City, county officials get update on addressing homelessness

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — New Hanover Commissioners and Wilmington City Council heard a presentation from staff on Thursday about ongoing efforts to address homelessness.

The presentation revealed that there are 319 unsheltered individuals living in New Hanover County.

The process of collecting information for the presentation included the involvement of 27 different organizations, such as Coastal Horizons and the Good Shepherd Center.

Some suggested ideas included increasing the capacity of shelters and making access to resources easier.

Council member David Joyner said the presentation showed that the majority of people who get help are successfully overcoming their homelessness and that resources need to continue to flow into those programs.

“I’m really impressed with the fact that when you look at our continuum of care locally here in the Cape Fear area, it’s a 9% return to homelessness rate,” Joyner said. “That means that 9 out of 10 people, once they’ve been housed, they’re staying housed. So what that tells me as a decision maker in this area is that we’ve gotta make sure that they have the resources they need, they have the staff that they need because their staff is getting the job done.”

Commissioner Dane Scalise said he’s fully in favor of helping as many people as possible, but he is worried the county could end up in the same place it started.

“I want us to have some idea about what we’re trying to achieve and then grade ourselves as we go along, based on the money that we spend, are we achieving what we told the public that we would achieve with their hard-earned, hard-spent tax dollars,” Scalise said.

Staff will work to come up with the cost to implement some of the proposed suggestions, which will be presented to the city and county within the next 90 days.