Living Hope started as a street ministry in 2020, husband-and-wife founders Tony and Christine Perez moved into a facility at the First Baptist Church in 2023. The following year, they received a $200,000 grant from The Endowment. Over the past several years, downtown stakeholders, including the Wilmington Police Department, have given the organization positive feedback.
When Living Hope needed a new location this year, it ran into concerns from potential neighbors during a community meeting. Issues included whether the day shelter had the proper zoning designation, safety precautions set up, and if people visiting the shelter would be managed properly given the proximity to homes and three schools: New Hanover High, Williston Middle, and the International School at Gregory.
In a Facebook post, Living Hope acknowledged that things could’ve been done better. That said, though a lot of neighbors sounded off against the day shelter opening up near them, many of them are not against day shelters as a concept.
Rather, for many neighbors it was the lack of trust and preparedness on Living Hope’s part that fueled much of their frustration, as Michael Jenkins, a resident of the neighborhood who attended last month’s meeting, explains:
“I reached out to them several times about this to a point of offering before the meeting to walk through the neighborhood with them… Let folks know what their plans were, when the meeting was, how they could add input, and that was consistently declined.”
What struck him particularly was the lack of notice given to many of the Black residents who’ve lived in that neighborhood for generations that Living Hope had their eye on the former Sorrow Drowner.
Welcome to the neighborhood
When Jenkins presented the same offer to walk through the neighborhood to me, I took him up on it.
One of the many people we met was a neighbor who goes by Mississippi. Jenkins and I spoke with her, and she wasn’t in support of the shelter opening.
“A lot of time I see why you homeless people be doing other places around here, you know, do it with trash and you know saying it's just bad and just sit on people's porch and stuff like that. So you know, I don't think [it would] be a good idea,” Mississippi said.
“The thing I would add to that is we don't have very many problems in the neighborhood right now, but we still get walkthroughs," Jenkins said. "So you'll occasionally run to somebody who's passing through from further down that way or further up that way."
"I think personally, you have to be understanding if somebody needs to get out of the sun for a bit or out of the rain, that's one thing," he said. "But I know people on my block have had occasional issues with houses that have stayed empty for longer, where somebody would just move onto the porch for a week. And again, you want to be sensitive to the fact that everybody has to live somewhere.”
Charles Singleton is a senior in the community; he has a soft spot for people around his age who are experiencing homelessness, so he’d be happy if a shelter opened up where they live.
"It's good to have a try to get a place where they can live because you don't know how they're living. Half of them living in the street," Singleton said.
"It's a nice area, but the idea, when you close your door at night, you don't know who is who. That's my concern," he said.
His next-door neighbor Susan agrees that people need somewhere to go, especially as access to public spaces dwindles for the unhoused.
“I think it's a needed service, and if what I was told, I was told that it would be a place for them to be in the daytime. Obviously, they're going to come at night too," she said. "I think that's a lot of people's concerns, but they need somewhere to go during the day. I think it's a good service.”
Then there is Rosa Shannon, who’s been living in the neighborhood for 60 years; she’s now 100 years old.
Her daughter Rosa Shannon Durant, spoke on her behalf after hearing about the proposed plans for the shelter for the first time, referencing a shelter in her new hometown of Fayetteville.
“We have that in Fayetteville. Yeah. So far, it seems to be a 100% helping,” Durant said.
“See, in Fayetteville, it's not by school or anything, because that was our biggest concern was school. But they did not put it around no schools or nothing," Durant said. "So now, we see a 100% turnaround, a humongous participation. Like I said, we haven't had no trouble from the homeless either.”
She says she personally isn’t against the idea of a shelter moving in, though she would want to make sure the overgrowth of bushes behind her mom’s home was cleared if one were to open up — though she said she thought that’s probably the city’s responsibility.
Durant says the shelter in Fayetteville is a success now, because concerns like that were heard and addressed, but, “you can't guarantee that nothing ain't gonna happen because you don't know that," she said.
Crime reports
Concerns about crime and other issues were consistently raised by people in the neighborhood. One resident reached out to WHQR, requesting not to be named to protect their privacy. In an email, they wrote:
“The additional pedestrian activity, queuing, and outdoor gathering associated with this use could create congestion and safety concerns along a corridor used daily by neighborhood residents and schoolchildren.”
This neighbor also brought to our attention the number of crimes reported at the day shelter’s previous location at 411 Market Street.
They shared files from New Hanover County’s 911 Center’s Computer-Aided Dispatch system, or CAD files, showing a total of 192 incidents that the Wilmington Police Department responded to since Living Hope began operating at First Baptist on June 1, 2023. They said in the approximately four months prior to Living Hope running out of First Baptist, only 13 events were reported.
This neighbor noted that only five events out of the 192 included in this list of reports had redacted dates.
The source notes that there was a striking concentration of calls on days the shelter was open. They found that, out of the 187 events with visible dates, 146, or about 78%, occurred during Living Hope’s operating days on Mondays and Wednesdays, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
WHQR verified these files with county staff, and after reviewing the files myself, I noticed that while only a handful of reports had the dates redacted, 99 out of 192 items included in this list had the criminal nature of the report redacted.
If you add the five events with both the date and incident details redacted, that leaves about 88 incidents that you can actually argue may be tied to the presence of a day shelter.
Also, out of the 99 redacted events, 80 fell under the Wilmington Fire Department’s jurisdiction. So a significant portion of these calls may not be crime-related at all.
Don’t get me wrong, there were a number of calls WPD responded to at First Baptist Church while Living Hope was there, including some thefts, verbal disturbances, and reports of open drug use.
One incident report from Wednesday, May 14, of last year, detailed a simple assault of a 47-year-old man who was threatened by someone with a knife near church grounds that afternoon. That aligns with the hours of the day the shelter was open.
Also, a 50-year-old resident reported an aggravated assault that appears to have occurred on a Monday, but was reported on a Tuesday. There was also a forcible rape reported on October 9, last year, which was a Thursday — a day the shelter wouldn’t have been open, but still worth noting to show that serious crimes happened in the area on days the shelter was closed.
The identity of the victim was kept off the record, but according to the report, this incident took place at a park or playground at or near First Baptist Church.
Learning to Adapt
A local business owner of a community corner store shared the same concerns over safety as many residents. The owner, who asked not to b