SOUTHEASTERN N.C. — An influx of complaints from the public, as well as calls to local law enforcement have been made recently regarding a tract of land on the northwest end of town. Unhoused individuals have been setting up tents there and with it has come increased litter by the tens of thousands of pounds.
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However, as of next week, enforcement will begin to ensure people are not living on public and private property in an encampment near Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and North Kerr Avenue.
The area is located inside a North Carolina Department of Transportation right-of-way, near the two traffic corridors, and has been on the radar of officials in the City of Wilmington, New Hanover County and NCDOT in recent months. The owner of an adjacent 3.2-acre privately owned property and Duke Energy, which has an easement nearby, has also agreed to cooperate with officials in making sure the area is not occupied.
Temporary “no trespassing” signs were installed on trees in the area on Oct. 4, according to NCDOT spokesperson Lauren Haviland. Permanent metal signage and enforcement is set to begin Oct. 18.
Lt. Greg Willett with the Wilmington Police Department confirmed its units that work with the homeless population will then patrol the site, as well as respond to incoming complaints.
“There will be future discussions on if there will be a progressive enforcement approach — for example, first offense warning, second being a citation and subsequent encounters being arrest,” he said. “Anyone found on that property without permission of the property owner is subject to criminal prosecution.”
Willett clarified enforcement of such laws are never based on an individual’s housing status.
NCDOT granted permission to WPD “to follow the limits of the law in abating any trespassing occurring within our right-of-way in this area,” according to a letter the state transportation agency sent to WPD Chief Donny Williams on Sept. 25.
The agency requested the encampment’s residents receive “a reasonable opportunity” to be connected with resources offered through various outreach teams, such as Getting Home — the city and county’s joint initiative to connect unsheltered individuals with services — and Coastal Horizons’ Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH).
According to internal emails Port City Daily obtained, WPD Sgt. Ron Evans, one of the leaders of the Getting Home initiative, informed officials that people at the Kerr Avenue and MLK encampment have been notified of the impending changes. In coming weeks, “removal of all persons on that property,” he wrote, as well as completing cleanup, landscaping brush and cutting the grass, will take place.
“The closing of that area will, no doubt, cause an increase in calls of service dealing with the homeless population,” Evans wrote to deputy city manager Thom Moton and Williams. “We will be making a concerted effort to mitigate the calls the best we can.”
WPD has responded to upward of 30 calls in the vicinity during a four-month period between April and August 2023; this does not include service calls made by Wilmington Fire Department or Novant EMS. Responses have been for incidents ranging from domestic assaults and disturbances to overdoses, as well as welfare checks and weapon incidents, Evans wrote to city council members, department of health and human services staff, as well as NCDOT.
Created at the end of 2022, Getting Home expanded outreach efforts in May to include the MLK and Kerr area homeless population. It staffs four social workers, a supervisory social worker, three WPD officers, and a WPD sergeant. According to Evans’ emails, teams have visited the site 27 times for outreach and another 33 times to assist in connecting people with meals, showers, prescriptions and more.
Anywhere between 25 and 80 people have been living in the wooded area, according to the county. Spokesperson Alex Riley said the Getting Home and PATH teams have engaged in “countless interactions,” which has included helping people access shelters, affordable housing options and long-term recovery residences, or connecting them with their families for better support.
The county did not give an exact number on how many people it has helped at the encampment. Riley said Getting Home is working with 125 individuals countywide “in different capacities” and increased demand persists.
“They continue to receive new calls every day from people eager to understand the range of services available,” Riley said. “This indicates not just the ongoing need in the community, but also the trust placed in the team’s ability to provide assistance.”
One person attributed the increase of people at MLK and Kerr Avenue to an ordinance New Hanover County commissioners passed 4-1 (Jonathan Barfield dissenting) in February to ban people from camping out on county-owned property from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. This was especially targeted at the downtown library where unsheltered individuals once congregated. The county put forth the ordinance as a public health issue, citing “sanitation in that area” rose to significance.
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“This displaced hundreds of individuals and we saw the population of the encampment increase greatly,” Cape Fear River Watch water quality programs manager Rob Clark wrote to city and state officials in an email last month. “Since the increase I have not been able to keep up with the litter.”
Cape Fear River Watch has hosted multiple cleanups on a front portion of the property since August 2022 and collected more than 14,000 pounds of trash to ensure pollution doesn’t reach the waterways; the MLK encampment is near the Smith Creek water basin. An inundation of trash left behind is an unintended consequence, due to frequent migration of belongings ferried from one location to the next.
In an email sent to officials last month, Clark said the team built a rapport with campers in the last year and passed out gloves and bags encouraging them to clean up after themselves, in which many complied.
He told Port City Daily: “The community who lived in that area would ask me for bags and bag up the vast majority of the trash and have it stacked at the front of the property for me. They were very much invested in keeping their space clean.”
Clark would go by monthly to pick up the trash with a truck and trailer, but as more people drifted through in recent months, he said it was hard to keep pace. The litter has increased and the site “regressed,” Clark wrote in mid-September to city councilman Luke Waddell, as well as NCDOT’s Caitlin Melvin and Chad Kimes.
NCDOT Roadside Environmental Unit cleaned up the area again last month and collected more than 26,000 pounds, while its on-call litter crew added 22 bags of loose trash.
Some shelters at capacity
With the unsheltered population being pushed away from another area of town — nine months after forcing their removal from the library and nearby parking deck, as well as NCDOT’s Meadowlark Lemon Bridge on Third Street — the question remains: Where will they go?
New Hanover County has around 10 shelters and only a few dedicated strictly to serving the homeless population (Good Shepherd Center or Rescue Mission, for example). Other nonprofits cross sectors of homelessness with domestic violence abuse, addiction or youth needs (Domestic Violence Shelter and Services, Inc., The Healing Place, Coastal Horizons).
Most shelters aren’t outfitted with enough beds currently to house an influx of unsheltered individuals, while some nonprofits have recently closed or are transitioning into new facilities, adding to the shortage.
A June shelter vacancy report generated from Cape Fear Homeless Continuum of Care and sent to the county indicated Good Shepherd was at capacity and Family Promise worked off a waiting list. It catalogued the Rescue Mission (which houses men only) and The Healing Place with capacity available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
CoC sent an updated vacancy report which indicated no changes to the four main homeless shelters.
It also showed the area domestic violence shelter, Open Gate, was at limited capacity, while human trafficking shelters had restricted space: A Safe Place was not accepting intakes and 5.11 House had three beds available.
While the youth shelters at Coastal Horizons only had four beds open in June, the recent report asked potential clients to call and inquire about program availability.
The Salvation Army closed in May and has temporarily relocated to the Harrelson Center for people to retain access to programs. However, it’s not taking in clients for overnight stays, which once served 50 people. The nonprofit is preparing to build a new campus at 1120 N. 30th Street, roughly a mile from the current encampment location, with expanded accommodations to serve up to 70 individuals.
Just last week, Hope Recuperative Care closed. Founded in 2019, it provided homeless individuals post-hospitalization recovery residency in two houses on Wrightsville Avenue and could accommodate six guests at a time.
According to Katrina Knight, executive director of Good Shepherd, the region’s largest provider of homeless services in the area, the organization has experienced climbing requests for shelter, more so far in the second half of the year than the first. This upward projection has been on a continued path since 2020.
“Homelessness has been on the rise throughout the pandemic,” Knight wrote in an email to PCD. “This reverses much of the progress we made — contrary to what people tend to think — in bringing the size of the overall homeless population down over much of the last decade or more. Folks tend to presume that homelessness is always on the rise, but that has actually not been our experience locally.”
According to the Continuum of Care’s point-in-time, which tracks the homeless population through a survey conducted once a year, numbers have ticked up in the tri-county region by 60% from 2022 — up from 357 people to 558. Since 2015, figures hovered in the 300s, with a spike above 400 in 2019, before tracking back into the 300s again through 2022. Officials have said, though, the survey isn’t a perfect science and likely more unsheltered individuals exist than who are recorded.
Good Shepherd started more than four decades ago as a soup kitchen and has grown to operate an emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing and medical center. Knight said the overnight shelter is at its 118-bed capacity — “ongoing with no relief in sight.” Men, women and families with children are waitlisted and people often hang out at the day shelter daily in hopes of securing an overnight bed.
“With the closing of the Salvation Army shelter, there is more pressure on our beds,” Knight said. “It’s now a given that we will have 100 adults and children every night.”
Jason Black echoed Knight’s concern of homeless numbers on the rise. He’s the Coastal Horizons’ adult residential community treatment services (ARCTS) program director and said the organization employs 10 people to help run its litany of homelessness programs and street outreach, such as PATH. The program provides clients with mental health support, employment assistance, housing, substance use treatment, and disability services, “with the ultimate goal of securing housing,” Black said.
Coastal Horizons’ clients include homeless individuals with severe and persistent mental illness, and it operates a 6-to-18-year-old open house youth shelter with nine beds, a transitional living program, and a maternity group home for youth. It provides four families permanent supportive housing.
Black pinpointed increased homelessness to transplants coming from other areas to receive assistance but not having resources to get home if they’re turned away or receive help.
“Many individuals are relocating to New Hanover County from neighboring areas to access essential services such as homeless services, mental health support, and recovery programs,” he said. “However, the existing services, including detox and shelters, often lack the capacity or necessary funding to facilitate transportation for individuals, whether their participation is successful or not, back to their home counties.”
Good Shepherd works with various populations and operates a low-barrier shelter, meaning it accepts people from all walks of life, regardless of whether they have special needs, physical or mental challenges, or substance-use issues. Some are on oxygen, others battling late-stage diseases or seizure disorders, Knight described.
“We have really had to invest in our shelter team to ensure that we could continue to accommodate this diverse and high-need group,” Knight said.
The organization has also doubled its rapid rehousing efforts, helping people secure permanent housing.
“It’s a positive outcome for them but also frees shelter space for that senior, veteran, or family who will lose their housing tomorrow and seek safety with us,” Knight said.
Good Shepherd is in the throes of a $20 million fundraising campaign for an expansion to create a larger, three-story supportive family shelter at its Martin Street campus and build and operate 70 apartments for chronically homeless persons — but that’s years away.
No calls have been received by Good Shepherd so far from MLK and Kerr Avenue campers, Knight said. However, she has heard through the outreach teams some have expressed interest in utilizing the nonprofit.
“We stand ready to engage them to whatever degree they feel comfortable, but so far we have not had anyone identifying as from that camp contact us or come in to explore services,” Knight wrote to PCD. “This may well change when they are asked to leave their current space.”
Knight called Getting Home a needed “bright spot,” but added a more concerted focus on housing, especially as costs continue to inch up, will make for transformative change. This is especially true for people making only $10 to $15 an hour; even entry-level first-responders, with full-time salaried positions around $35,000, struggle to find a place to live in Wilmington.
New Hanover County’s housing needs assessment shows rent has gone up by 53% for one-bedroom, one-bath units in only two years, while the average median home price is $400,000, up from $225,000 in 2016.
“The lack of affordable housing in Wilmington presents a significant hurdle, with most rental properties requiring proof of three times the rent in monthly income for approval,” Black said. “Coastal Horizons is also actively involved in the Healthy Opportunities Pilot Program, which provides extra resources to support housing navigation and address homelessness effectively.”
Knight added the housing crisis isn’t new and traces back 25 years. However, she fears it’s grown to a degree that could be hard to reverse.
“Today it is regional and we simply don’t have the words to describe its depth or scope,” Knight said. “As a region, we’ve done too little to invest in housing for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.”
County spokesperson Riley said other contributing factors beyond housing need to be considered as well when discussing the breadth of homelessness.
“This is obviously not a one-issue, sole-cause problem,” he said, with mental health issues, substance abuse, and income challenges playing a role.
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The county and city have put funds toward implementing more workforce housing. New Hanover County has earmarked $15 million to go toward affordable housing over five years and the City of Wilmington has approved 526 units of affordable and workforce housing in the last year, of which 421 received gap financing.
Both entities also have provided land, capital funds and operational support to nonprofits working with vulnerable community members.
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