Bernie Sanders and the Radical Mayor

In March of nineteen eighty-one, an independent socialist candidate named Bernie Sanders defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor of Burlington by ten votes. He was not supposed to win. The city's Democratic and Republican establishments were so confident he would lose that they had not really prepared for the possibility that he would not.

Sanders served as Burlington's mayor for eight years, winning reelection three times and eventually departing with approval ratings in the low seventies. He did not nationalize the waterfront. He did not collectivize the farms. What he did do was focus obsessively on affordable housing, local business development, waterfront access, and the distribution of city services toward neighborhoods that had been historically underserved.

The most durable thing he built was the Burlington Community Land Trust, later merged into the Champlain Housing Trust. Launched in nineteen eighty-four with seed money from the city's municipal budget, it was the first municipally supported community land trust in the United States. The idea is that the land trust holds the land in perpetuity, and homeowners buy the buildings but not the soil beneath them, which keeps prices permanently lower than the market would otherwise allow. Four decades later, the trust manages well over a thousand affordable rental apartments and hundreds of ownership homes across Chittenden County.

The city also fought the local cable television franchise and won lower rates for customers, and established a sister-city relationship with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, during the Contra War, which made national news and infuriated the Reagan administration.

In nineteen eighty-seven, US News and World Report named Sanders one of the twenty best mayors in America. He left office in nineteen eighty-nine, went to Congress, and the rest of that story is something most people already know.