America's 10 Most Enlightened Towns

UTNE Reader, May-June 1997

#4 Burlington, Vermont

Everyone knows Burlington is cool, but its hipness has become institutionalised now that Ben and Jerry, the city's most famous entrepreneurs, have named their newest ice cream flavor after Phish, Burlington's best-known band. These two icons typify the spirit of this beautiful city by Lake Champlain, where entrepreneurial drive and progressive government are seen as complementary, not contradictory values.

It's no wonder that Outside magazine included Burlington as one of its American Dream Towns.

On the waterfront, where other cities might have a private yacht club, Burlington has a beautiful boathouse. And the downtown Church Street marketplace, which resembles a European shopping street, is thriving. But don't mistake it for an Aspen of the East. What sets Burlington apart is a history of more than a decade of progressive municipal government under independent socialist mayor Bernie Sanders (now in Congress) and his Progressive Coalition successor Peter Clavelle. At a time when Congress is locked in a big-government-spending-versus-private-sector debate, Burlington has quietly pursued another solution. "It's a city that's really putting it's resources into the third sector, the nonprofit sector," says Brian Pine, co-ordinator of Burlington's federally funded Enterprise Community project.

That means that during the 1980s, when rents and housing prices in town were appreciating twice as fast as the national income, Burlington skipped the usual two methods of creating affordable housing - building publicly owned units and giving private landowners lavish incentives to provide homes for low-income people - and instead put it's money into creating nonprofits and built and rehabilitated affordable housing. The houses and condos are occupant-owned but price-restricted. "When people move out," says Pine, "they don't get to take all the equity, most of which has been created by society and not by the individual. The public subsidies that went into making the house affordable in the first place stay locked into the house."

When Burlington was designated an Enterprise Community, it used the $3 million in federal funds to create nonprofits to manage a wide range of projects, primarily in the low-income North-End. It extended public transportation from the inner-city neighborhoods to the suburbs, where most of the new jobs are located, and founded the Community Technology Center, which offers computer training to low income residents. Elsewhere, in typical Burlington fashion, the economic development office helped convert an industrial zone into the Pine Street business corridor, where old factory buildings provide space for more than 80 startup businesses. With the entrepreneurial spirit so strong here, it's easy to understand why Ben and Jerry feel so right at home.