Charlotte's Homeless Crisis

On any given night, between 5,000 to 8,000 people are homeless in Charlotte. They aren’t who you may think – grizzled old men on street corners holding cardboard signs. Many are single working mothers with children. 

There are 3,000 homeless children attending Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. More than 50 percent of all CMS students are growing up poor. Fifty percent of people in Charlotte’s shelters are working-poor who can’t afford roofs over their heads. 
More than 100,000 people in Mecklenburg County live below the federal poverty level. People you know or meet every day – bus drivers, waiters, nursing home aides and many others – do vital work for low pay. Seventy-five percent of projected job growth in our region will pay less than a living wage

If you make eight dollars an hour, you can afford $275 a month rent. An older apartment in Charlotte costs nearly $600 per month. Working-poor people live on the edge of homelessness. What should they buy: food, shelter, transportation or medicine? One wrong choice or a turn of bad luck often puts them in our overcrowded homeless shelters. Now homeless with bad credit, these families face the almost impossible task of getting back into rental housing much less becoming self-sufficient.

The W.I.S.H. Program is the  collaborative solution designed to eliminate homelessness by rapidly re-housing these families in safe and decent vacant apartments and empowering them with extensive wrap-around supportive services to become self-sufficient.