The Salvation Army Center of Hope is growing quieter by the day. The hallways, recreation rooms and cafeteria once buzzed with more than 60 of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Now, many of these residents have already cleared out as the Center of Hope prepares to shut its doors until at least next spring.
Phillip Stokes oversees shelter operations with his wife, Sherrie Stokes. The couple made the decision to pause shelter services after the nonprofit ran through its final installment of federal funding, which included money from the American Rescue Plan Act and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Mr. Stokes described the predicament as “heavy” and “heartbreaking,” especially in the face of the city’s growing homelessness crisis.
“We still have about 20 residents here,” he said with a sigh. “We are still working very closely with them, but for some of them, it's a challenge to get them placed.”
The downtown institution is one of the largest and oldest shelters in the region. Stokes says he has made multiple appeals for additional funding, but Asheville and Buncombe County leaders told BPR they do not have any plans to provide the shelter with more funding, after allocating nearly $2 million in federal grants in the last few years.
In an interview with BPR, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said it’s not sustainable to keep the shelter open with public funds.
“If we could afford to do that, which we can't, that would only be a short-term solution,” she said. “There's got to be a long-term operational solution for Salvation Army that isn't dependent on city funding or even county funding.”
The national Salvation Army organization will not cover the shortfall either, Stokes said, leaving the organization on its own to raise the $1.2 million needed to reopen the shelter.
“We’re gonna do everything we can until April 30,” Stokes said. “But the reality is, come April 30th, if the funding's not there. Like this place will probably end up shutting down.”
A “significant strain” on a system already short on beds
The pause in services comes at a particularly tough time, as homelessness continues to rise in the Asheville area.
The 2026 Point in Time count logged 824 people who are unhoused in the survey area – a number that has jumped 50% since 2020. Hurricane Helene played a major role in that increase, pulling an estimated 130 more people into homelessness.
The biggest spike is among those who qualify as unsheltered, meaning those sleeping outside, in tents or in cars – a number that’s increased from 65 to 334 since 2020.
The Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care, a collection of local governments, shelters and other nonprofits, is the main body responsible for addressing homelessness.
For years, the CoC has hammered the importance of maintaining shelter beds, marking it as a priority in its three-year strategic plan. The organization was also aware of the Center of Hope’s financial problems well before the shelter announced its pause.
In a November 2025 memo, the CoC’s Funding Committee warned that it was “highly likely” the Salvation Army shelter would experience a service disruption in 2026. The committee recommended that the CoC monitor the situation and develop contingency plans for people who could be displaced by shelter reductions or closures.
“Losing something, especially something that's been ingrained into the community for so long is going to be a really hard thing to replace,” Johnson said.
In a more recent interview, Thomas Kirchgasser, a Continuum of Care board member, confirmed the closure of Center of Hope would bring “significant strain” to an already struggling system.
“We have a large number of people that are unhoused. Not having that capacity makes more people unhoused. And so we're going in the wrong direction,” he told BPR.
He added that the Center of Hope would be especially difficult to replace because it has relatively low barriers to entry, meaning it serves people whose circumstances can make other shelters harder to access.
But he stopped short at providing a solution to the problem and acknowledged that there’s no immediate plan to replace the lost beds.
“What we've bumped up against is the funding reality,” he said.
Asheville is already short about 90 shelter beds, Emily Ball, the Homeless Strategy Division Manager for Continuum of Care, told BPR in an interview. If the Center of Hope closes for good, that shortage would increase to a total of 155.
Ball added that the CoC has a limited and constrained budget, meaning it also cannot help out the Salvation Army – and that the financial issues the shelter faces are a common predicament.
“These are not revenue generating activities,” she said. “And often funders want to understand the sustainability plan and you know it is really complicated to fund crisis response services.”
Still, it’s uncommon for a Salvation Army shelter to close – even temporarily, according to Josh Johnson, a Vice President with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
"I've never seen this actually happen, like a shelter shut down,” he told BPR. “I've seen Salvation Armies hold up really strong homeless response programs.”
But if a community does lose a shelter, complications around zoning, finances and community pushback can make it tremendously hard to get a new one off the ground.
“Losing something, especially something that's been ingrained into the community for so long, is going to be a really hard thing to replace,” Johnson said.
Funding has been a “spiral downhill” since pandemic, Salvation Army says
Public records show the Center of Hope has been at risk of closing since at least 2024. But its financial struggles actually date back to around 2018.
For more than a decade, the shelter operated as a federal pre-release facility, receiving per-person, per-day payments to house people nearing release from federal prison. That arrangement ended around eight years ago, eliminating a major source of recurring revenue for The Salvation Army.
According to Stokes, the Salvation Army used reserve funds – and some profits from its thrift stores – to keep shelter operations afloat.
“Then COVID happened and it was just a spiral downhill after that,” he said.
After struggling to staff the stores, the Salvation Army closed all four local locations in the aftermath of the pandemic, eliminating another source of revenue for the nonprofit.
“The expectation was that these funds would fill a short term budget deficit and enable the Salvation Army to build the resources to be self-funded moving forward.”
Stokes said the Center of Hope continued to rely on reserves from 2019 through 2022, but declined to share how much in total was spent. He added that the Center of Hope also depended on “local donations and small grants.”
Then in 2023, Asheville and Buncombe County stepped in to fund shelter operations, using American Rescue Plan Act funds.
Over two years, the city and county directed $1.98 million of those ARPA funds to sustain operations and also expand the shelter’s capacity from 45 to 65 beds.
A 2024 audit of The Salvation Army shows the Asheville organization closed the year with around $350,000 in operating reserves.
In late 2025, the shelter received another $280,020 as part of a one-time Helene recovery grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Even before that final funding was exhausted, the CoC had concluded that the shelter had not developed a sustainable replacement.
In its November 2025 memo, the CoC wrote that “the expectation was that these funds would fill a short term budget deficit and enable the Salvation Army to build the resources to be self-funded moving forward,” adding that “it is apparent the Salvation Army has not been able to develop the capacity to self-fund their shelter operations.”
Repeated requests, but no more funding
When the Center of Hope’s remaining federal money ran out this summer and no replacement emerged, the shelter moved toward the service disruption the CoC had warned about.
Stokes, who took over as the local Salvation Army lead in June 2025, acknowledged that the organization has struggled with fundraising over the last few years.
“The numbers just don't add up to where we can sustain it currently,” Stokes told BPR. “But we're out to work in the community and trying to secure the donations we need.”
In 2026, The Salvation Army made multiple requests for more public funding.
In February, the organization applied for $1.2 million through Buncombe County’s Safety Net and Behavioral Health Maintenance of Effort grant program. That request was not recommended for funding, with one committee member describing the application as “unclear on many fronts, including capacity, what the project entails, and the budget, which was not detailed.”
A few months later, The Salvation Army pitched three more possible funding scenarios in a presentation to the CoC: $2.6 million to maintain full operations for two years, $600,000 for a six-month extension, or $650,000 to operate a stripped-down, overnight-only shelter without case management, daytime space, or full food service.
That presentation also did not result in any funding commitment.
Stokes said he’s puzzled why there are so few grants available specifically for shelter operations.
“I wish I could know why that was,” Stokes said. “We provide a service that is vital to this community… I do wish I had an answer for why there aren’t more available funding streams, as far as grants strictly for sheltering. But it’s just not there.”
“I wish I could know why that was,” Stokes said. “We provide a service that is vital to this community… I do wish I had an answer for why there aren’t more available funding streams, as far as grants strictly for sheltering. But it’s just not there.”
Despite these setbacks, Stokes said he plans to continue seeking out any and all grant opportunities.
“Any grant we're put in front of, we're asking,” he said. “We've sat down with commissioners, mayors. We’ve presented to three municipalities in Buncombe County.”
He said the organization is also planning to double down on The Salvation Army’s annual Christmas fundraiser, which he said used to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars before COVID, but sunk as low as $40,000 in the last few years.
Homelessness leaders pursue a new emergency shelter, again
As the Center of Hope searches for financial sustainability, the CoC is moving forward on a separate plan – for a new emergency shelter.
And it’s pursuing a new bucket of federal funding to make that happen: Asheville’s $225 million Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery, which the city received from HUD in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
In July, the CoC wrote a letter to the city, requesting an unspecified amount of CDBG-DR funds for emergency shelter infrastructure.
When asked if the city could use CBDG-DR funds to support the Center of Hope, city spokesperson Rebecca Walter wrote it “could be an allowable use,” but only if the shelter uses the money to provide an expansion of services.
So far, the city has not indicated any interest in using CBDG-DR funds to expand services at The Salvation Army, but it has authorized $240,000 to help create a plan for a new emergency shelter.
Asheville has made several unsuccessful attempts to create a high-access emergency shelter already. In 2022, the city abandoned a plan to convert the old Ramada Inn site into a permanent shelter, selling the property to a developer who eventually foreclosed on the site.
The following year, the city and county formed a shelter planning group, ultimately proposing a 150-bed, 50,000 sq ft facility that would provide medical and behavioral health support for residents.
That project never got off the ground after the work group failed to find anyone willing to build the facility.
Then, in May 2025, the CoC started another work group for an emergency shelter. That group examined a wide range of ideas, including alternative concepts like pallet cabins, church-hosted beds and a safe parking program, meeting records show.
At the end of 2025, this most recent working group concluded that it needs a full-time staff member to lead the project, along with other planning resources.
In other words, the plan is a long way from taking shape.
In an interview, Mayor Manheimer acknowledged the potential irony of building a new shelter while an existing one is fighting to remain open.
“You're looking for a low barrier shelter and here's one that's closing. Why don't you just fund that and you'll have what you need,” she said.
“I think every solution is on the table and I think that there is discussion about, well, maybe this facility needs to be basically adapted to be our low-barrier shelter. I've heard people talk about that idea.”
Meanwhile, Stokes, facing the possible closure of his shelter, can’t help but wonder if local leaders are reinventing the wheel.
“You have five, six shelters in this community that are already doing it well,” he said. “Why can't you figure out a way to help these five or six shelters continue the revenue stream to continue to do what they do very well?”
