It’s been one month since the cash-strapped Bethesda Center for the Homeless in Winston-Salem reopened its day shelter. The move came following months of closure due to a lack of finances. Local downtown business owners, concerned about the rise in homelessness in the city, raised enough money to keep the doors open through the end of the year.
On September 26, following months of what city officials described as disruptive behavior at Merschel Park, staff members removed all furniture there. The park had become a popular hangout for people downtown experiencing homelessness, folks like Tony, who asked that his last name not be used.
"I think instead of taking the chairs away, they need to help these people," he says. "Some of these homeless people that can’t get into shelters because they’re full, ain’t got nowhere to go."
Kimberly Bolden, who also experiences homelessness, says she’s concerned about the aggressive behavior of young people in the park.
"They fight all the time," she says. "They disrespect — like I’m an elder. I stopped sitting in the park lately because of that reason."
The reality is, there are few, if any, options available for people like Tony and Bolden. There are about 235 unsheltered individuals in Winston-Salem. The Salvation Army provides temporary housing for families, and as the only whole-family emergency center in Forsyth County, the nonprofit struggles to keep up with demand.
The Bethesda Center for the Homeless is for individuals, with no background checks or sobriety requirements.
But Executive Director Chris Leab says, they too are feeling the pressure.
"We're a low-barrier shelter, 70 men, 30 women, and we are the only women's shelter in Forsyth County," says Leab. "And I can tell you, we're consistently turning women away, and so that is a big issue."
City officials are aware of the problem, but last month, during a Council meeting, City Manager Patrick Pate said all city and federal funds for homeless services had already been allocated for 2025.
That response was not what local business owners in the downtown area wanted to hear. They formed a coalition and quickly raised just over $10,000 with roughly a dozen members contributing to reopen Bethesda’s Day Center through the end of the year.
Co-organizer Lauren Dubinsky owns a garden design business, and her husband runs a menswear clothing store on Trade Street. She says the City of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County’s annual Point-in-Time counts have consistently shown the overall unhoused population here to be several hundred individuals.
In January, the 2025 count identified 476 people experiencing homelessness on the streets, in emergency shelters, or in transitional housing.
Dubinsky says city and elected officials have had years to develop better strategies for getting incremental, state, and local funding, and to help garner private support to house people living in the streets — and she and her business-owner colleagues are waiting to hear a plan.
"We're asking for clear messaging from leadership that the population is underfunded; we're asking for them to humanize these people as like, real people that are living in crisis," says Dubinsky. "And we're really asking them to re-earn, I think, the trust of downtown business owners and residents by making good faith efforts in the short term to, like, deal with an emergency problem as they're trying to figure out better long-term planning for everyone."
Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines says the city has a very aggressive program focused on the unhoused. He points to a ten-year plan he developed around 2011, which he says led to the reduction of chronic homelessness by 92%, pre-pandemic.
"We know how to address it," he says. "The problem is there's a lack of housing units, and so that's part of the strategy. We have a goal of creating about 13,000 new housing units in our community over the next eight to ten years, and that will help us address that. On the other end of it, there we know we've got to have continuing homeless programs, and we, the city, through federal grants and others — it’s in the neighborhood of $1.5 million a year — we spend on continuum of care, rapid rehousing, things of that nature."
Joines adds that his office is currently working with Bethesda Center and the Dream Center, which provides food, clothing and family counseling to bring about a more coordinated effort at addressing the homeless population.
Chris Leab, who directs both centers, says he considers the city a partner, pointing to its recent funding for new bathrooms at Bethesda. At issue for Leab is his bottom line, and he says a more coordinated effort with the city can’t come soon enough.
"We have to have it open during the winter because the conditions outside are too tough during the winter, and really, even when it's really hot, for a lot of these individuals to be outside," says Leab. "So we've got to figure out a way, once we get into 2026, to remain open."
And with the number of people experiencing homelessness nationwide at a record high, keeping the doors open may be an ongoing challenge in the Triad for years to come.