Baymont Hotel Displacement Crisis Reaches City Council
Housing advocate Apryl Lewis addresses council members after press conference in Uptown
Surrounded by a small group of supporters and a few families who had recently been pushed out of their precarious living situation, local organizer Apryl Lewis called on local leaders to support hundreds of displaced people during a press conference outside of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center on Monday night before going inside and addressing Charlotte City Council during a public forum.
Lewis has spent months working with families ousted from the Baymont by Wyndham hotel off Sugar Creek Road after operations at the site transitioned from Heal Charlotte, which operated a year-long housing program at the hotel that ended in April, to Cedric Dean, who activated his Heal Empower Love Protect (HELP) program in the space in May.
The facility made headlines when a mother and her baby, both originally part of the Heal Charlotte program, were found dead at the site in early June. Dean shut down his HELP program at the site about a week later, citing a violent atmosphere surrounding the site that went unchecked by police.
That shutdown has led to more displacement as Dean has moved to expel the remaining Heal Charlotte families whom he had moved into houses around the city that are leased by his organization, Cedric Dean Homes.
This has led to public confrontations between Dean and Lewis that have played out over social media, with Dean calling the remaining families squatters and alleging that some of them had changed the locks on the homes.
Lewis, on the other hand, evoked the tenants’ legal rights, as they had been moved into the homes by Dean more than 30 days prior and would need to undergo formal eviction proceedings to be removed from their living quarters.
Read more: Baymont Hotel Displacement Upends Lives of Already Vulnerable Tenants
In front of the Government Center on Monday night, Lewis returned to the root of the issue, which began with the end of Heal Charlotte’s program and came to a head — but did not end — with the death of the Baymont tenant and her child in July.
“A mother named Shannon and her 1-year-old son lost their lives during the chaotic unplanned transition between Heal Charlotte and Cedric Dean’s program,” Lewis said.
They would not be the last people to suffer, Lewis warned, if local government officials did not step up to rescue vulnerable people from what she called a “pattern of exploitation, neglect and performative service that has left families traumatized, displaced and unheard.”
Lewis’ proposed remedy, which she has lobbied city leaders for since the mass displacement at Lamplighter Inn in 2024, is the creation of a community-led stabilization center for the unhoused augmented with a community stabilization fund to support displaced families.
She also advocates for stronger tenant protections, especially in publicly funded housing programs, and city and county partnerships that would reunite residents scattered in the wake of mass displacement events like what has occurred at the Baymont Inn.
‘It was chaos’
Founded by community organizer Greg Jackson, Heal Charlotte launched its Heal a Home emergency shelter program for single mothers and their children at the hotel in April 2024, funded by a one-time grant allocation that came from the American Rescue Plan Act — money that is no longer available to the city.
That community safety net unraveled on April 2, 2025, when tenants participating in Heal a Home received a letter informing them they would need to vacate the property by April 11. Jackson insisted that he had begun informing the families of the program’s impending end as early as February, pointing out that the program was only ever supposed to last one calendar year.
Community activist Cedric Dean took over operations at the hotel in early May and began transforming it into a residential substance abuse treatment program called HELP. He attempted to relocate women with children left there from the Heal a Home program, maintaining he did not believe they would be safe living there alongside the tenants who were involved in his program.
Lewis, an independent housing organizer who has helped families experiencing mass displacement since hundreds of residents were forced out of the Lake Arbor apartment complex in 2019, had been working to find permanent solutions for some of the families who were living in Cedric Dean’s houses after leaving the hotel.
While the Baymont residents were paying to stay at the facility, they were allowed to stay at Dean’s leased homes free of charge. Then, in a June 17 press release, Dean announced that HELP would be leaving the Baymont campus, citing safety concerns for staff and program participants.
Dean’s press release also blamed CMPD for HELP’s exodus from the property.
“CMPD created this sinful sanctuary when CMPD told me I couldn’t put the drug dealers off the property,” the press release read. “Now the drug dealers are scheming to plant drugs in my office to get me off the property.”
Dean and his staff started relocating the recovery program participants into the houses where they had already relocated families displaced by the collapse of Heal a Home.
On Sunday, June 22, the day before Lewis’ press conference, HELP evicted Ursula Baker and her family from the home Dean’s organization had previously moved them into on Concordia Avenue in north Charlotte with her mother, her two children and another woman and her two children.
“While I was driving my mother to work, people were trying to get access to the home,” Baker said. “By the time I got there … a whole bunch of people were trying to push out a lady and four kids. A grown man [was] jumping in the window where children were sleeping. It was chaos.”
Baker and her children have since moved back temporarily into the Baymont hotel, which continues to operate as a for-profit company.
Contested evictions
Lewis told Queen City Nerve the mothers and children who have been moved from Baymore to Dean’s rented houses are not legally squatters, so Dean cannot call on CMPD officers to evict the families. So, instead Dean sends HELP participants to move into the homes, she alleges.
“Basically, [Dean] just brings people into the houses to force [the families] out,” Lewis said.
To make matters worse, conditions in the houses are already crowded. There are six or seven houses that she’s aware of and each holds multiple families.
“I hate that [Dean] impacted these families and traumatized them unnecessarily,” Lewis said.
Baker said that her son, who is autistic, was terrified by the people coming into their home.
“He was scared; he was screaming and crying,” Baker said. “That’s not good. We’re trying to make these children the best kids for the next generation going forward, and make sure that they understand that they’re safe, loved and protected.”
“Since May 2, Cedric Dean has placed families into homes he does not own,” Lewis alleged. “He illegally evicted mothers, elders, and children. Charlotte funded who they thought was a community representative, but what they got was a performance.”
Dean has documented his side of the story through Facebook posts, including one on June 21 that shows a confrontation with police who would not allow him to enter one of his purported homes despite his repeated claims that he was the only person named on the lease.
“I haven’t given anybody permission to be inside my property,” Dean claimed to officers. “Other people are saying that they received permission from people who worked for me and this and that. I am telling you that this is my property … I pay the bills … Why am I being threatened by CMPD?”
He told police that he had no authority to move people into the home because he signed a lease there that did not allow for subleasing.
Another video posted on Dean’s account shows him kicking the door in at another home after a police officer tells him he must go to court and file eviction papers in order to remove the people living inside.
In that video, he enters the home but does not go upstairs where the people living there are watching from a window. He holds a piece of wood from the kicked in door and tells police he will return to place his own locks back on the door.
City council and staff responds
In her address to city council on Monday, Lewis called on the city to act. “Do you support illegal evictions? Do you support programs that exploit the most vulnerable? If you don’t, then prove it.”
Later in the meeting, council member LaWana Mayfield asked that the Housing, Safety, and Community Committee look deeper into the city’s application process to ensure that city-funded programs such as Heal a Home can sustain past the point that grant funding runs out.
“The investments that we made were not only in good faith but were actually working and changing people’s lives,” Mayfield said. “Unfortunately there were other funding sources that fell through. My biggest challenge is, how did it transition from who we invested in, that contract getting to another organization and we have very little say over what happened?”
Charlotte Housing and Neighborhood Services director Rebecca Hoefner told council members that the city’s displacement team, working with community partners such as Crisis Assistance Ministry, had helped relocate “a number of families” who had taken part in Heal a Home — about 10, according to our earlier reporting — back in April but acknowledged that some families are still in housing limbo after the original displacement.
She said city staff planned to help Lewis organize a resource fair where families could find permanent housing solutions, rent and/or utility assistance, legal aid and other needs as early as this weekend, an effort that Queen City Nerve later confirmed is moving forward on a referral-only basis.
Lewis later confirmed with Queen City Nerve that the city is moving forward with those plans and will help facilitate a virtual/in-person hybrid event to provide resources for 35 displaced families over the coming weekend.
However, Lewis remains focused on building preventative protections so that the city does not have to react to situations weeks or months after a displacement occurs.
“We are calling for a community-led stabilization center built from the ground up … focused on housing, health and healing, not headlines,” she said. “Help us build what we’ve never had in Charlotte, a community-led safety net.”
