In Raleigh, Brentwood of North Carolina The neighborhood, standing out among stone stores, car repair garages and warehouses that drip the city’s arterial capital boulevard, is a new site of stories: Broadstone City apartments, a stylish complex of silent land tones , modern letters and a manicure lawn. The spread of one of America’s fastest growing cities has not yet reached Brentwood. But if broadstone and its pool drained by the cabin and the resident business center filled with podcasting clothing is any indicator, genderification It’s coming.
Predicting the flow, the city of Raleigh did something unusual: bought a hotel.
In 2021, the city used $ 8 million funds from the Covid era The act of the American Salvation Plan To buy hospitality studios, a hotel with extended 117 rooms across the road from Broadstone. As the city reconstructs the building, the goal, says Emila Sutton, the director of housing and the Raleigh neighborhoods, is double: “to keep the tenancy for people already living there” as local rents will probably grow soon, and provide housing Permanent for the homeless population of Raleigh, which from 2021 to 2024 increased by 200%. The homelessness is growing all over the country: About 770,000 people lived without shelter in America in January 2024, 120,000 more than in 2023, and nearly 200,000 more than in 2022.
“Due to previous expulsions and credit history, many people have left shelter,” Sutton says. The hotel, which the city has renamed the studios with 2800 Brentwood and dramatically decreases the room rates, “offers a lower opportunity for those people.”
While people at risk of homelessness have long found shelter in the night or weekly rents in hotels and motels, that number grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, often with the help of state and federal funds. In New York City, 9,000 people moved from shelters to hotels. California Roomkey project moved about 62,000 people experiencing homeless in hotels across the state. For many people, it was changing life. In a study published in the Distress Social and Homelesness newspaper, Deborah Padgett, a professor at the New York University Social Labor School, and two colleagues interviewed more than a dozen homemade people who stayed in hotels during stretching Pandemia. “The benefits of hotel housing,” the authors wrote, “included improving physical health, sleep, personal hygiene, intimacy, safety, food and general well -being.” They concluded that “an unprecedented opportunity was born out of pandemia to end the homelessness for many people.”
Raleigh joins several cities across the country trying to make hotels a more permanent shelter solution. In October, the city of Agoikagos Purchased Motel Historical Diplomas, replenishing that Haven in Lincoln, who provides people with homeless access to their rooms. In the Ultraexpensive Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, 90 recently renovated sands will provide shelter – along with a gym, computer lab and bicycle storage – for hundreds of people who lived on the streets. At the beginning of 2024, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat from Oregon, presented the “Project Gazette Act”, which if passed will provide $ 1 billion a year through the department of housing and urban development, to buy and transform unused hotels, schools, hospitals , and office buildings across the country in the housing or to increase housing capacity.
Housing homeless people is not just altruistic, adds Sutton. She notes that A 2017 study by the National Alliance to end the homelessness Found that the cost of taxpayers to support homelessness (for public services from shelters in hospitals) can range from $ 35,000 to $ 96,000 per year. If those people are located, this cost drops between 18,000 and $ 34,000. “It is more affordable to house people, in general,” Sutton says. “And most of these people simply need light -touch support such as shelter.”
But other hotel projects for Raleigh and country housing remain new, and face many obstacles to success.
Not everyone has been on board with the hotel-staffing concept. Because they remove the inventory of city hotels, night rates in hotels around them can increase. Last May, the New York Times reported that one in five of the New York City hotels had entered a migrant housing program, leading the norms to be tossing. (Some of this increase are also due to City hit on Airbnb’s properties Along with the general inflation global.) In the controversial city meetings, where the hotel conversions are proposed, residents have also shared the fear of making their neighborhoods more sensitive to crime.
In some cities, especially New York, hotel housing projects have faced considerable opposition from hotel unions, as well as prohibition costs needed to meet local zoning regulations and construction codes, which are often more Strict for affordable housing than those for hotels. Some hotel lifts and doors, for example, are smaller and shorter than require residential buildings, and additional requirements for each unit to have a full -size refrigerator, stove and sink can be particularly costly. In a 2022 politico article, a New York architect called the strict legislation of the city’s conversion a “classic case of being perfect that is the potential enemy”.
At Raleigh, however, there has still been no obvious reaction to draftsays Sutton. For one, the Brentwood neighborhood is still a way out of the feeling of the Raleigh spread effects. The city also decided to bypass the regulatory rigmarole by keeping the building zoned as a hotel. That is to say, the preparation of the building has been a long project.
It is important not to relocate anyone while renovating.
Everett Mcelveen, CEO I CASA
Studios at 2800 look at the typical stable stable hotel each time, with the banks of rooms running along an exterior sidewalk on the first floor and a raised crossing in the second, a group of oak trees, and a pool filled with between weeds and cracked concrete.
Immediately after purchasing property, the city received a $ 15 million quota from a local architect for full renovation. Given the steep cost, Raleigh took something of a trio approach so that it was able to move people more appropriately. After reviewing the four offers for an asset manager, Raleigh chose Casa, a 30-year nonprofit specializing in providing sustainable and affordable housing for homeless areas throughout the North Carolina search triangle. Together, the city and Casa decided to update the fire alarms and sprays first, add a new WiFi system and rebuild some of the hotel stairs. Since then, CASA has rehabilitated rooms while they become available, moving existing residents to recent finished rooms in order to deal with outdated ones. Currently, 70 units are operational, they were all occupied when I recently spoke to CASA -s Everett Mcelveen CEO.
“Important is important for us not to relocate anyone while we renovate, which is why we have to do it in stages,” he says.
A few days before I was talking to Mcelveen, Employees from the Sutton office filled six rooms with people who previously lived in camps scattered inside and around Raleigh. Erika Brandt, auxiliary of the Raleigh Housing and Neighborhood Department, said those rooms were filled with a mixture of participants in the bringing of homes home-a two-year pilot program of $ 5 million aiming to mitigate homelessness that the city began in Autumn and “or few people who are not part of the pilot, but who referred to the studios because of extreme medical vulnerability making it high priority to move them indoors.”
Those rooms were given what Mcelveen calls “lightweight facilities” – a fresh job with new paint and furniture – “so feels more like an apartment than a hotel room”. Once a new chamber bank is ready, Mcelveen says, residents in the lightened rooms will be moved and those areas will accumulate for more detailed renovations.
The city and Casa plan to turn a small number of building suites into conference rooms within the next few years to provide place support services and office spaces for the Casa health intervention team to work with residents.
Casa also plans to turn the hotel -filled pool into a common area, with shutters, green grass, chairs and benches for residents to rest and accompany, and turn the entire building into solar power to reduce services costs. All of these updates require additional funds, and Sutton’s office has submitted a requirement of the city’s capital improvement plan to continue to support the $ 11 million estimated in the remaining improvements over the next five years.
Because the building remains a hotel, to reserve a room, future tenants can simply call or visit the front table. A room in hospitality studios can cost up to $ 379 a week. For now, most rooms go for $ 200 a week. Although there is no job requirement to get a room, tenants who are employed may receive a lower rate if they provide the income documentation for the city, which ensures that no one pays more than 30% of the revenue of them for rent. If there is no free place, the city will work with people to help them find apartments elsewhere.
Lynnette Moore is the longest resident in the hotel. In her 17 years there, she has seen hundreds, if not thousands, people come and go.
“People mostly stand for themselves. It’s’i is quiet. People are just trying to live,” she says, adding that recent changes have begun to foster a sense of community. “Now people seem to speak a little more. Maybe when that area is done,” she says, referring to the planned shared space, “We’ll all get to know each other.”
Casa hopes to have studios in 2800 completely renovated by 2030. By that time, Raleigh spread is likely to have swallowed the Brentwood neighborhood, turning it into something completely unknown.
Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written for the New York Times, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, Wired and many others. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and their two children.