Urban streams are frequently impacted by a common set of abiotic stressors that define the urban stream syndrome. However, the expanding reach of urban stream ecology has revealed that local social and political factors shape the different ways that urban development impacts stream communities. In regions with cold winters such as the Northeastern USA, heavy usage of deicing salts on impervious surfaces could be a major stressor to urban stream organisms. We investigated the impacts of urbanization and salinization on stream invertebrate communities in the metropolitan area of Burlington, VT. We studied eight headwater stream sites with watersheds ranging from 0-32% impervious surface cover and 0-89% developed land cover, collecting water samples biweekly and benthic invertebrate samples three times annually in 2022 and 2023. We found substantial variation in the invertebrate community among streams, with a particularly strong difference between sites with >50% developed land cover and those with <50% developed land cover. Among streams, specific conductivity was tightly positively correlated with developed land cover, suggesting that increased salinization could drive changes to the invertebrate community. Using a separate regional dataset, we modeled relative sensitivity of common genera to chloride and found that many of the most sensitive genera did not occur in our urban stream sites. We then conducted a laboratory mesocosm experiment in which we exposed communities to four chloride treatments representing the range of baseflow chloride values measured across our field sites and found support for our hypothesis that increasing chloride is a major contributor to community composition changes among the studied streams. Our results suggest that a reduction in use of deicing salt could promote the biotic integrity of urban stream ecosystems in New England.