The living room of Mike Renner’s modest South Burlington apartment is almost entirely taken up by a network of tunnels, towers and other playthings for his two black-and-white cats, Bubby and Bebe.  Renner adopted the pets with his partner, Tabby Manuel, when they moved into the federally sub sidized unit at Country Park Apartments last fall. It was a long journey for the couple to get there. Renner, 54, fell into heavy drug use and homelessness after he came to Vermont from Orlando, Fla., before the pandemic. His life reached a nadir when he was arrested on methamphetamine possession and federal gun possession charges in 2021. At the time, he was living at a large, unsanctioned Burlington homeless encampment on Sears Lane that the city eventually condemned and cleared.  While Renner was away at a substance-use rehabilitation program, Manuel moved into the Elmwood Community Shelter in Burlington, known more commonly as “the pods.” The pods are not ovular living spaces but a clutch of 30 insulated sheds set up in a fenced-off Old North End parking lot, a miniature neighborhood of tiny homes on city-owned land. Renner later joined Manuel there while he served a court sentence of supervised release. Living at the pods gave the couple an opportunity to rebuild their lives. After Manuel had been there for three years and Renner a year and a half, they were approved to move into Country Park Apartments in South Burlington. “It was a lot easier to get it together from there than from in a tent,” Renner said of the pods. “I had to be the one to turn my nose up to the drugs and keep clean and keep on working on my life, but it did help. Without it, I’m not sure that I would have made it.” Renner is one of the few success stories from the pods, which opened three years ago. At the time, then-mayor Miro Weinberger proposed the shelter as a three-year pilot, part of his plan to end homelessness by 2024. While that didn’t happen — homelessness in the city remains at historic highs — Elmwood, according to its managers, is more necessary than ever, as it serves the most difficult-to-reach members of the city’s unhoused population. Last summer, the Development Review Board extended the program until the end of this June. Mike Renner Credit: Aaron Calvin What happens after that remains an open question, as the city considers its options for the property. “The intention prior to opening was that it was a temporary, three-year project,” said Taylor Thibault, who manages the shelter on behalf of Champlain Housing Trust. “The intention for after shelter operations ceased, whenever that may be, is for that city-owned property to become a permanent supportive housing site.”  There remain more than 200 people on the waiting list for a pod, in part because the path to permanent housing for residents of the pods is difficult and occasionally disastrous. Neighbors have also complained about the Elmwood shelter’s damaging effect on the area, saying it attracts drug dealing and other bad behavior. But housing advocates see the pods as an essential piece of the region’s growing shelter system, one that is working to get people out of the tents that dot Burlington and into more stable accommodations.  The pods were built on an Elmwood Avenue parking lot using $3 million in federal coronavirus money. The tiny home village was intended as a “low-barrier” shelter, meaning there’s no sobriety requirement or curfew. It opened in February 2023. Priority is given to applicants who are camping and don’t do well with the restrictions found at most congregate shelters. Pets are allowed at Elmwood, and each shed is equipped with a bed. They are heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer.  The autonomy afforded by four walls is paired with the social requirements of a shared community center, where residents go to bathe and eat. At the center, they can also find caseworkers to help them navigate a system of support services that they may have otherwise avoided.  “It’s been kind of a huge blessing to my life. Honestly, it helped me out in more ways than I could count,” said Jesse Hillman, a current Elmwood resident who’s been there for four months. He described himself as a traveling musician who occasionally busks on Church Street. He has camped outside off and on his whole life, Hillman said, but he spent the past three seasons in Burlington. He’s not actively seeking permanent housing and plans to eventually return to an itinerant lifestyle. But he’s grown close enough to his neighbors that he and a pal have plans to start a “pods-cast” about life at the shelter. Since the pods opened, 150 people have lived there, according to Thibault, and 20 have moved on to long-term housing. Four of those are either facing eviction or have already been kicked out, meaning that only one in eight pod inhabitants have moved on successfully to longer-term housing. Since the pods opened, 150 people have lived there and 20 have moved on to long-term housing. Considering the challenges many homeless people face when searching for housing, however, Thibault sees this limited success rate as laudable. Elmwood residents can’t afford housing without a federal subsidy, and Burlington Housing Authority, under financial pressure, is issuing 110 fewer vouchers than it was at the beginning of 2025. The average length of a stay at Elmwood is 250 days.  “To some people, I would imagine that it’s not an extreme success,” Thibault acknowledged. But as someone closely involved in the program who knows the residents, Thibault said she was proud of the results when the alternative would be someone likely living in a tent.  Elmwood accounts for 30 of about 243 shelter beds in Burlington — not nearly enough for the hundreds of people sleeping outside or in need of permanent, subsidized housing. Some other shelters are low-barrier, while most are congregate settings with more stringent rules for their residents. The numbers of people sleeping rough could rise even further as the state continues to wind down its pandemic-era motel program. Sarah Russell helps oversee the support services at these shelters through her work at Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. She spent nearly four years as Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness before taking over as emergency services director at CVOEO last fall. Elmwood costs about $1.4 million annually to run, similar to other shelters that CVOEO oversees. The state covers most of the cost through its Housing Opportunity Program, according to Thibault.  To Russell, a “low-barrier” shelter such as Elmwood is about creating a magic mix of self-determination and social responsibility that allows some of Burlington’s most vulnerable citizens to cultivate a little stability.   To others, “low barrier” is synonymous with drug use. Such views can be heard among residents at the McKenzie House Apartments, next door to the pods. The 41 units of subsidized housing are owned and operated by O’Brien Brothers, a major developer and commercial landlord in Chittenden County.  McKenzie House Credit: Luke Awtry CEO Evan Langfeldt said he only learned about the shelter proposal from news reports at the time it was announced, setting the tone for what he said has been a frustrating relationship with the city. While he said he understands the need for an Elmwood-like shelter, he disagrees that the Old North End is the right neighborhood for it.  Langfeldt described the shelter as having a “gravitational force” that has brought drug dealers to the area in search of customers. Steph Holdridge, a McKenzie House resident, said the first year of the shelter was “overwhelming.” Residents became so concerned for their safety that, a year and a half ago, O’Brien hired private security group Censor to patrol the grounds.  Burlington police have responded to the pods about 30 times since they opened, for calls ranging from overdoses to mental health emergencies. Langfeldt said things have improved somewhat over time. Drug use is not tolerated at Elmwood, according to Thibault, the manager, but residents who use drugs are not turned away. Rules around conduct and substance use are enforced within the shelter, but residents do as they please outside the fence. They can be evicted if they commit a certain number of infractions, she said, but are allowed to get right back on the waiting list. Thibault not only manages the shelter but also acts as its community liaison, fielding calls from neighbors with various concerns and complaints that are often directed at Elmwood, fairly or not.  “We do our due diligence, and we ensure that, from a community safety point, that everyone is safe,” Thibault said. “We field calls from our neighbors when there’s some sort of encounter that may make them feel uncomfortable. I would say pretty much 100 percent of the time, what’s happening in the neighborhood is not caused by guests at Elmwood, but you’re the first place they call because it must be Elmwood.” O’Brien, as a private landlord that provides a good chunk of the region’s Section 8 housing, has had four tenants who graduated from Elmwood. Three of them are currently in eviction proceedings, according to Langfeldt, the company CEO. Vermont tenant protections and the lengthy eviction process cost landlords a lot of money, he’s quick to point out.    O’Brien was actively trying to evict one man for months before he was found dead of a suspected overdose in late February.  The tenant’s first-floor apartment became a source of chaos for the entire building almost as soon as he moved in last fall, Langfeldt said. Burlington police were called there 11 times in the five months leading up to the tenant’s death, often because he needed help forcing out visitors who refused to leave. The windows in the apartment were broken so often that O’Brien ended up boarding them up instead of replacing them with glass. According to Langfeldt, surveillance video suggests that the tenant died days before his body was found — even as visitors continued to come and go from his apartment. After spending thousands of dollars trying to evict that tenant, Langfeldt resents that O’Brien and McKenzie House residents must bear the financial and emotional toll of Burlington’s housing-first strategy. For Holdridge, living next to Elmwood and seeing the havoc wreaked by one of its former residents in her apartment building has only reinforced her belief that the city needs to help rehabilitate people before housing them. Most of the humans at the pods, they can be saved.Mike renner Russell, the CVOEO staffer, acknowledged that there are real gaps in the system. CVOEO staff are only allowed to continue providing support services for 90 days to people who exit the shelter system and enter permanent housing. Leaving Elmwood, she said, can mean losing some of the structure gained there and entering a more stressful, alienating environment that can push people back into active drug use.  Three years into the Elmwood shelter experiment, and at the end of its initially promised expiration date, the City of Burlington is in the process of deciding its future. Kara Alnaswari, the mayor’s interim chief of staff, said the city plans to apply for an extension to the property’s current zoning designation, keeping the shelter open through June 2027. The city will “envision a future use” for Elmwood in a process led by the Public Works Commission and community partners, Alnaswari said.  While the city is staying tight-lipped about any future plans, both Russell and Thibault said they hoped the property would turn into a more permanent shelter. Across town from Elmwood and McKenzie House, Renner knows just how difficult it can be to get back on your feet. A criminal record and drug addiction, he said, make holding down a job or getting an apartment an extreme challenge without some help. But he believes the residents of Elmwood deserve a chance to turn their lives around, as he has.  “Most of the humans at the pods, they can be saved,” he said. “But what do you do with them? I mean, where do you put them?” ➆ The original print version of this article was headlined “Pod Fellows | Three years after opening, Burlington’s oft-debated homeless shelter is at a crossroads” The post Burlington Weighs the Future of Its ‘Pod’ Homeless Shelter appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less