A Tale of Two Cities

“Be safe”, “Don’t walk around at night”, “Burlington’s changed”. These are things I heard from good friends when I booked our Airbnb near downtown Burlington for a week. Sweet little Burlington? Sure, it’s a city and you have to be careful in any city, but Burlington? When we arrived, it didn’t seem to me like the city had changed much at all. I mean at all. Flashback city. The signage for the City of Burlington is still the same as it was almost 40 years ago for god’s sake. Many of the stores, shops and restaurants are the same. Some are gone, sure, but that’s everywhere. It felt basically like it was the same place I first landed for college in the mid 80s. Ok, maybe the music playing out of car radios or dorm windows or some of the clothing fashions were different (only some mind you) but not much else seemed to have changed.

The first difference I actually noticed was Church Street, Burlington’s pedestrian mall. Granted, it was a Thursday afternoon, but Church Street used to be full of shoppers, families, high school kids and vendors on a beautiful afternoon. It felt sketchier. And it was relatively empty. I chocked it up to a day of week/time of day thing. Maybe that is true still.

Then we went to the American Flatbread pizza oven restaurant (possibly the best pizza on earth). Across the street is City Hall Park. There has always been, as long as I can remember, a tale of two City Hall Parks. Once home to a food festival or other family-friendly events it also had a “don’t go there at night” image. The latter now seems to have taken hold. Homelessness seemed rampant. Apparent opioid addicts outnumbered families. People weren’t walking through. It didn’t seem dangerous, just not a good look. And the sun hadn’t set yet. Then our friends started telling us stories of area restaurant owners hiring security guards to walk their staff to their cars. Yikes.

I realize I’m painting a pretty grim picture here. “Why would you go to Burlington?” Well, I would still go and encourage you to go. It’s a great little city in a beautiful place on earth. I’m not ready to give up on this city or any American city yet, but…

We’ve got to get our cities back. There are too many news headlines and personal stories about shootings, clubbings, homelessness running rampant, opioid addicts and meth heads sleeping on curbsides or in parks. There have to be solutions between buying every homeless person a house (as a Denver mayoral candidate has proposed, won’t that just lead to more people coming?) and just letting people permanently set up camp on city blocks.

We have a friend who works in high end retail in New York City who stopped taking public transportation and had her husband drive her to work when she returned during Covid because of safety. She was literally witnessing crimes being committed from her store window near 5th Avenue.

We have a family member who has essentially commuted to San Francisco for a decade and used to stay in Union Square and won’t stay there anymore because of the homeless overrun. San Francisco was, in the 1990s, one of my favorite American cities. I went there whenever I could to visit friends who had moved there after college. It’s not a place we choose to go any more. I’m sad about that.

Downtown Salt Lake City has looked more and more like a mini-LA skid row for years.

In Ithaca, we canceled a dinner reservation citing the rain as the root cause, but while the rain was a factor, a larger one was when we walked from our B&B to find it, we crossed into an area we didn’t feel like we’d want to walk at night. It was just two blocks off of Ithaca’s equivalent to Church Street. I can’t remember us doing that anywhere, ever, before.

This is a complex problem. I have no solutions to offer. There are many facets of it: a mental health crisis, homelessness, drug addiction and an opioid crisis, easy access to guns, no real solution to a slow and broken immigration system, hangover from COVID, cost of housing, inflation. These issues are all converging and playing out on our city streets, in our city parks. I don’t have a ton of faith that the polarized politics of our time at all levels is capable of solving this problem, or any problem of this magnitude, anymore. But we have to. It’s time for our leaders to step up and lead, without dividing us, without assessing blame on others because there’s a D or an R at the end of their name. It’s time to take our cities back. For real.