Fights, stabbing, guns? Greensboro’s IRC, a 24/7 center for the unhoused, is becoming increasingly unsafe, residents say

Featured photo: Police presence at the parking lot across from the Interactive Resource Center on June 27. (Photo by Gale Melcher)

It was late into her first night seeking shelter at the Interactive Resource Center, and the young woman watched as a large SUV sped up to the front entrance. A group of five people, yelling threats, got out of the car and pushed their way into the crowded lobby where about 100 adults were sleeping on the floor.

“This is so scary,” the woman can be heard saying on a July 22 cellphone video she recorded at 11:08 p.m. from across the street and shared with Triad City Beat, requesting anonymity because she witnessed a crime.

“They’re going inside the [expletive] shelter,” she says on the video, her voice shaking. “Oh, no. I gotta get out of here.”

In that late-night incident, 911 logs show, four callers reported armed suspects entering the IRC, the city’s largest center for unhoused individuals; the Greensboro Police dispatched five patrol cars. Though no shots were reported fired and no weapons charges resulted, the incident was one of multiple disturbances this summer that IRC clients say have made them afraid to take shelter at the facility one block from the Greensboro Depot, the Experiential School, and Bennett College.

IRC administrators deny that guns were involved, and insist that their de-escalation approach to security and come-one-come-all policy has been a manageable response at the facility.

“We’ve been very happy with the way we’ve been handling it,” said IRC Executive Director Kristina Singleton. “Our doors are open to anyone who wants to come in.”

Jim King, who became IRC board chair in July, downplayed the July 22 incident.

 “If there had been weapons, I would have been informed,” King said. “My understanding was, they ran around the day room and then they ran out.”

But unhoused men and women interviewed in recent weeks warn that the IRC is unsafe. Since the resource center moved from a day program to a 24/7 drop-in shelter last winter, clients described witnessing fights, a stabbing, a drug-infested parking lot, and IRC staffer accidentally sprayed with mace while intervening in a dispute, incidents confirmed by police reports and the IRC director.

Overall, the daily situation has been so chaotic, as TCB documented in July, that Guilford County Emergency Services will no longer answer calls to the Washington 

Street address without a law enforcement escort.

Clients interviewed don’t put blame on the IRC, which has been overwhelmed by an estimated 200 percent increase in unhoused people seeking services in the last two years. Still, clients say the situation is growing worse, even as the IRC’s difficulties have dominated Greensboro City Council meetings this summer.

“I get it, they’ve got a hard job,” Scott Svarla, an unemployed line cook currently without shelter, said of the facility unhoused people call “The I.”  “My head’s on a swivel when I go in that building. You’ve got people stealing your stuff. Going in the bathroom is dangerous.”

Mark and Kris Hermanowski, who have been homeless for almost a year, prefer the safety of Center City Park in the daytime and a makeshift place they have found to sleep this summer “in the dry.” For the couple, the IRC is too stressful.

“You’ve got to believe everybody’s got a knife or a firearm that goes in there,” said Mark Hermanowski, who charges his phone at the IRC, but won’t sleep there. “It’s dangerous. They need a cop and an ambulance there all the time.”

Continued frustration boiled over at Tuesday’s city council meeting, when neighborhood merchants and unhoused people alike pointed to a lack of working plumbing as well as safety concerns.

Mayor Nancy Vaughan said later that she was pursuing details about the SUV incident, but that councilmembers had not been informed about the July 22 disturbance, either at a July 25 council work session on the IRC budget, or before the Aug. 4 vote to approve $463,000 for the nonprofit for the next six months. Vaughan said knowledge of the July incident might have changed the conversation.

“I think what it would have done would to have really spotlighted the need for lighting, cameras, and security,” Vaughan said after Tuesday’s meeting. “We had a whole two weeks to find out.”

Singleton, the IRC director, said surveillance video from July 22 included “no weapons that can be seen,” and that the dispute was between the group and a man who was banned from the drop-in shelter but had apparently taken refuge inside.

The dark SUV was gone by the time police arrived, and witnesses said the man being chased had fled the IRC barefoot. According to 911 logs from 30 minutes later, two unidentified callers reported that the same group had returned to the IRC in a different vehicle, this time in a green truck circling the parking lot.

The woman who took the video said this time, she saw guns: “People were scared. I was scared. That was my first night there. There wasn’t any kind of reassuring words.”

Police charged a woman with resisting arrest in connection with the incident, but this was not at the IRC. A shattered pane of glass in the front door, Singleton said, was apparently the result of someone trying to get in after the door was locked that night.

James Dampier was among the crowd of people sleeping on the floor that night, with several sleeping in wheelchairs. As he huddled in his sleeping bag,  he did not see any guns, Dampier said, but the conversation after the brief incident raised that possibility.

“They ran past me and up and over me, and then they ran out,” said Dampier, an unemployed fiber optic installer. “I heard one of the staff say, ‘Don’t bring your gunplay in here.’”

On Tuesday, city councilmembers expressed impatience that they had not received a 30-day update that was a condition of the funding approved in August. Singleton said the plan is for 24-hour security contracts to be in place in the coming months, but these will be unarmed employees.

Hiring off-duty police officers, Vaughan pointed out, would not only be expensive but inconsistent. The Greensboro Police Department is severely understaffed, Vaughan noted, and officers putting in for the overtime would sooner sign up for special events such as the Folk Festival or Tanger Center than they would a demanding shift at the IRC.

The IRC didn’t start out this way when it opened at Washington Street and Murrow Boulevard in 2008 with a community garden, computer room and library. The place was a day center where people could put down their bags, shower, do laundry and get help applying for social services, housing or jobs.

That role changed as numbers of unhoused people seeking services swelled from several hundred in past years to 979 by April 2024, according to the IRC. First, the IRC became an emergency “warming center” during cold snaps; today, it is a 24/7 “cooling center” for adults that welcomes all.

Communities across the country have seen the same explosion of people lacking shelter. In June, a US Supreme Court decision gave municipalities the legal authority to shut down homeless tent camps, a ruling critics say effectively criminalizes homelessness.

In Greensboro, several factors added up to the IRC becoming a bottleneck:

• 80 shelter beds were subtracted when the Salvation Army’s Hope Center on Eugene Street shut down due to mold
• Regency Inn, an aging 60-room motel on O. Henry Boulevard, closed after serving as supportive housing during the pandemic
• Greensboro Urban Ministry’s Weaver House shelter operated at partial capacity
• The Doorway Project pallet houses, with space for 60 people, closed in March
• Smith Homes, a 400-unit public housing complex on Florida Street, was razed, leaving residents with Section 08 vouchers that few landlords accept in a tight rental market with among the highest eviction rates in the U.S.

Those needing help, as a result, are all funneled to a narrow block east of The Depot, where the temporary closing of the Washington Street Bridge for construction has created a dead-end street. Outside, sirens wail regularly to a stop. Inside, the elderly and the weak fend for themselves, sleeping with their bags under their heads to prevent them from getting stolen.

“I don’t go there unless I have to,” said Toad, a homeless advocate who has frequently warned the council about conditions at the IRC, including lack of safety and broken showers. “The last time I was there, someone stole my blankets. And it was cold.”

Robert Boddie, who lost his apartment 18 months ago and has slept in vacant buildings rather than returning to the IRC, agreed.

“You’re already going through depression, and with all that hell, you can’t sleep and you can’t think,” he said. “Is it gonna make you stronger? Or is it gonna break you?”