Roanoke Homeless Assistance Team To Move from Downtown to Williamson Road Building

Roanoke’s Homeless Assistance Team is moving out of its downtown offices beside the Amtrak platform to a social services building on Williamson Road.

The move is meant to bring HAT, as it’s known, under the same Civic Mall roof as other staff in the city’s Department of Human and Social Services, Carol Corbin, a city spokeswoman, said in an email. That “will make it easier to coordinate care, streamline referrals, and ultimately provide more consistent support for those experiencing homelessness,” she said.

The move will also free up ground-floor space at 1 Jefferson St., where the city has long said it wants to locate an Amtrak station. For the fiscal year that begins in July, the city has earmarked $1.9 million in bond funding for a passenger rail station. 

Some advocates who work with people experiencing homelessness said the HAT move seemed to make sense. But they also wondered about transportation to the new office. From the Roanoke Rescue Mission, the new location is a 34-minute walk, compared to a 12-minute walk to the current office.

The HAT office provides walk-in services from 8 a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday. About 10 to 40 people take advantage of those hours on a given day, according to Matt Crookshank, who leads the team.

Alex Sedinger identified himself as homeless and said he walks from the Mission to the HAT office daily to use the phones, bathrooms and talk to caseworkers. 

“I think it’s stupid,” Sedinger, 52, said of the move, the second in as many years. “When you have a team of people trying to help the homeless, why are they jumping from one spot to another spot?” 

“In one way, they’re making it easier for people to gain access to the resources that Roanoke has,” he added. But at the same time, Sedinger said the current HAT office provides many services and is centrally located where a lot of homeless people gather.

“I like it being here and not all the way down on Williamson,” Sedinger said.

Crookshank said the team’s caseworkers are cognizant of the distance from downtown.

“We know that could be potentially a barrier with folks that walk, trying to get to us in a location that's a little further away,” he said. “So we plan to be more proactive out in the community and do whatever we need to do to make sure clients still have access to our services.”

Crookshank said the new location will help clients who may qualify for food stamps and Medicaid or need other social services.

“It'll help us work more cohesively as a department to better serve the folks that we serve through HAT,” he said, “so I think it'll benefit us in a lot of ways, being closer to the rest of the team over at the DSS building.”

Crookshank said the plan is to move eight staff members over the Memorial Day weekend into third-floor office space currently occupied by the Children’s Services Act (CSA) team. Those staff will relocate to the first floor of the downtown municipal building, which Deputy City Manager Angie O’Brien said is “a space better suited for executive administration and one that will facilitate closer collaboration with our downtown CSA partners.”

Caseworkers helped more than 300 people get off the streets and into permanent housing last year, according to Crookshank. In recent years, those numbers have been north of 200, compared to historical trends of around 100 people annually. 

“The cost of housing is so unaffordable that we're having more people come into homelessness than we're able to move out through permanent housing, because folks just can't afford to meet their basic needs and pay rent,” Crookshank said.

Some downtown business leaders pushed back in 2023 when the HAT offices moved to 1 Jefferson from its prior location on Salem Avenue. The city tried to sell that building to a developer of affordable apartments, but that project fell through. That building remains empty.

The Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce argued that the HAT office would compromise investments that city and business leaders had made in downtown over recent years.

“We believe that co-location of HAT with the new AMTRAK station is a misstep and ask that any plans to immediately move HAT to 1 S. Jefferson Street be suspended until a formal review of alternatives can be completed for both the use and programming of this important civic asset as well as the best location for HAT,” Eric Sichau, president and CEO of the chamber, wrote in a 2023 letter to then-Mayor Sherman Lea. Sichau and a Chamber spokesperson did not respond to messages Monday. 

On Monday morning, movers were in and out of the 1 Jefferson St. office, packing up couches and cubicle walls. Amid driving rain, some HAT clients standing outside had donned ponchos and wrapped black trash bags around their dogs’ torsos.

The total cost of the move is unknown at this point, according to O’Brien, the deputy city manager. Asked about the city’s plans for the Amtrak station, she wrote, “We have made no additional changes to 1 Jefferson other than HAT moving to Williamson Road.”