07/31/2024
Former IRC employee and local writer Gwen Frisbie-Fulton shares her thoughts about the IRC in her recent News and Record column.
Years back when I was working at the Interactive Resource Center, a young woman checked in at the front desk. She was small and thin, wearing an oversized sweatshirt that consumed her little body.
She had just turned 18 and had aged out of the foster care system. With no place to go, no place to get a shower, to charge her phone, or get online and apply for a job, someone had directed her to the IRC. I kept an eye on her throughout the day; she scrolled on her phone, read a magazine and timidly chatted with a few other women, nervously trying to blend in. She seemed so lost, so untethered, so scared.
The IRC day room is always a huge mix of people. An elderly man living off disability who doesn’t want to talk to anyone but naps in the corner. A woman in a wheelchair who was a photographer until she fell on the job, shattering her legs and losing her income. A Honduran man who was an EMT back home but can’t find a job here. A young man who has been in and out of jail since he was 14 and left by his family to fend for himself. A middle-aged woman with a raised scar that runs across her face, living in a tent to stay away from the danger lurking in her suburban home.
Pastors, police, neighbors, family, employers – so many of us suggest that folks who are down on their luck “go down to the IRC.” And indeed, there are so many ways to get there: Evictions, housefires, job loss, an unexpected injury. That is what struck me about that young woman: It was as if she had traveled down some river I could not see and simply washed ashore at the IRC.
When critics complain about the crowds at the IRC or the number of times emergency personnel are dispatched to the shelter, what they aren’t understanding is that everything that is happening at the IRC is happening downstream from the rest of the city.
When I worked there it was like we were splashing around in rising water, as if there were a slow-leaking dam upstream made up of substandard housing and low-wage jobs. But today, the IRC is working in a flash flood. Over the last year, the center has experienced a 67% increase in people needing services.
This sort of flood has never, ever happened before.
In the middle of the flood, developers and businessmen are seizing an opportunity. With their eyes on the nearby Depot for development, they are pressuring the City to withhold funding from the center, citing crowds, trash and crime. But holding the IRC solely accountable for the problems occurring in and around the building is both myopic and cynical. It’s a way of looking at a problem on one block of the city instead of the 130 square miles that Greensboro is made of.
In fact, the IRC may be the only place in Greensboro not responsible for the problems being complained about. The IRC has no ability to address the upstream problems, while policymakers, developers and the business community do.
Like the woman I met years ago, one of the growing populations showing up at the IRC are young people. The minimum wage in North Carolina is still $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2008. At this wage, a young person starting their first job would have to work an impossible 139 hours a week to afford an apartment. Many of downtown’s eateries and bars only pay a little above the minimum wage, meaning that young adults must have multiple jobs, multiple roommates or a wealthy family to support them. If local Greensboro businesses were paying living wages, these young people wouldn’t be at the IRC.
Another growing population at the IRC is the elderly and medically fragile individuals. These people are often living on disability or social security checks which no longer make a dent in astronomical rents. The Urban Institute found that North Carolina is one of the worst states for healthcare costs and medical debt — between 2019-2021, 13.4% of North Carolinians had medical debt. The resulting predatory interest rates and aggressive legal actions are pushing thousands of families into poverty, even sometimes taking their homes. If local politicians and healthcare professionals advocated for policy change in the healthcare industry, many of these elders and medically fragile people would not be at the IRC.
The IRC served over 8,500 people experiencing homelessness last year. At 14%, Guilford County has North Carolina’s fourth highest eviction rate. In 2022, Greensboro experienced the nation’s largest increase for a one bedroom apartment, according to Rent.com.
Corporate landlords and short term rental companies are buying up housing in poorer neighborhoods like mine, driving up costs and pushing families out. If landlords were held accountable, if developers built affordable housing and if the elected officials regulated housing in ways that help poor people, not the wealthy, then thousands and thousands of people would not be at the IRC.
But, everyone at the IRC would be somewhere else if the center is shuttered. The medical emergencies would still occur, the mental health crises would happen and the altercations, too.
Unless, of course, we address things upstream.
The IRC is not a medical facility. It is not a youth shelter. It is not a memory-care unit or a nursing home.
The IRC is also not a place where policy is made. It is not an investment firm helping set the cost of rent. It’s not a business trying to increase its profit margins. Instead, it’s a place that exists as a consequence of all of that, trying to mitigate it all.
From it’s very beginning, the IRC was designed as a place to give placeless people a place to be. The IRC hasn’t changed – and they are not the ones failing to live out their mission. They aren’t failing to do what the city or their funders have asked them to do. They aren’t the ones letting us down – we are letting them down.
If there is a problem that the IRC creates for Greensboro, it is that they are holding up a mirror for the rest of us.
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Greensboro resident Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is communications director with Down Home North Carolina and a News & Record columnist.
https://greensboro.com/opinion/column/greensboro-irc-interactive-resource-center-gwen-frisbie-fulton/article_b2fce3b2-4ab5-11ef-b448-ef6691b07230.html
