Columbia to launch new downtown center to get homeless off streets. What we know
For decades, Columbia has cycled through committees, consultants, contracts and more in attempts to reduce homelessness downtown.
And in all that time, the conversation has remained pretty much the same: City power brokers say people living on the streets is bad for downtown business and hurts economic growth, but downtown is also where shelters, meal-sharing programs and other assistance for homeless individuals are located.
To further complicate things, there are dozens of groups trying to provide meals, clothes, transportation help, medical care, connections to housing vouchers, and a list of other services, but they are spread out and not always well-known.
Columbia has talked for years about doing something to better consolidate those resources.
Next month, it will open the Recovery Center at Hope Plaza near Elmwood Avenue downtown, to help meet that goal. The center will have a particular focus on addiction recovery, specifically targeting people living on the street.
Columbia plans to call on numerous service providers to join the effort, but the city did not include many of the area’s major nonprofits in the planning of the new center, multiple of those organizations confirmed.
Monday, the city sent out an email invitation for an open house this Friday. The center is expected to be open October 13. The email was sent to dozens of nonprofits and other agencies that interface with homeless individuals. Representatives for several of those organizations said that email was the first they had heard of the recovery center effort, and that they didn’t fully understand the project given only the short open house invitation.
Organizations that said they had no previous knowledge of the city’s plans include Homeless No More, MIRCI and SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center.
“Over the next month, as we work towards the opening of the Hope Plaza, we’re going to have some serious conversations with folks in the service world for homeless services and also with our health care providers,” Columbia Councilman Will Brennan, who chairs the city’s homeless services committee, said in an interview with The State. “We’ll lead, but we need partners, and so that’s kind of our efforts right now.”
Why weren’t providers involved earlier? The city said the nearly $400,000 in funding for the project wasn’t approved until Sept. 16 and it could not provide specifics about the project until after that point.
The city is now appealing to those providers, less than a month out from the facility opening its doors. It’s unclear which, if any, of the groups the city says are integral to the effort have committed to participate.
The city’s open house Friday for those providers at the Hope Plaza site is intended for them “to learn more.”
“Our request is simple: Bring the great work you’re already doing into Hope Plaza. The space has been generously donated and is designed to accommodate multiple providers, offering private areas to ensure confidentiality and effective service delivery,” said the city in a statement shared with The State on Tuesday afternoon.
What is this new facility?
The facility, dubbed the Recovery Community Center at Hope Plaza, will be a day center where chronically homeless individuals with substance use concerns can get a variety of possible help: from assistance to applying for SNAP, to connections for housing vouchers, to specific addiction counseling. Nearly 35% of homeless individuals across Richland County are estimated to have a substance use disorder.
The center will be located at 2018A Main Street, at the existing Christ Central Hope Plaza across Main Street from Transitions Homeless Shelter, and it will operate Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Those hours may eventually change to address a lack of evening homeless services in the area.
“This is huge, knowing that Hope Plaza has been for a very long time a hot spot for trouble, for lack of a better term,” said city council member Aditi Bussells during a Sept. 18 committee meeting about the new initiative.
The city hopes to also include groups that provide free meals to those in need. When people come for a meal, then those at the center can try to also refer them to services like transitional housing and mental health care, among other things. And, leaders said, the center could also eventually offer on-site urgent care and the ability to fill prescriptions.
Because the program has a strong emphasis on addiction recovery, the city is able to use money from the South Carolina Opioid Recovery Fund. The board overseeing that fund approved $385,899 for the six-month pilot program. That money comes from a nationwide legal settlement with opioid maker Johnson & Johnson, in which South Carolina received more than $360 million. Cities are able to apply for some of that money.
The recovery center model is championed by a medical research nonprofit with ties to Harvard, called the Recovery Research Institute. The goal of recovery community centers is to build layers of support – termed recovery capital – that help sustain addiction recovery. These layers include basic needs like food and housing, and more abstract resources like building social support systems.
City council members Brennan and Tyler Bailey both said that the program is also very much tied to the city’s overall goals around homeless programming. They both stressed that the use of the facility is being donated by Christ Central Ministries, but it will be operated entirely by the city.
And the city’s message is also one of tough love. Leaders want the Elmwood corridor cleaned up and they say something has to give to reduce frequent 911 calls and police stops in the area.
“The corridor right now (at Elmwood Avenue and Main Street) that our community members, our business owners, our citizens, our law enforcement professionals deal with on a daily basis, as we know it, is just untenable to keep being in a cycle,” said Columbia City Manager Teresa Wilson during that public discussion last week.
A one-stop shop?
Columbia leaders have in the past have decried the city’s lack of a “one-stop shop” for various homeless services, but several providers have pointed out that they do travel around to different locations across the city to meet people experiencing homelessness where they are. One example, the nonprofit MIRCI already provides mobile homeless outreach and mental health screenings and treatment at sites including Transitions, Toby’s Place, Oliver Gospel Mission and the city’s Rapid Shelter hub.
Brennan, the city councilman, said this effort isn’t meant to detract from the existing work being done, but that this new effort has a specific focus and is also the city’s attempt to take a leadership role on the issue at large.
“We want to be that touch point. We want to help people (as) the guide of services,” Brennan said. “And I think that’s a frustrating point for a lot of folks that are seeking help, is they don’t know where to go.”
Though they are still learning about the effort, some providers reached by The State said they think the city’s idea could be fruitful.
“A center like this has the potential to offer very coordinated, holistic care for our unhoused neighbors, including those living with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders,” said Robbie Robertson, spokesperson for the Lexington/Richland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council when reached by email. “We really appreciate the city’s efforts to strengthen recovery resources, and we look forward to being part of those conversations.”
The alcohol and drug abuse council was invited to the upcoming open house.
Larry Nichols, who helps run the meal-sharing ministry Resurrections also agreed that having the ability to centralize resources could certainly help get more people into stable housing.
“We’re not going to be able to (get people housing) by having 20 different agencies not knowing what the other agencies are doing,” Nichols said. “Other groups should hook up with (the city) and go through them to consolidate resources so that homeless don’t have to go pillar to post, six blocks this way, eight blocks that way, to get something they can all get in one place.”
Homelessness on downtown streets has always been a concern of city leaders, Nichols said. But the redevelopment of Bull Street, which began over a decade ago, marked a notable shift.
“It’s not evil,” Nichols said. But it is economic. “I think they’re at the point now where they’re going to be very, very serious about moving the homeless population, redirecting their activities away from the BullStreet District, and certainly away from the Vista.”
The Hope Plaza project is set to come online as nearly 1,000 people are considered homeless in Richland County alone.
Each January, volunteers go around and physically count how many people they encounter on the street to compile a “point in time” measure of how many people are considered homeless in a given area.
In Richland County this year, that count found at least 837 people considered homeless by federal definitions. Just over 200 of those people were considered chronically homeless, meaning the person has been homeless for at least a year. The annual count is also almost always considered an undercount by experts because it’s just a snapshot taken one day each year.
The new recovery center is geared specifically at reaching those chronically homeless, Brennan told The State. And it’s just one of a long list of ideas the city has tried in recent years to address homelessness across the city.
Members of Columbia City Council have repeatedly talked about moving the city’s existing homeless services out of downtown and into an as-yet unfunded centralized campus which has been tentatively named the Hope Center. That campus would include individual housing units in addition to on-site care from different organizations, but currently it’s still just an idea.
Despite similar names, this Hope Plaza project is not a scaled-down version of the Hope Center campus plan. But it could be a first step, Brennan said.
“We’re not planting the flag on that block of Main Street saying ‘this is the forever home for homeless services,’ ” he said. “This is just a portion of the blueprint as we build up to eventually finding that Hope Center.”
Brennan emphasized that this new effort is a pilot program and after six months the city council will review its impact.
“Are we going to get it right all the time? No,” he said. “Are we going to try our hardest to pivot and head in the right direction if challenges arise, absolutely. But we can’t do it alone.”
Ongoing attempts
This is not the first time the city has launched a new initiative to centralize certain services.
Over the last few years the city has spent more than $3 million to bring homeless services in-house, ending a long-standing contract with the United Way. And the city council has taken several steps to broadly address downtown homelessness, some celebrated some scorned. Those efforts have included:
- Creating a temporary housing program called Rapid Shelter Columbia with “pallet shelters” erected near the river on Calhoun Street, which has so far given short-term housing to more than 400 people and connected over 100 people with permanent housing.
- Adding new city positions for homeless services, including a community liaison, support specialist, part-time outreach specialist, housing navigator and an aftercare case manager.
- Proposing relocating homeless services away from downtown and into an as-yet unbuilt campus that would include individual housing units. That effort included a failed ask for $10 million in state dollars, as well as a failed deal to secure a Department of Mental Health property on Farrow Road.
- Launching a controversial partnership with Christ Central to provide a no-cost kitchen to centralize meal-sharing, and to curb that practice elsewhere downtown.
- Hiring private security firm Allied Universal to reduce loitering around the Elmwood Avenue corridor.
- Passing controversial ordinances about stolen shopping carts and drug paraphernalia that the ACLU and other groups criticized as efforts to criminalize homelessness.
At each of these junctures, the city has heard some praise and some criticisms. For example, the pallet shelter initiative has inspired nearly $10,000 in donations to buy more of the shelters.
While many grassroots meal-sharing groups argued against the city’s desire to stop that practice on public streets, calling it an effort to erase homeless from the downtown environment, and an effort to quash groups’ ability to meet people where they were.
But Nichols’ also said that despite the controversy around that notion, he’s found the Christ Central site to be ideal for his Resurrections meal-sharing group, adding that they are now “working in synchronicity.”
And as the new program at Hope Plaza is underway, third-party consultants soon to be hired by Columbia will begin compiling a new report to “gain a clear understanding of the current landscape of homelessness, the services available, as well as be able to identify strengths and gaps, and develop actionable recommendations to enhance and expand support for chronically unsheltered individuals,” according to a request for proposals issued earlier this year.
Kameisha Heppard, Columbia’s homeless services director, told council members the consultant the city hires will have that report ready to present by this coming spring.
Brennan said he hopes that report will help not just the city but the Midlands broadly to understand if they are missing opportunities for funding or other programming, including what they can ask for from the statehouse.
This story was originally published September 24, 2025 at 8:58 AM.
