T 50 Chestnut Avenue
he house at 50 Chestnut Avenue has sheets of plywood where the windows and doors once were. Its green paint has faded, one of its two chimneys has started to crumble and the screen on a second-floor porch flaps in the wind. A sign nailed to the front door warns that no one is allowed inside. For all its dilapidation, Rutland officials point to this boarded-up house — in one of Vermont’s most troubled neighborhoods — to illustrate a major success in their battle against drug addiction and related crime. Vermont’s “opiate epidemic” has attracted plenty of attention since Gov. Peter Shumlin sounded the alarm in his State of the State address last month in Montpelier: calls to action on the treatment front, laws drafted, the story of a rural state drug crisis trumpeted through the national media. But in the neighborhood of Rutland known as the Northwest, that fight has been under way for two years. Perhaps nowhere in Vermont has the drug problem been more devastating than the area tucked between a
32 FEATURE
SEVEN DAYS
02.19.14-02.26.14
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
‘ALL HANDS ON DECK’ Tim Tuttle patrols the Northwest
How officials in Rutland are combining forces to fight drug abuse B Y M A R K D AV I S P H O T O S B Y C A L EB K EN N A
tidy green park known as Pine Hill Park and a mildly resurgent downtown. Distinguished by large, multifamily homes that suggest a more comfortable past, the Northwest has become the target of a campaign that may point the way for other Vermont communities. Rutland officials and activists have developed an approach that trains laser-like focus on individual properties where drug problems are inclined to take hold. This time last year, the landlord of 50 Chestnut had all but abandoned his property, and drug addicts had moved in, police say. There was one bathroom and almost no furniture in a building that held as many as 30 people on any given day. Cars with out-of-state plates came and went at all hours. Neighbors complained of smashed windows, car thefts and visible drug use. “There was more traffic there than the highway,” said neighbor Michele Mailhiot, who began writing down visitors’ license plate numbers and sending them to police. It was a one-house ghetto in an otherwise law-abiding neighborhood, sharing the block with well-kept homes, a school, a church and a doctor’s office.