooski Housing Authority executive director Katherine Decarreau said, “is probably going to fall to groups like us and Champlain Housing Trust.”
But affordable housing requires public investment, and licensing fees from short-term rentals won’t be enough. Officials have been seeking more state support. Lott said she’s particularly frustrated that the state doesn’t invest in appropriate housing for the refugees that Vermont resettles — people whom the state also needs to alleviate its labor shortage.
“We cannot get family-size housing built without some kind of help or funding,” Lott said.
Some worry, however, that city officials’ anxiety over preserving and expanding the supply of affordable three-bedroom apartments is missing the forest for the trees. Last year, Winooski added no new housing units — in fact, it lost three. The city still needs more housing of all types, landlord Ryan Smith said.
“That stinks that we’re losing a bunch of two- and three-bedroom condos for a larger building,” Smith said of the 300 Main redevelopment, “but there’s a need for more units overall.”
Smith, who also co-owns the Monkey House bar on the downtown rotary, said gentrification concerns are being “a little overstated.”
“We’re doing some things right,” he said.
Smith said some in Winooski still tend to equate family housing with detached single-family homes. He’d like to see larger apartment buildings permitted throughout the city — not just in the gateway districts.
‘Winooski Strong’
Crowder and Burr expected that the sale of their house would cause their $1,200 rent to go up. The real estate listing for the Lafountain Street duplex led with that promise: “Big upside to current rent.” There was a reason for that — their former landlord had hardly ever increased it.
When the purchasers, a younger couple, closed on the house in December, Crowder said she went outside to introduce herself. She was surprised to learn that she’d need to find a new place to live. The buyers “just showed up and claimed their property, essentially,” Crowder said.
The new owners, who soon moved in downstairs, told her only that they wanted to start a family in the home they’d purchased for $420,000, Crowder said. The parties negotiated a four-month move-out schedule. The new owners did not respond to interview requests.
As Crowder and Burr scrambled to look for other rentals in Winooski, they encountered prices exceeding $2,000 per month. Burr kept coming back to the same question: “Who can afford that?”
In mid-April, when they were already loading up their moving truck, two three-bedroom flats became available for rent in the neighborhood. A 1,000-square-foot unit in an older Main Street home was listed for $2,775 per month. On Lafountain Street, a 1,100-square-foot apartment in a rambling multiunit building was going for $2,900, utilities included.
The latter unit was owned by Smith, the co-owner of Monkey House, who has 20 or so rentals in Winooski. Smith bought the Lafountain Street property in 2016 and has since upgraded the plumbing, heating systems and kitchen. “All sorts of people” have rented units in the building, he said, including a Nepalese family. Smith came up with the $2,900 monthly price, he said, by looking at similar rentals in the area.
“I tried to price it where I thought it would rent,” Smith said.
The rents that Crowder and Burr encountered in Winooski couldn’t compete with rates in North Carolina. There, the couple said, they will be paying about $1,700 for a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in Charlotte. Their new complex has a gym — and a pool.
They are excited to start a new life in a more affordable place. But Crowder still hasn’t figured out how to walk away from the hair studio she ran for seven years in Vermont’s “Opportunity City.”
Her studio’s front window looks across Main Street toward Four Quarters Brewing, where the “Winooski Strong” emblem — a circle of linked arms in different skin tones — is displayed prominently outside. “It’s my little space,” she said of her salon. “I love that place so much.”
For the next several months, Crowder, who can fly for free thanks to her husband’s job, plans to return to Winooski periodically to cut hair. Working with her clients, she said, is more than a business: “I didn’t want to just pick up and leave.”
