A few months after announcing a homelessness intervention plan in October, Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders is eyeing a site for a possible overnight shelter in downtown Charlottesville.
Monday night, Sanders will ask Council to consider buying two connected parcels of land at 405 Avon St. and 405 Levy Ave., between the Kindlewood community (formerly Friendship Court) and the Belmont Bridge, for a future shelter and housing project.
He’s recommending Council use $4 million in unused American Rescue Plan Act funds to acquire the properties. They are currently owned by the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA).
The Rescue Plan money has to be designated for use by the end of this year, and used by the end of 2026, which is why Sanders wants the city to use it now.
“When money sits, when it’s federal money, they tend to start questioning and then they start asking for it back. It’s not my desire to send it back,” he said.
“There are big things we can do with it.”
Currently, both sites are used as ad hoc parking for CRHA and city employees, and the garage on the Avon St. side is used as materials storage, like building supplies and city vehicles. Previously, it was home to two local nonprofits, Community Bikes and the Urban Agriculture Collective.
Sanders envisions it as something that could address the dual problems of homelessness and lack of affordable housing in the city. He’s thinking year-round permanent shelter beds, as well as a housing component similar to the supportive housing offered at The Crossings at Fourth and Preston. In those communities housing is combined with on-site social services to get people out of, and keep them from falling back into, homelessness.
But it’s just a vision for now. Sanders has not determined who would run the shelter, or how its operations would be funded.
“All I’m doing right now is getting control of a site to do whatever it is we need to do.”
If Council approves the acquisition, Sanders’ next step will be to consult with the area’s homeless continuum of care, composed of organizations like the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, People and Congregations Engaged in Ministry (PACEM), and The Haven. They’re the experts in issues of homelessness, and Sanders said he wants to know what they’re seeing and hearing.
A comprehensive evaluation of those needs would follow.
“I don’t want to rush into doing something that turns out not to be what we truly need,” said Sanders. “If it’s as simple as ‘yes, we need permanent shelter beds,’ the question that I have now is, how many?”
Then the conversations would turn to cost, and to what else the site could physically accommodate — like supportive housing units.
A permanent overnight shelter is something Sanders started looking into in the fall, when homelessness became what he called a “hot topic” locally.
More about unhoused people in Charlottesville
In September, Sanders lifted the curfew on Market Street Park after a community member accused police of harassing unhoused people there. (A follow up investigation by the department determined the allegations were unfounded.) But within days, a tent community popped up in the park and emails from residents both furious and concerned flooded Sanders’ inbox.
By October, Sanders promised the city would make addressing homelessness a priority and announced a plan for doing so. One of the action items in that plan was identifying a site for and funding a homeless shelter, and maybe more. Sanders asked Chris Engel of the city’s Office of Economic Development to look at potential sites for such a project. None were quite right, until the Avon and Levy properties came up in a conversation between Sanders and CRHA Executive Director John Sales.
In fact, Sanders had been curious about the site for a while, after hearing that it was at one point very close to becoming The Crossings II, a Virginia Supportive Housing project that stalled indefinitely.
If the deal goes through, CRHA has some preliminary plans to use the $4 million from the sale to do another project, on a different site in the city.
“If this acquisition is approved, CRHA has a plan to undertake a mixed use redevelopment community,” said Sales.
The plan envisions three economic development spaces for minority-owned businesses, new headquarters for CRHA, office space for potentially two local nonprofits, and possibly up to five affordable housing units. Sales was not ready to share more details about the project, like its location, but he did call the potential deal between the city and CRHA “a game changer for Charlottesville.”
Sanders is eager for Council to approve the purchase so that he can get started on talking with the experts in the homeless continuum of care.
He has a timeline in mind.
“I don’t want it to be very far,” he said. “I want movement, I would say, within the next two years for sure. I could be overshooting at this moment, for how much I could get moving, but we need it. I’m impatient when I see a need.”
