On March 4, 1981, red dawn broke over the Green Mountains.

“‘Everyone’s scared.’ Socialist elected mayor of Vermont’s largest city,” blared the UPI headline over an article that began, “Self-described socialist Bernard Sanders… has invited the city’s business and political leaders to join him in creating ‘a rebirth of the human spirit.’ ” Readers could have been forgiven for concluding that some Pol Pot in Birkenstocks had just established a beachhead in Burlington, Vermont.


When Bernie Sanders won by 10 votes in a four-way mayoral race, Ronald Reagan had just entered the White House, the Cold War was in full swing, and people were seriously freaked out. “You would’ve thought that Trotsky had come to Burlington,” said Sanders’ confidant and one-time roommate, Richard Sugarman.

But now, 34 years later, as Sanders launches a campaign for the presidency, many of the radical solutions he imposed — free arts and culture for the masses, local-first economic development, wresting money from rich nonprofits, and, most shockingly, communal land for affordable housing — have become mainstays of the American municipal governance playbook.

Such policies “would be unexceptional today,” said UCLA urban planning professor Randall Crane, noting that urban policy in general has become broader and more creative in the decades that followed, as more people returned to city neighborhoods.

Crane himself lives on property developed through a land trust in Irvine, California, and says the once-radical idea is now “just seen as a routine part of the toolkit.”

“They sound weird and socialist and stuff,” he said of today’s housing trusts, “but it’s become a non-radical way of thinking about housing affordability.”

That was a far cry from what people were saying in the early ’80s. After Sanders’ election as mayor, Burlington’s business and political establishment — in which Democrats and Republicans coexisted cozily — prepared for the worst.

Sanders had campaigned against the incumbent mayor’s plans to raise residential property taxes, and proposed raising taxes on commercial property instead. “If Sanders succeeds in putting over his tax proposals, they would shut this business community down,” an anonymous businessman told UPI. ”If I was planning a major investment in Burlington, I’d be a little cautious right now.”

“He ran against everything — against the governor, the alderman, the senators,” said Tony Pomerleau, 97, a Republican commercial real estate developer. “He ran against me, too, the guys that were making money.” In fact, Sanders’ opposition to Pomerleau’s plan to develop pricey hotels, condos and office space on the city’s dilapidated waterfront became a signature issue of his campaign.

Shortly after taking office, Sanders created a Mayor’s Arts Council to bring free arts and cultural events to the city, and in 1983 the city gave it municipal funding. “It was like he started a revolution,” said Bruce Seifer, Sanders’ appointee as assistant director of economic development, of the initial reaction to this use of city resources. “But business people like to go to cultural events. It helps to retain families and businesses.”

Indeed, with the rise of Richard Florida’s theories about the importance of a creative class to a city’s fortunes, municipal funding for the arts has become an increasingly popular economic development strategy for cities across the country.

Early in Sanders’ tenure, his treasurer discovered $200,000 in the city’s coffers and the mayor determined to plow it into a bold initiative. Inspired by the garden cities of England, Isreali kibbutzim and Indian communes set up by the followers of Gandhi, he proposed to buy land and hold it in a communal trust for affordable housing, while the housing itself would be owned by occupants.

An opposition group, Homeowners Against the Land Trust, or HALT, labeled it a “communist scheme.” But the plan went through. In 1984, the Burlington Community Land Trust became one of the first affordable housing trusts in the world, and the very first to receive municipal funding. Today, there are over 250 such trusts in the United States — in places like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Boston and Chapel Hill, North Carolina — most of which receive some form of government funding.

That was also the year that Sanders delivered on a campaign promise and brought Burlington a minor league baseball team: The Vermont Reds. “That was from the Cincinnati baseball team — not because of his politics,” insisted Sugarman, though a year later Sanders traveled to Nicaragua to hang out with the Sandinistas.

Burlington Free Press/BurlingtonFreePress.com

When it came to economic development, the “Sanderistas” in City Hall, as his supporters were known, decided to ditch the prevailing “smokestack chasing” approach, which called for local government to entice employers to move to town and set up shop. Instead, they promoted local ownership of business and sought to minimize leakage from the local economy to amplify the multiplier effect of money spent within the economy.

“That was an early initiative for sure,” said Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban studies at UCLA. “It’s become more common in cities to think about economic development from within.”

The approach also put Burlington at the forefront of a “buy local” movement that’s now very much in vogue across the country.

Later in his tenure, Sanders went after the University of Vermont and a local hospital, non-profit institutions that owned large swathes of valuable land in the city but were exempt from paying taxes and cut deals for them to contribute “Payments in Lieu of Taxes.”

Sanders didn’t invent PILOTs in Burlington. That other people’s republic, Cambridge, Mass, had been receiving them from Harvard since the 1920s, as had other cities since. But he did anticipate an approach that’s become increasingly popular in the Northeast in recent decades as tax-exempt hospitals and universities have swallowed up more and more land and local governments have put the screws on them to pony up more money for city services.

Sanders also carried through on that original campaign plank, scuttling Pomerleau’s plans for a ritzy waterfront development. But Pomerleau learned to work with Sanders nonetheless. So did the rest of the business community. Ben & Jerry’s grew into a household brand and Burton Snowboards moved to town without any special inducements.

Pomerlau ended up becoming one of Sanders’ closest friends. At one point, a Burlington Free Press front page pictured the two men together under the headline “the odd couple.” On Tuesday, Sanders launched his presidential bid from the public park he created on the waterfront land.

In 1988, toward the end of Sanders’ four-term tenure — long after a local Democratic leader predicted the movement that swept Sanders into office would be gone in a decade — the U.S. Conference of Mayors named Burlington the most livable city in the country with a population of under 100,000 (in a tie). Then Sanders’ director of community and economic development succeeded him in the mayor’s office and Inc. Magazine named Burlington the best city in the Northeast for a growing business.

And what about the guy who told UPI “Everyone’s scared” when the Lenin of Lake Champlain first stormed to power in 1981? That was the state’s then-Democratic Party chairman, Mark Kaplan. Today, he’s on board with a socialist in the White House.

“I actually donated to him,” said Kaplan. “I’m kind of excited about it.”