As the Sept. 1 deadline to vacate a homeless encampment in a Rivanna River park looms, Charlottesville city councillors got more details Tuesday night about how a new, low-barrier shelter on Holiday Drive will look and feel, even as some homeless residents said they wouldn’t leave their tents. WMRA’s Christine Kueter attended the meeting and filed this report.
Real beds—not bunk beds or cots. Room for pets, storage, and couples. Twenty-four-seven staffing, a new city bus stop, and $4 million more to expand the city’s existing transitional housing supply and workforce development services for homeless residents.
That’s what Charlottesville's promised for its new low-barrier shelter at 2000 Holiday Drive, empty since it was purchased for $6.2 million last fall but now likely to open by Sept. 1 once a deal is inked with Central Arizona Shelter Services, which would charge about $3 million a year to operate it.
But some who live at the Free Bridge encampment aren’t moved.
DOUGLAS CHAMBERS: I was thinking y’all were going to get our ideas, figure out what we need, and build the shelter to support us, but obviously y’all don’t care what we say, y’all don’t care what we think, and y’all just building a shelter just to throw us in there.
Resident Douglas Chambers has lived in the encampment, known as Free Bridge, for the last year.
CHAMBERS: The people that are making the decisions are not the people that need to be making the decisions. Y’all need to have somebody in the room that’s out here, that’s homeless, and knows what’s going on. None of y’all are homeless. Y’all go back home to your beds, curl up, wake up, get back, come back to work. Y’all don’t know what’s going on, y’all don’t know what’s wrong with these people, y’all don’t know that.
For more than a year, clusters of tents have dotted the floodplain along the Charlottesville side of the Rivanna River, a stone's throw from the Albemarle County line where overnight camping is prohibited. When Charlottesville’s police chief made motions to close the camp last fall, citing health, safety, and environmental concerns, some residents’ outcry left city leaders and nearby businesses treading water for months.
But after fires, floods, the death of a 57-year-old resident, and two alleged sexual assaults (on July 10 and 27), the settlement’s future is at a tipping point.
A 5-minute viral video taken by a man taunting Free Bridge residents posted June 30 gave the story legs. Less than three weeks later, officials announced plans for a “coordinated transition” to dismantle the tent city by Sept. 1, and begin clean up along portions of the trail where between 40 and 50 tents were staked earlier this spring.
Charlottesville Human Services Director Misty Graves has been working with City Councillor Jen Fleisher and social service agencies to survey camp residents about their needs. Those conversations, Graves said, are progress.
MISTY GRAVES: We hope to be able, every day that we’re down there, to have one more piece of the puzzle to share to help alleviate the anxiety that folks are experiencing, some of the frustration associated with not having answers. And we are doing the best that we can, moving as fast as we can, but hoping to, you know, stay down there so that we can continue to have a pulse on what folks' experiences are and if there’s anything we can do to alleviate that.
Joshua Ballou, who came to Charlottesville in 2017, has lived at the Free Bridge encampment since last summer. In addition to the bathrooms being too far from his tent, and without the showers city officials promised, he doesn’t like the police cameras that were installed earlier this summer.
JOSHUA BALLOU: That thing looks right at my tent, where I can’t walk out my front door without being seen. I can’t sit in my yard, I can’t go over and set up a shower, without being seen, without being watched.
Free Bridge resident Jennifer Grant questioned the readiness of the Holiday Drive shelter, a 27,000 square-foot former office building situated near the 250 bypass and another section of the Rivanna Trail.
JENNIFER GRANT: The building is not even up to structure. You can’t even give us an idea of what we’re going to be sleeping on. You cannot even give us an idea of what is going to be in there. You can’t - We don’t have anywhere to put our stuff, storage-wise. So, as of today, I will say, you will be locking up a lot of us down there. We are not going anywhere until you can give us answers to our questions, until you can get to know us, until you can give us feedback to everything we have asked wisely.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities could legally ban people from sleeping and camping in public spaces, even if they had no place else to go. Still, UVA School of Law professor Anne Coughlin, who walks along the Rivanna Trail, urged councilors to proceed with caution.
ANNE COUGHLIN: I’m not sure that there will be lawsuits brought against you, but you would want to think about what those lawsuits would involve, the amount of resources they’d take, the attention that they would garner, and the way that would distract us from the really important thing that we need to do, which is to provide housing, a basic human right for people. What is the crime for which you’re going to arrest folks? Being in public? Being homeless in public? Sleeping in public? It’s a crime to sit in public?
There are about 215 people experiencing homelessness in the city of Charlottesville and its five surrounding counties, according to Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, a number that’s declined more than one-third since its April 2026 high of 335 people.
In addition to Holiday Drive shelter, the Salvation Army has begun raising money to expand its shelter capacity, too. Charlottesville will also open Vista 29, a $26 million transitional housing facility with 80 units for income-eligible residents, this November.
