Homelessness on the East Coast

This document is a preliminary research and field report compiled by Fourth Sol LLC. It is not a formal academic study, nor is it produced by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Fourth Sol LLC is the operating entity of James (Jim) Suleyman Brendlinger. All current efforts are self-funded through personal resources and business profits. No public donations are being solicited under nonprofit status. The purpose is practical: to understand how best to communicate with people experiencing homelessness, identify what they need most, and design processes that can move them toward stable housing, income, and care.

A Part 2 may be published later based on further field progress, phone-distribution pilots, or new findings. There is no guaranteed timeline.

1. Field Observations Near Hoke Street, Hillsborough Street, Glenwood Avenue, Downtown Raleigh, and Washington D.C.

On a recent day near Hoke Street in Raleigh I observed more people experiencing homelessness than I had seen in a single concentrated area of the city in a long time—more than five individuals in close proximity. Typically I encounter only one or two at a time in Raleigh. The density stood out.

Raleigh is not a sprawling metropolis. The core downtown corridor feels like only four to seven blocks. Driving through it recently, from one end to the other past the illuminated floors of the Pendo.io offices (one of the Southeast’s recent unicorn companies), took roughly 45 seconds. In that compact space, people are sleeping in abandoned vehicles, parks, tents near hospitals, and on the streets while luxury apartments and commercial buildings rise around them.

North Carolina’s overall homeless population has risen significantly in recent Point-in-Time counts (statewide figures exceeded 15,000 in the 2025 count). Wake County’s 2026 count registered approximately 1,050–1,150 people on a single January night. These numbers remain far smaller than those in California or New York, which makes the problem more tractable here—if we treat it with urgency and better design.

2. Primary-Source Interviews (Selected Field Notes)

Over the past five years I have spoken with multiple individuals in Raleigh. The questions I ask are basic and practical: Do you currently have a place to stay? Is there anyone you can rely on? Do you have a reliable way to receive communication (phone or email) so resources can reach you? When the situation appears acute, I recommend emergency care or behavioral-health evaluation. Many shelters and portals are difficult to navigate for people who cannot keep a device charged or focus on multi-step web processes. Beds are frequently full.

Most individuals encountered in these specific interactions were African-American. Many remain outside formal systems and lack reliable contact methods, which makes matching them to care extremely difficult.

3. Local Resources & Facilities

Several facilities provide behavioral-health and crisis care, yet their locations and intake processes are often distant from the places where people actually sleep or panhandle.

Behavioral Health

• Holly Hill Hospital — 3019 Falstaff Road, Raleigh. Inpatient and outpatient psychiatric and addiction services for multiple age groups. 24/7 assessment available. Phone: 919-250-7000.
• Raleigh Oaks Behavioral Health — 3200 Waterfield Drive, Garner. Acute inpatient psychiatric care, senior programs, and intensive outpatient options. Assessment line: 888-603-0020.

These facilities can stabilize patients for roughly one to two weeks and sometimes assign case managers, but capacity and transportation remain barriers.

Food & Dignity

• A Place at the Table — 300 W. Hargett Street, Raleigh. Pay-what-you-can café. Open Tuesday–Sunday, 8 a.m.–2 p.m. Guests may pay the suggested price, a reduced amount, or volunteer one hour in exchange for a meal. A practical, low-barrier resource that is actually known and used by people in the surrounding area.

Coordinated Entry & Shelters

• Oak City Cares (1430 S. Wilmington Street) serves as a primary access site for coordinated entry, showers, laundry, and referrals.
• Second Street Place and temporary White Flag sites operate as drop-in or weather-related shelter options; capacity fluctuates.
• Raleigh Rescue Mission, Salvation Army, Women’s Center of Wake County, and others provide additional beds under varying rules.

Many shelter processes remain difficult for people who cannot keep devices charged or navigate web portals. Beds are frequently unavailable the same night they are needed.

4. Analysis, Scale & Systemic Barriers

North Carolina’s homeless population is more solvable than California’s (which numbers in the tens to low hundreds of thousands). Wake County’s count of roughly 1,050–1,150 people on a single night is a manageable number for focused intervention—if the system is redesigned around reality rather than portals that people cannot access.

Common barriers observed repeatedly:

• No reliable phone or email, so resources cannot be delivered.
• Devices that cannot be kept charged.
• Missing identification documents required for jobs or benefits.
• Shelter intake processes that demand focus and multi-step navigation many people cannot sustain.
• Limited public restrooms and amenities concentrated in ways that push people into the same few blocks.
• Benefits such as SNAP often provide less than $200/month for a single adult—insufficient for sustainable living.
• ACA open-enrollment windows and complex eligibility systems that are easily missed.

NCWorks and county library business centers offer some workforce tools, yet they are not marketed or positioned as the primary on-ramps for the most vulnerable. A workforce-training center I once saw attached to Arundel Mills Mall in Maryland (near the food court) was one of the few purpose-built public facilities of its kind I have encountered; it has since closed while a 24/7 casino opened nearby—an inversion of priorities.

5. Further Notes on Priorities, e.g. Zoning Laws

What follows are candid notes from the author, drawn from direct observations made from the mid-2000s through to today. They were left out of the summary above, which was skimmed down; they are recorded here largely as they were written. They are first-hand impressions and opinions, not formal findings.

Additionally, most people experiencing homelessness simply need money to eat or to get what they need. Housing-first initiatives have been proven to be very effective in Europe as well. Someone needs stable shelter so that they can do something as simple as sit down and apply for a job. However, until they can be routed there — or while they are on their way — we should be reaching out to people to make sure they can drink, can eat, and are not starving, in pain, or in need of critical care. Many also do not have any recent identity documents; the man with the backpack I spoke to downtown was missing the form of ID he needed to apply for a job. This is one company that was offering a free smartphone and also a digital identity: fastcompany.com/40551578.

This company held a Facebook Live once, all those years ago, featured above. I tuned in and observed the environment in their office. This is only my observation, but I saw two very distracted young people joking in an open-plan office, and they did not appear to be addressing any issues, nor did they seem equipped or focused on this one. They also stated, as I recall, that they were working on other things and were not focused on this issue. It seemed to me that the initiative would not exist for long. I am not sure where they are now, but they appear to have moved on to other things almost immediately. That program was offered nearly eight years ago in Brooklyn, as a small pilot by a startup, and only for a very limited period of time. This is simply the reality of non-profit or startup endeavours tackling this: the people who work there also have to find something more literally profitable as a long-term career, and non-profits, of course, often have to continually find supporters to give them money, with a great deal of marketing, in order to accomplish what they set out to do.

To my knowledge there are now non-profits touting having accomplished virtually zero veteran homelessness across more than five states and dozens of individual communities. The term of art is “functional zero” — a measured standard meaning the number of veterans experiencing homelessness at any given time is no greater than the number the community can house in a month — rather than a literal count of zero. Organisations doing this work include:

• Community Solutions — community.solutions — runs Built for Zero, a national effort in which more than 100 U.S. communities work toward functional zero; a number of them have reached it for veteran homelessness.
• National Coalition for Homeless Veterans — nchv.org — the national body organising service providers working directly with veterans.
• U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness — usich.gov — publishes, with HUD and the VA, the criteria and benchmarks by which a state’s or community’s claim is confirmed.

Virginia, Connecticut and Delaware were among the first states to announce that they had effectively ended veteran homelessness, and cities including Houston, New Orleans and Las Vegas have made the same claim for their own communities. These figures should be checked against the current USICH, HUD and VA confirmations before being relied upon: the standard is a rate rather than a permanent condition, and communities can and do fall back out of it.

I have followed their journeys and their staff closely, to try to understand how they did it and how best to emulate it — or how best to help.

I would probably need more funding to provide every homeless person in Raleigh without a communication device with something like an unlocked smartphone carrying a digital wallet. The learning curve for an app on that phone would need to be genuinely straightforward, and it would need to earn the trust and maintain the dignity of the people using it, as many may not even be interested. The wallets could each come with $20–40 on them, helping the person buy basic necessities. On one occasion I did get someone connected with a Lightning wallet; they bought socks and got their identity paperwork going. However, an initial funding of a wallet is spent right away on what a person wants or needs at that moment, and it is not sustainable on its own. They also need somewhere they can reliably charge the phone.

In the United States there is sometimes not even an easy place to find a public bathroom near parks, or in downtown areas past certain hours; they are very spread out. Their locations are also not near other amenities, and so the homeless individuals I have observed congregate where they can find such resources all available in one area, even if those resources are sparse. It is more comfortable for them, and it creates the municipal burden you see in places like Skid Row in California.

For my 30th birthday, just after the pandemic, I visited Los Angeles with one of my best friends, an Air Force veteran, and my other best friend from when we were both freshmen in high school, now a PharmD working in hospital clinics — the two of them sharing stories of flooded hospital beds and the like. We had dinner at a nice spot in LA, and then my Air Force buddy and I took rented scooters from Staples Center through Skid Row. I wanted to see LA. My takeaway is that these blocks are actually not that much land in total. I saw most of the city (I was born just nearby, on Edwards Air Force Base, in 1991), and the roads themselves seemed to me to cover about the same space as downtown Raleigh, in fact. The tent city I saw spanned only about two blocks in Skid Row specifically — in my head, a few blocks and not much more — and I went from one side of the city to the other and was there for several days. It is abysmal that this small a surface area, in perspective, is not somewhere we can immediately care for and get everyone situated somewhere else, away from our economic centers.

This includes New York. It is my feeling at this time that somewhere like New York should not open homeless centers inside the city, near other established businesses and homes. That disrupts the economy and the people trying to live, work, shop and eat with their families in our best economic centers. People at risk can be provided for nearby — even just a few miles out, or 10–15 miles from where they currently are or where they congregate or became homeless — with professionals who can take them to a resource center: a place with reliable places to sleep, cots, and housing-first-style accommodation where they can focus on getting back on their feet, being rehabilitated, and, if possible, actually re-entering the workforce and affording something better. That is away from the transitional shelters that are, in my opinion, currently not reliable.

North Carolina’s homeless population is a more easily solvable problem than California’s, which numbers closer to the hundreds of thousands than the tens of thousands. Here, near Raleigh — our capital and the state’s second most populous city after Charlotte — the scale is different.

By my preliminary math and estimates, it would take only somewhere around $2,500,000 for an initial facility that could house the entirety of the local homeless population for at least a whole year. Other initiatives, to staff and employ trained, seasoned and veteran healthcare professionals, would need to meet their payroll and be funded — perhaps as a non-profit wing that provides this service as part of a company, or of a coalition or conglomerate of companies that support and fund these efforts, in the way that Verizon provides emergency service support to first-responder vehicles.

IBM’s blue-collar initiatives were not targeted at the most vulnerable individuals, but they do provide career pathways for people who need additional workforce training.

I noticed, in Maryland, where I worked at the Best Buy in Arundel Mills Mall while attending AACC and taking classes at the nearby AACC Cyber Center, that there was a very nice educational and workforce training center attached to the larger campus of the mall. It was on the other side of the theatre, near a parking lot, extending about a block away once you left the mall’s food court.

I sat down in it once. It was very nice, in fact — a bit like a community center or a library — and it had multiple computer terminals with workforce-entry resources for doing things like searching for and finding a job, with printers nearby for the public. In all my time living in the United States, since I was born here, and having lived in several states, I have never seen anything like it anywhere else in person: not marketed, not in advertisements, never driven past, and never heard anyone even mention such a place, apart from this one, which I happened to notice because I left the food court and walked to my car past it once. It was also very clearly labelled, with a walkway leading in and a large sign.

County libraries do something like this. They are free to use and open to the public, and they do have business-center amenities such as printers, but they do not have workforce training specifically, and they do not serve quite the same purpose.

Currently, all of these people are likely missing the ACA’s one-month enrollment window.

They are likely not getting all of the benefits that are even available to them. Sometimes food stamps qualify a single individual for less than $200 a month. That is enough to buy some things for a month — items that can be bought with a SNAP card, at stores that accept SNAP — but it is not enough to live on, it is not sustainable, and sometimes it lasts only a few months. These are not yet built to be relied upon at all, and in my opinion they should not be. Other solutions that enable an individual to help themselves, with more resources, need to be provided faster and better. This is unacceptable.

NCWorks exists in my state. It is a nice portal, but it is also, in my opinion, not sufficient.

Most resource websites are built in a very convoluted way and do not provide a clear path for anyone in need to navigate and find care. They would likely need assistance. Either that, or there need to be resources that are genuinely useful and readily accessible at all times. Many resources have limited hours and scarce means of actually helping within those limited windows — of getting someone onto a path toward independence. Most are revolving doors, often offering less than 24 hours of care, or less than two weeks at all.

Maybe that is something the new government design team could also work on.

That Maryland facility is now gone, unfortunately. Its sign is gone and so is the entrance; it seems to have been repurposed, and I could not locate anything like it again there or in North Carolina. Less than 50 feet away, literally, a 24/7 casino opened in the state of Maryland — even closer than that, across a 30-foot walkway from the food court of Arundel Mills Mall — called the Live! casino. From what I recall, the state and the governor approved the building because it would help with taxes.

I would not have been in support of that legislation at all. I would prefer that gambling in the United States be condensed, preferably, to the city of Las Vegas, and probably not on Native American reservations either. I do not like them, and I think they should be heavily regulated and completely zoned out — illegal in at least close to 49 states, or frankly all 50. Luckily, all gambling in America is heavily regulated if you run commercial games. I believe anyone should do what they want in their pastime and have fun (I am a fan of Texas hold ’em, and I do not mind blackjack and roulette as a game and a pastime with friends). But these are predatory buildings when they sit near a center that families frequent, such as directly across from the food court of a popular American mall.

The 24/7 nature of the building also attracted a different type of crowd — workers or desperate people entering the building at all hours of the day. I have played poker and blackjack there, and once, at a virtual roulette machine, I witnessed what appeared to be a Spanish-speaking immigrant in working clothes get angry and break the machine with his hand.

This is a matter of education, but also of distribution. If the state had not approved that building, those who are not educated about it and not responsible with it would not be frequenting it. As built, it preys on exactly those demographics instead of uplifting them. It also creates a situation, near other commercial businesses and residences, in which 24/7 clientele cause problems where families are shopping; it creates more opportunities for criminals to try to rob people going in and out with cash, and it attracts that behaviour. Instead, these types of adult establishments should, in my suggestion, be far away and zoned out — off a distant highway, for instance — with better surveillance, and with educational resources for something as simple as how to play a game of virtual roulette.

Instead of that casino being there, people could have worked to create more workforce programs, and literally buildings with those resources in them. Companies could have a presence to hire, not just at a one-off booth at a community college, but perhaps by sponsoring something like a Staples (the computer store) that also hosts work fairs. Work fairs are great places for people to go, but they are often run very professionally, at unclear times or in the ballrooms of hotels, and marketing anything like that is difficult. However, I would argue those things would be exponentially more beneficial than recouping some taxes off one casino under those zoning laws. As nice as the entrance to the Prime Rib steakhouse near the theatre is, in my opinion that casino should not be near the food court. It should be far away.

6. Proposed Paths Forward

My working conclusion, shaped by conversations with colleagues and professionals over years, is that we need:

1. Rapid, low-friction outreach — trained responders in equipped vehicles who can offer immediate food, water, medical evaluation, and voluntary transport to a stable intermediate facility.
2. An intermediate “hangar / cot” facility with security, healthcare staff, charging stations, showers, and a simple business center with computers for job applications and document recovery. This is not a permanent warehouse of people; it is a bridge.
3. Digital identity + communication devices — unlocked smartphones with prepaid service and a digital wallet seeded with modest initial funds ($20–40) for immediate necessities, paired with places to charge the devices reliably. Earlier cryptocurrency-funded identity experiments (including a Brooklyn pilot years ago) showed both promise and the difficulty of sustained focus by the teams involved.
4. Workforce pathways that are physically co-located or clearly signposted, not buried in portals.
5. Private-sector coalition funding rather than sole reliance on strained public budgets or perpetual nonprofit fundraising cycles.

Preliminary rough math suggests that a well-designed intermediate facility capable of housing the current Wake County unsheltered and chronically homeless population for a year could be achievable in the low millions of dollars if land, modular construction, and operational partnerships are secured efficiently. Staffing with experienced healthcare and case-management professionals would require additional ongoing support—ideally from a coalition of companies (telecommunications, technology, healthcare systems) that already operate in the Triangle.

Veterans experiencing homelessness anywhere—especially in Washington, D.C.—is unacceptable. Multiple communities participating in the Built for Zero movement have reached functional zero for veteran homelessness; the methods exist and have been documented. They should be studied and adapted here.

7. East Coast Context & National Notes

While renewing a passport near the Washington Monument I observed a homeless veteran (appearing to have severe physical disability) holding a sign on a median. When I stopped to try to help, luxury vehicles behind me honked insistently.

My errands that day, the passport office included, took me four hours or more to complete. When I passed that median again afterward, he was still standing there in the exact same position — slightly slouched over, still holding his sign, his arms still flailing in the same involuntary way, in what looked to me like the presentation of a neurological disease. He had barely moved at all in those four hours, and in that entire time no one had helped him. It irked me greatly then and it irks me still: a man in that condition, visible to thousands of passing cars in the capital of the United States, left exactly where he was.

The contrast is stark: a nation that can produce unicorn companies and world-class medical universities still tolerates veterans sleeping on medians in the capital.

In Los Angeles, after dinner near Staples Center, a short scooter ride through Skid Row revealed that the densest tent blocks occupy a surprisingly small surface area—comparable in scale to downtown Raleigh. The land footprint is not the insurmountable problem; the political and operational will is.

Disability determinations in the United States frequently take two to four years, with high denial rates. VA processes remain slow for many. These are macro system failures that leave people on the street while paperwork grinds.

Physician supply is not the 4,000–7,000 figure sometimes cited in casual conversation; the United States has more than one million active physicians. The issue is distribution, incentives, and the time required to navigate complex eligibility systems—not an absolute shortage of trained clinicians for every acute case.

Michael Tubbs’ work in Stockton is documented in the film below, and privately funded pilots (including those supported by figures such as Jack Dorsey) demonstrate that non-taxpayer sources can drive meaningful local experiments. Those lessons remain relevant.

8. Closing

Civilizations should be measured not only by their scientific and industrial achievements but by how they treat the most vulnerable—those with chronic illness, the elderly, the disabled, and those without shelter. Homelessness in the capital of the United States, and in the compact downtown of a growing southern capital like Raleigh, is a solvable problem. The surface area is limited. The numbers, while tragic, are finite. The missing pieces are reliable communication channels, low-friction intake, intermediate housing with dignity, and the political and private-sector will to fund and staff them at scale.

I am currently exploring practical next steps: sourcing unlocked smartphones (Back Market, Motorola, or T-Mobile business / prepaid eSIM options), pairing them with simple digital wallets, and continuing field interviews. I work in Raleigh at present and may later relocate within the Triangle or to Charlotte, Miami, New York, or Austin depending on professional opportunities.

I have spare time to work on things, and that time is usually the other non-40 hours of the week — the remaining 128. That is plenty of time to work on something like this, which in my opinion is one of the most important things we should be focused on as the greatest civilization so far to have existed on planet Earth. Or, as Joe Rogan has said a few times, to paraphrase: if there is anything to work on (with regard to homelessness), that is one of the next big issues to work on.

If you have concrete resources, domain expertise, or capacity to collaborate on phones, housing pathways (including models such as PadSplit), healthcare tools, or operational design, contact me.

This is Part 1 of an open series. A Part 2 will be published only if further field progress or new data warrants it. All opinions and field notes are those of the author. Statistics cited are drawn from the most recent publicly available Point-in-Time counts and official reports available at the time of writing.