Amid safety concerns, some Decker Towers residents fight to ‘take our building back’

Susan Miller said she was grateful when she was able to move into an apartment at the Burlington Housing Authority’s Decker Towers.

At the time, a medical disorder had forced her from a good career in nursing and all but wiped out her income. She was going to the University of Vermont Medical Center for treatment four days a week and needed a place nearby to live.

A social worker offered Miller a spot in the 11-story apartment building, along with a note of apology — a nod to the building’s reputation as a rough place to live.

Eight years later, Miller has had enough. In recent weeks, she and other members of the Burlington Housing Authority resident advisory board have become increasingly critical of building management.

They have insisted to the authority’s leadership, police and the media that problems in the building have reached crisis levels. They say that Decker Towers is plagued by drug dealing, theft and noise and that a lack of security has allowed too many nonresidents into the building, leading to unchecked crime.

Last week, Miller and three other residents — some members of the advisory board — spoke to VTDigger inside a Decker Towers apartment. They went around the room discussing their previous careers and the unexpected events and disabilities that led many of them to move into public housing.

“People look at us like we’re generational poverty,” Miller said. “We’re not.”

One resident, Bob Collins, shared a two-page flyer that he had been posting around the building on bulletin boards. The first line reads, “I have an idea — How ’bout we take our building back!”

Over the course of a 90-minute interview, the group of concerned residents listed many problems in the building that have led them to feel unsafe:

“They always told us that they wanted us to be proud of our place,” said Dave Foss, a Decker Towers resident. “And so we fight to make it our home and enjoy it, but all these other people come in and wreck it.”

On Aug. 17, a couple dozen residents of Decker Towers gathered in the community room on the first floor of the building for a town hall-style meeting.

Leaders from Burlington Housing Authority, an independent nonprofit housing agency which is designated as the city’s housing authority and owns the building, said they called the meeting. Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad and a police detective also attended. Members of the media, including VTDigger, were invited by residents.

Only one item was on the agenda: safety.

“How do I keep myself safe and feeling like it’s OK to go outside my door?” asked Judy Pomoroy.

Steven Murray, executive director of Burlington Housing Authority, acknowledged at the meeting the challenges within the building. But he also said they were not unique and that “just about every major apartment building in town has very similar problems.”

Murray said the housing authority is working hard to address the issues residents cited. He said two suspected drug dealers had recently been evicted. He also said that 17 other eviction notices were pending and that the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department had given notice to six residents suspected of dealing drugs.

“But I want to remind you, the courts right now are taking eight to 12 months to evict anyone,” Murray said.

In response to questions about safety, Murad said, “That is a question that is really plaguing us all.”

Murad said police calls to Decker Towers average around 110 to 120 a year. In 2020, the calls for service spiked to 215, he said. But this year, he said, calls are on track to be lower.

That data backs up what residents told VTDigger in interviews — that sometime after Covid-19, there was a noticeable increase in crime in the building.

Speaking about the decline in call volume at Decker Towers this year, Murad said that residents might be reluctant to call because the police “are overburdened, and they don’t want to burden us. Maybe they’re doing it because they’ve tried before and they haven’t received the same kind of response that they used to get.”

Part of the change in response, Murad said, is due to the priority response model that the police department has been using amid staffing constraints. Priority response means that police respond to all calls for service until there are only two officers available. At that point, officers respond only to calls that involve life safety.

“So I recognize that the call volume in this building may be down because of that,” Murad said. “And I regret that. I wish it weren’t the case. But I need you all to continue to call when you experience things that are worthy of requiring the police.”

Decker Towers includes 161 units and several common areas, including the community room where the town hall meeting was held. Several other common areas have to be locked down at night “because the homeless population was sleeping, or camping, or shooting up” in many of the common areas, according to Murray.

He recalled a situation in which a man, who was not a resident of the building, refused to leave the building’s library, so maintenance crews had to carry a couch outside with the man still on top of it.

While Murray said the common areas were supposed to be locked only at night, one resident, Catherine Foley, showed VTDigger during a weekday last week that some common areas remained locked during the daytime hours, including a locked observatory on the building’s top floor.

Murray said housing authority leaders were considering several measures to address safety. They may wipe all existing keycards and issue new versions. They were considering buying a large construction site camera, similar to one being used at a downtown Walgreens. Murray also mentioned using license plate readers and facial recognition and said the BHA board of commissioners had pitched to Murray that he get a security company to evaluate the building to find areas to “tighten up on.”

“There are a lot of things we are doing,” Murray said. “We have no expectation we have the silver bullet. All we can hope is that it’s just a little bit harder to sell drugs in this building.”

During an interview a few days after the town hall meeting, Foley said that, early in the year, she started to take part in meetings about issues in the building. During one meeting, she was asked to share her thoughts. She had to warn the group that she wouldn’t “sugarcoat it.”

“And I told them, ‘What I see, there’s a whole bunch of people out here that are apathetic, that have given up, that are — for lack of a better term — institutionalized into this way of life,” Foley said. She went on to say that being poor isn’t “a reason not to stand up and advocate for yourself.”

Soon after, Foley started to speak with two members of the resident advisory board, Foss and Miller, as well as with other residents of the building. There is now a standing Tuesday night meeting during which residents discuss security and other issues.

At a meeting with residents in May, Foley put together a 22-slide presentation titled “changing the culture” that pointed out there seemed to be an adversarial relationship between the housing authority and residents, and that there were shortcomings on both sides.

Foley offered several recommendations for Burlington Housing Authority, including better communication and creating a new working group with housing authority staff and Decker Towers residents. She also included a list of what residents can do, encouraging them to gather more often for social events, hold more meetings and make sure to file incident reports to the housing authority. She encouraged residents to look inward and instill “a sense of pride.”

“No one is a 2nd class citizen because they live at Decker Tower,” Foley wrote.

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VTDigger's Burlington reporter. More by Patrick Crowley