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At downtown Greensboro’s Interactive Resource Center, there was a pervasive sadness and an edgy, nervous energy this week.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Jay, a 46-year-old who relies on the center for temporary housing and asked that The Thread use only his first name. “Right now, it’s not working the way it’s supposed to work. But I ain’t heard nobody’s solution. Everybody’s got complaints, but no solution.”
The IRC opened in 2009 as a drop-in day center for people experiencing homelessness and expanded to a round-the-clock resource in January. The arrangement was never meant to be permanent. But the levels of homelessness have dramatically increased in the city and permanent low- or no-cost housing solutions continue to stall.
IRC records show that in May 2023, the center saw 633 unique guests. This May, that number was 839. In June 2023, the center had 632 guests. This year, it saw 804.
The center is overwhelmed, underfunded, and increasingly the target of ire from neighboring businesses and city leaders concerned it’s become a dangerous eyesore. Business owners, residents, and church leaders in the area have been pushing the council for a solution for months.
Simmering tensions boiled over at last week’s city council meeting, where IRC Board Chair Jim King said the board would close the center this week unless the council approved $588,000 in funding. Citing concerns about management, transparency, and planning, the council was only willing to consider $300,000. That’s the same level at which the city and county both funded the center when it initially moved to 24-hour service. The IRC aimed to raise an additional $300,000 but has fallen well short of that goal.
After a long and tense back and forth, the council tabled the funding question until a July 25 work session, by which King agreed the center would provide an overdue plan for improvements to health, safety, and security measures in the next 30, 60, and 90 days. A final decision on funding is scheduled for the council’s August 5 meeting.
“We understand your position, but you have to understand ours,” said Mayor Nancy Vaughan. “Maybe you can just close your doors and you’re okay with that. But we’re not okay with the status quo. We’ve had these conversations on and on and on.”
Councilwoman Goldie Wells, an original member of the IRC’s board, said no one wants to see the center shut down. But it can’t go on as it is.
“Come up with something, before we lose the IRC,” Wells said to the current board. “A concrete plan so that you can get the money you need, so we can have a better operation and the people are not all over the community disturbing the business community and disturbing the residents.”
‘Disturbing’
At daybreak on a drizzly morning last week, the IRC’s parking lot was packed with people camping in their cars or sleeping under the trees around nearby bridges. A trail of Natural Light boxes, shattered 40 oz. beer bottles, take-out containers, and soiled clothing spread out for blocks around the center.
Piles of peoples’ meager possessions crowded the area around the centers’ doors, covered in plastic bags in a futile attempt to keep them dry. Puddles of urine, human feces and even abandoned hypodermic needles could be found not far off.
The night before, The Thread saw at least one IRC guest dealing drugs just off the parking lot while a young sex worker moved from car to car soliciting.
Greensboro Police and Guilford County EMS say they’re struggling to keep up with the volume of calls to the area. From May 15 through June 15, they responded to 108 calls at the center. From June 15 to July 15, paramedics got 58 calls.
“None of that should be going on,” Jay said. “But everybody knows it does now.”
It wasn’t always this way. When the center opened, it was a ray of hope for those experiencing homelessness in Greensboro—a place to get out of the heat or cold, get a shower, do laundry, get mail, get help finding a job and stable housing.
Original Executive Director Liz Seymour oversaw not just a refuge but a community there. Michelle Kennedy, now director of Housing and Neighborhood Development for the city, took over after Seymour’s retirement. As the center expanded its mission, she summed up the ethos that kept the place alive and vibrant in a short, sharp sentence still quoted at the center: “Don’t shit where you eat.”
“We still say that all the time,” said Kristina Singleton, now the embattled director at the center, in an interview with The Thread last week. “I said it yesterday, in the morning meeting.”
The message is blunt, but easy to understand. In a city where homeless camps have been broken up and those experiencing homelessness are increasingly discouraged from taking up any public space, the IRC is a respite for those who need it and a way out for those who want it. But anything drawing negative attention to the center and its work is an existential threat.
Nowadays, Singleton said, that message is increasingly going unheard. While the IRC’s guests once formed a tight-knit community that policed itself and were fiercely defensive of its safety and reputation, an influx of new people without those community ties has dramatically changed that dynamic.
Singleton traces it to the COVID-19 pandemic. While extra government funds led to some getting housed in area motels and some working their way into permanent housing, area resources like the Salvation Army and Urban Ministries never quite returned to offering the number of beds they did pre-pandemic. Some went away completely.
“So many of the people that had been around for all those years and had that loyalty got housed because of COVID, which is really great,” Singleton said. “But now it’s just this constant rotation of people and we don’t have time to build relationships and that trust the way that we used to.”
“Something has got to change. And that doesn’t mean closing the IRC, that means changing the IRC. That means improving the IRC.”
Councilman Zack Matheny
For years, those using the IRC as a day center slept and kept their belongings elsewhere, Singleton said—many of them in nearby encampments. When the city began sweeping those camps, she said, people were forced to begin carrying everything they owned with them, including to the area surrounding the IRC. Untreated mental illness and addiction are unfortunate realities for many experiencing homelessness, Singleton said. Many people find broken beer bottles, drugs, and sex work happening out in the open disturbing, Singleton agreed. But they should be more disturbed by the desperation and lack of resources they represent than their potential impact to area businesses.
Sara, a woman experiencing homelessness who did not want to share her full name, said she has been coming to the center on and off since 2018. She sometimes feels unsafe there now, she said, and can attest to the sense of positivity and community having broken down. But under the current conditions, she said, that’s inevitable.
“What you’ve got right now is a bunch of people in this city who want new luxury apartments, who want nice restaurants, who want to go see the show, and they don’t want to see no homeless people,” she said. “So you got them chasing us off the streets, out of parks, taking away places where you can even sit down.”
“When you take people who got problems and you chase them from everywhere people can see in the city to one area, what do you think is going to happen? This is what happens.”
With Development, Tensions
Greensboro is the state’s third-largest city, with a population of just over 300,000. But it often doesn’t feel that way. Large and sprawling, it can seem even to those who live here like a series of interconnected and ever-expanding suburbs. Downtown is the exception.
With the decline of manufacturing and new housing proliferating outside of the urban center, the city’s downtown—like many across the country—went through a long period of decline.
That began to slowly shift around the turn of the century, with new restaurants and clubs opening downtown. New apartments followed, again slowly, over the next decade.
Now, it can safely be said, downtown is booming. More than 8 million people visited in the last year, according to economic development organization Downtown Greensboro Incorporated. Some 23 businesses opened over the same period, and the organization says more than $800 million in new development is coming—including to the area around The J. Douglas Galyon Depot, the downtown bus and train station within blocks of the IRC.
Within a half-mile of that depot corridor, new luxury apartments now sit behind iron gates. The enormous digital sign outside the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts lights up the area, advertising touring Broadway shows. Billboards invite people to live, work, dine, and be entertained downtown.
The IRC, once on the outskirts of all that, has watched as gentrification crept its way.
A Conflict of Interests?
Singleton and her team say Councilman Zack Matheny, who is also president of Downtown Greensboro Inc., is one of the prime drivers of a campaign to relocate the IRC. Matheny and a number of developers and business owners want to see unfettered development in the area, Singleton said, with those experiencing homelessness pushed further out of sight.
Matheny pressured the center’s previous director, Michelle Kennedy, to sign the IRC up as part of the development organization’s Business Improvement District, Singleton said. He’s kept the pressure on with her as well, she said, but the IRC has resisted. Its leaders believe such districts are often used against a city’s homeless population. Because a business improvement district must be contiguous, Singleton said, Matheny sees the IRC as a major roadblock to bringing more of the downtown area under the district.
“What you’ve got right now is a bunch of people in this city who want new luxury apartments, who want nice restaurants, who want to go see the show, and they don’t want to see no homeless people.”
Sara, currently experiencing homelessness
In emails with area business owners and developers, Matheny has floated the idea of contacting the family who donated the IRC building for the center’s use to say it is no longer serving the purpose they intended.
The IRC’s current location is intentional, Singleton said–near enough to downtown and a short walk from the bus station. Any attempt to move it could be destabilizing, she said, and isn’t in the best interests of the IRC’s clients.
Matheny doesn’t deny trying to get the IRC on board as part of the business improvement district. In an interview with The Thread, he said he believes it’s what’s best for the area and for the IRC.
“The property doesn’t pay taxes, so there’s no benefit to me or to DGI for them coming into the BID,” Matheny said. “But the fact that the IRC won’t come into the BID does make it impossible for other surrounding properties that are non-contiguous to come into the BID. So that’s not fair to those businesses and business owners who do want to come into the BID.”
Matheny said he resents being cast as someone who wants to run vulnerable people out of downtown. Teams from his development group pick up and drop off those who need IRC’s services and clean up in the area regularly, he said, and the organization has donated to the center.
Matheny, the council’s only Republican, left his seat in 2015 to become president of DGI. Some on council and across the city said it would be a conflict of interest for him to hold both positions. But he returned to office in 2022, dismissing such concerns. The only conflict he sees is the council’s vote on the organization’s budget, he said, from which he has recused himself.
“Kristina is trying to throw these things at me to distract from the reality,” Matheny said. “The reality is, the situation is totally out of hand at the IRC. It’s not good for downtown, it’s not good for the city, and it’s not good for the people who go there and need help. …Something has got to change. And that doesn’t mean closing the IRC, that means changing the IRC. That means improving the IRC.”
At last week’s city council meeting, Vaughan floated the idea of a residency requirement for those seeking to use the IRC—proof that they have lived in Greensboro for a specified amount of time. That may be the only way to curb people coming into the community to use those services, she said, taxing resources that should go to those experiencing homelessness in Greensboro.
That may sound “hard hearted,” Vaughan said, but it’s obvious the current model isn’t working. “I think we have to make some painful decisions.”
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.