Wake County’s next emergency homeless shelter won’t be in downtown Raleigh

Wake County opened an emergency drop-in shelter for homeless people last year in a building in downtown Raleigh that had long served as a refuge for those in need.

But county officials knew that arrangement was temporary. The building is owned by a development company that plans to build a 12-story apartment tower in a fast-changing corner of downtown.

The shelter will need to close by the end of the year.

Now the county has found a replacement site in North Raleigh. County commissioners have agreed to buy a 9,300-square-foot building near the intersection of Old Wake Forest and East Millbrook roads and will soon begin looking for a partner to operate a drop-in shelter there starting next year.

The county initially planned to open what’s known as a “white flag” shelter that would operate only in the winter months. The term refers to the banner shelters everywhere fly on cold nights to indicate that anyone can come in to stay warm.

But as the number of unsheltered people in Wake doubled between 2019 and 2023, the county decided to keep the shelter open regardless of the weather, said Morgan Mansa, deputy director of Housing Affordability and Community Revitalization.

“We are at capacity or pretty close to capacity every single night,” Mansa said. “It reaffirmed the need to create something that is lasting in the community, and so that’s why we are moving forward with this acquisition.”

The temporary shelter opened last fall at 401 West Cabarrus Street, the longtime home of the Helen Wright Center for Women , a shelter operated by the nonprofit Urban Ministries of Wake County . Urban Ministries moved the center to a new, larger location outside the Beltline and sold the Cabarrus Street building in 2019.

The property changed hands again earlier this year. The county has been told that the new owner, a limited liability company created by First Form of Washington, D.C. , plans to start demolishing the building and others nearby early next year to make way for about 300 apartments. The county’s lease is up at the end of the year.

“We don’t want to get in the way of their development and their plans after they’ve been so gracious in letting us utilize this space temporarily,” Mansa said.

The shelter is operated by St. John’s Metropolitan Community Church , under a contract with the county. With 100 beds for men and 50 for women in a separate part of the building, the shelter opens at 7 p.m. each night and closes at 7 a.m.

“It’s intended to be an emergency-type shelter, to allow folks to get a space if they’re coming into homelessness for the first time,” said Vance Haywood Jr., the church’s pastor. “This gives you a place to have safe space to be while you sort those things out and figure out what’s next.”

A ‘forever home’ outside downtown Raleigh

Wake commissioners agreed to pay $1.9 million for a former AT&T server building and estimate it will cost another $4.9 million to get the building in shape to house about 100 people each night. Some or all of the renovation cost may be covered by donations and the organization the county chooses to run the shelter, Mansa said.

The county hopes the shelter is ready to begin accepting people by late next summer, more than half a year after the temporary one downtown closes. In the meantime, Mansa said, the county will work with nonprofits to provide white flag emergency shelter elsewhere, including at the county’s South Wilmington Street Center just south of downtown .

The new emergency shelter will be about six miles north of downtown Raleigh. Haywood said it will be less convenient than the Cabarrus Street site, which is centrally located and easy to reach on foot.

“Being downtown has a lot of perks,” he said. “So moving out of downtown will certainly have impacts on the people who are able to access the shelter.”

But Mansa said the North Raleigh location is within walking distance of two GoRaleigh bus lines, the 23L and 2. There’s also value in knowing that the shelter will have a “forever home” in a building the county owns, she said.

And staying downtown wasn’t really an option, given rising real estate values and the shrinking supply of available buildings. The new apartments that First Form plans to build on the site will share the block with the Fairweather, a five-story condo building , and is down the street from Platform, a new 442-unit apartment complex and Oldham & Worth, a five-story apartment building now under construction .

The county expected its permanent drop-in shelter would be outside downtown, Mansa said.

“Finding something that is just over 9,000 square feet and that is accessible to a diverse group of people who are unsheltered is not the easiest thing to find in downtown Raleigh,” she said.

Sign Up for RDU on the Rise