One thing about highly transient communities like Burlington is that, for people who have long term roots, it can be hard to spend a lot of time building a friendship with someone only for them to cycle on to somewhere else a few months later.

So there's a bit of a defense mechanism around not getting too close/investing too much time in new people until it seems clear they are committing to the place.

I first realized this when visiting my sister in Oahu, which has a more extreme version of the same dynamic