WILMINGTON — No clear plan of action emerged from the Wilmington City Council’s special meeting on homelessness Monday, though service providers were able to illuminate concerns they have as the city reviewed its ordinances to target camping on its property.
READ MORE: Wilmington’s homelessness debate reveals deeper city-county tensions
ALSO: As the city and county develop a homeless strategy, what can they learn from the success of Houston?
The meeting began with a presentation overviewing homelessness locally from Rachel Schuler, the city’s director of housing and neighborhood services. Thereafter, council discussed the difficulty of solving the problem, despite numerous resources, some $5.5 million in funding since fiscal year 2021-2022, Schuler showed the council had contributed to date.
The city had also committed to a joint strategy with New Hanover County, though little progress was made since the last joint meeting in September 2024, and the county recently reported it would prefer to respond to homeless needs in the county solo moving forward.
Council member Luke Waddell’s second attempt to bring an anti-camping ordinance has sparked more conversations about how to address homeless needs. Struck down once before last year, the ordinance would bar individuals from sleeping on, camping or otherwise occupying city property, though the city largely prohibits these measures already. The ordinance proposal was tabled at the last council meeting so the city could examine the issue as a whole, but is expected to return to council in September.
Service providers were not convinced the ordinance would solve the problem, frankly addressing council after being invited to speak.
“Where could a homeless person living on the streets legally occupy if there’s no shelter bed and how could they not be in violation of the city code?” Allen Serkin, executive director of the Cape Fear Council of Governments, asked rhetorically Monday. The CoC is the lead agency for homelessness efforts in the tri-county region.
Serkin described the issue as a game of “musical chairs,” with chairs representing a shelter and, in the case of an anti-camping ordinance, the unhoused being punished when they can’t find an open seat.
According to Schuler’s presentation, there are currently 220 emergency shelter beds available in the county, with 219 filled; the latest estimate of the unhoused population in the area is 506 people, though service providers suspect more are out there.
Someone seeking a transitional bed and/or permanent supportive housing beds doesn’t fare much better. Permanent supportive housing, which is a unit subsidized in some way and paired with supportive services, is available in 109 units, though 123 people are enrolled to receive it.
In between emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing is transitional housing, with 53 local beds available — 52 are spoken for.
Serkin said, while more temporary shelter was needed, the city ultimately required more affordable housing for people to exit the Continuum of Care: “We need people to get up out of the chair to make room for the next guy.”
Hillary Faulk Vaughan, clinical director of the Physician Alliance for Mental Health, said she knew the people causing visible issues downtown were some of her clients who had nowhere to go. Anyone involuntarily committed, according to Vaughan, is done so from the emergency room, but because facilities across the state are often full, those patients have to be released back onto the street after 72 hours if their medical condition has returned to baseline.
“It is many many systems saying they don’t belong here,” Vaughan said.
Council member Charlie Rivenbark asked Vaughan how she would approach the solution today. She stated a combination of housing and greater access to stabilizing care for those with mental illnesses.
Tony Perez is the director of Living Hope Day Shelter and runs it out of First Baptist Church in downtown Wilmington. He said he sympathized with downtown business owners who have to deal with people sleeping outside their store and cleaning up behind them, but suggested the city direct its efforts toward helping the few bad actors instead of penalizing the entire unhoused population. As Wilmington Police Department Chief Ralph Evangelous reported in the meeting, a majority of people his officers respond to comply without issue.
The shelter only operates in the daytime, Perez saying the 80 to 90 people that on average seek his facility often have nowhere to go at night. He added it’s the number one phone call he receives: people looking for somewhere to stay the night.
During the meeting, council member David Joyner suggested the city could look to open a shelter specifically for men in the immediate future, as several of the shelters are geared toward families and women.
Council member Waddell said he supported a night-time shelter project from Tom Dalton, who owns the tiny-home community Eden Village, several years ago. He questioned where that concept went, with assistant city manager Thom Moton explaining staff didn’t find the location on Marstellar Street suitable. Moton assessed it would have deposited a group of unsheltered people at 17th Street every morning and concentrated low-income housing in the area. A report was given to council, but it was not made an action item for the elected body.
Rivenbark said the city should have found another location instead of pushing the idea to the side.
Action items for moving forward after Monday’s meeting also weren’t forthcoming among the council, even council member Rivenbark stating such.
“These are feel-good meetings but we’re not getting anything accomplished,” he said.
Most of council comments highlighted the difficulty of the problem, including how the city has struggled to keep up with rising housing unaffordability in the area and the doubling of the city’s population, and with it the unhoused, over the last several decades.
Data shows the unsheltered population is concentrated in city limits, with 25 people not having a home per 10,000 people, compared to the nation’s average of 23 per 10,000. The CoC as a whole has 12 per 10,000.
Mayor Bill Saffo described it as being “overrun” by the need for more services, despite the city’s investments. He noted much more funding would be needed and lamented the burden feeling like it was mostly on the city’s shoulders. Schuler also shared the services within the city — shelters, the justice sytem, hospitals — collectively spend around $35,000 per homeless person every year and that the city has been the only municipality in the CoC to fund permanent supportive housing, often viewed as the best solution for chronically homeless people.
Saffo suggested, going forth, more services needed to be placed in New Hanover or the other counties, despite a probable pushback from neighbors.
Rivenbark indicated whatever the city did, it would need to be “drastic,” though he didn’t have clear answers what that could be: “Nobody in this room knows what the cure is.”
There have been some cities that have reduced their homeless population in recent years, including Wichita, Kansas, and Houston, Texas. Port City Daily interviewed the president and CEO of Houston’s homeless coalition in June 2024 about its city’s success cutting its population more than 60% since 2012.
Like almost all cities, Houston employed a Housing First approach with a focus on permanent supportive housing, moving people directly off the streets and into housing units.
As mentioned by Serkin in Monday’s meeting, the city did not enforce its anti-camping ban unless the coalition had an open bed and the homeless individual refused the help. What set Houston apart from others, like New York or San Francisco, was its centralized system, with the coalition’s lead agency dictating what service provider a homeless individual was sent to, and the city’s ability to expand its housing options.
Though no longer jointly adopted, the New Hanover County and Wilmington staffs did present a strategy in September 2024. Its goals were to:
- Grow the capacity of Continuum of Care and support service providers
- Increase capacity of facilities to meet the needs of the unsheltered population
- Supportive regulations, incentives for developers, property management and housing assistance
Elected officials instructed staff to return cost estimates and an action plan for helping the CoC in the next 90 days; this never came to fruition. Council will further discuss the proposed anti-camping ordinance at its September meeting.
Tips or comments? Email journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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