A line of volunteers passed bags of trash from hand to hand out of a stand of trees and piled them on a concrete pad by the shore of Lake Champlain. 

It was late in the day, but instead of watching the sunset, the group, equipped with gloves, grabbers, rakes and containers for discarded syringes, braved a poison ivy-riddled stand of scrawny trees. 

They had come to fill their black bags with the detritus of homeless encampments. They collected sleeping bags and dirt-caked blankets, excavated worn-out tarps from beneath layers of dried leaves, and found fresh signs of habitation in the form of food wrappers, crushed cans and tattered clothes.

The volunteers, led by Nate Lantieri and Maddie Hersam, are members of the DIY Park Clean-Up crew, which focuses on the Urban Reserve, a swath of city-owned wilderness just north of the downtown waterfront. Lantieri was inspired to take on the green space after observing the “tough situation” there during a walk in April. 

Unpermitted camping is technically not allowed on any city land. In reality, public property has become a home of last resort for many.

“There were people without anywhere to go and a major trash situation that comes with the difficulty of that,” Lantieri said. “I was having this feeling of, Man, someone should do something.”

Volunteers posing with their haul Credit: Courtesy of Nate Lantieri

Tired of reading social media rants about Burlington’s very visible homelessness problem and knowing the city’s budget troubles, Lantieri is among those who are trying to change the conversation from “Why isn’t anything being done?” to “Let’s do something ourselves.” Volunteer cleanup teams now regularly pick up trash and used needles on streets and in city parks; others scrub away the unsightly graffiti found on buildings around town.

The Department of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront spends approximately $50,000 a year supporting the large city encampments as a way to keep the areas clean. The department maintains 20 to 30 portable toilets and up to eight dumpsters in some of the larger parks during the peak season. The city’s two urban park rangers work to maintain order and keep tabs on encampments in unsanctioned areas. Still, the trash piles up. 

Lantieri, 29, is chair of Burlington’s Parks and Recreation Commission, a researcher with the Vermont Housing Finance Agency and a former employee of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. Having viewed the problem from multiple vantage points, he believes that the soaring cost of housing is responsible for the number of people forced to live outside.

He’s read comments from people online who call Burlington a “disaster” and a “failed state” but says the Queen City’s problems aren’t notably different from those of other American cities.

“Burlington has a lot of great features, Vermont has a lot of great features, but the one that is the most challenging is the price. It’s very expensive to live here,” he said. He experienced this firsthand when a new landlord bought the downtown building he lives in and immediately raised the rent by 50 percent.  

On April 21 — the day before Earth Day — the parks department and the Department of Public Works brought in heavy machinery to clean up a site used as an encampment at the south end of the Urban Reserve. Removing 11 tons of trash cost $7,400. The department posted notices to warn campers of the impending cleanup, and then, with the assistance of 35 volunteers including Lantieri, city workers filled three large dumpsters with years of waste. The Department of Public Works brought in a front loader to assist; its teeth left marks in the dirt of the clearing. 

Having piles of trash so close to the water threatened the health of Lake Champlain, according to Parks Director Phil Lewis. The cleanup focused only on “items that had already been established as unsalvageable,” he said, and the department made efforts to return any recovered belongings to their owners. 

Lantieri and Hersam decided to keep the cleanup going after Earth Day. They’ve been spreading the word with digital flyers and now have a handful of regular volunteers.

During their trash-removal session in late May, the reserve was busy. The Burlington bike path runs through the area, so walkers, runners and bikers passed by the table Lantieri had set up under a small tent. A few stopped to ask about the cleanup or to sign on to his mailing list. Nearby, off the beaten path, people who showed visible signs of rough living wandered into the reserve. 

The DIY Park Clean-Up is mostly held on Thursday evenings. On Thursday mornings a different volunteer group, BTV Clean Up Crew, collects trash and used needles around the city’s Church Street Marketplace. That team, organized by the nonprofit Peace & Justice Center, counts almost 40 summer regulars. The initial cleanups, according to the center’s director of operations, Kason Hudman, were inspired by an open letter last spring signed by more than 100 business owners expressing concern about conditions downtown. The letter noted the proliferation of discarded used syringes in public spaces. 

“I was pretty frustrated with people who were complaining about an issue that to me seemed fixable. Syringe litter and litter pickup is something that you can just do. You don’t need permission,” Hudman said. “It takes just as much time to take a picture and post it on Reddit and be like, ‘This is disgusting,’ as it would to just pick it up.”

Syringe litter and litter pickup is something that you can just do. You don’t need permission.

Kason Hudman

A vacant state-owned office building on Pearl Street has become a site of open-air drug use. One recent Thursday morning, the BTV Clean Up Crew hauled away 14 bags of trash, used syringes and cardboard from the area. 

Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak participated in the crew’s one-year anniversary sweep of Church Street in May. She praised the group at a recent city council meeting for their “positive attitude” and “love of community.” 

“It’s a great example of community members stepping forward to be part of city solutions,” she said. 

Lantieri noted that unhoused people make up just one of several transient populations attracted to Burlington and Vermont. College students also abandon belongings when they leave town. As the semester ends each spring, Queen City greenbelts fill up with sofas, kitchenware and clothing — some of it in great condition — earning the annual event the moniker “Hippie Christmas.” 

This May, the University of Vermont paid the Casella trash-hauling company to pick up seven tons of greenbelt debris. Everything left after that was scooped up on May 30 by volunteers organized by Progressive city councilors. 

Bagging up discarded items Credit: Aaron Calvin

“The Old North End and Central District has some of the highest concentration of renters, so when things flip in May and June, we end up with a lot of discarded stuff,” Councilor Melo Grant (P-Central District) said. With borrowed trucks and trailers, volunteers collected worn-out tires, broken stereo systems and dead microwaves. City council funds covered associated costs.

City Councilor Evan Litwin (D-Ward 7), meanwhile, has taken the lead on graffiti cleanup around town. The number of tags on buildings has soared in the years since the pandemic, and city-led efforts to eradicate it have been sporadic and volunteer-driven. 

A mural on a brick building across the street from Edmunds Elementary School was defaced last fall before it was even finished. Volunteers quickly restored it. After that, the nonprofit PaintCare reached out to Litwin, who chairs the council’s Community Development and Neighborhood Revitalization Committee.  

The organization, which is funded by a tax on each gallon of paint sold in Vermont and several other states, provides recycled paint to cover graffiti. 

Litwin hopes to create a graffiti-abatement committee to give Burlingtonians “a seat at the table for the discussions about addressing defacement.” The city is too cash-strapped to take on the work, he said. 

“To be able to address these types of issues, which are important to community livability,” he said, “we’re going to have to engage volunteers more.”

The DIY Park Clean-Up crew, for one, has found that there are willing recruits out there. Last Saturday, the group marked its 10th sweep of the Urban Reserve since Earth Day. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Deep Clean | With city hall short on money and manpower, Burlington volunteers pitch in to clean up trouble spots”

This article appears in June 24 • 2026.