Baymont Hotel Displacement Upends Lives of Already Vulnerable Tenants

On May 21, local elected officials joined community advocates and developers to break ground on the Hoover Townes development, a new affordable housing community being built on Reagan Drive in the Sugar Creek corridor, one of the city’s six Corridors of Opportunity. 

Mayor Pro Tem Dante Anderson, who represents District 1 where the corridor is located, spoke at that morning’s event. 

“Turning this space into homes people can call their own is how we build stronger communities,” Anderson said. “This project shows what we can accomplish when we work together to prioritize people and progress over business as usual.”

Yet at another hotel on the same corridor, easy to see across I-85 from the Hoover Townes site, instability and the effects of chronic disinvestment continued on — business as usual. 

Events that have unfolded at the Baymont by Wyndham hotel over the previous two months have displaced dozens of families. Some of the families have been moved to other nearby hotels by Heal Charlotte founder Greg Jackson, who had operated the hotel as transitional housing until early April. Some of them were staying together in crowded homes owned by the hotel’s new owner, Cedric Dean of Cedric Dean Homes. 

Others still were made homeless, forced to ask friends and loved ones for a place to stay while they figure things out or take to the street. 

“This is getting out of hand,” said one such tenant named Jasmine*, who left one of Cedric Dean’s homes in May because she didn’t feel it was safe for her children. “Where are we supposed to go with these babies? Are we supposed to live in tents or cardboard boxes? All the shelters are full. What are we supposed to do?” 

Heal Charlotte leaves Equipment Drive

The trouble began on April 2, when tenants participating in Heal Charlotte’s emergency housing program received a letter informing them they would need to vacate the property by April 11. 

“We understand this news may bring a range of emotions, and we are here to support you through this transition,” the letter read. “To help you prepare for your next steps, please work closely with your case manager immediately to identify alternative housing options or placements that meet your needs. Your case manager is available to assist with planning, referrals, and guidance throughout the process.” 

Jaquala Givens, who had lived at the hotel since July 2024, said the letter caught her by surprise. Givens had participated in a housing program that offered three months of free housing for families facing homelessness, with supportive services to help participants find more permanent housing. 

Givens said she rarely ever got to speak to a case manager during her stay at the hotel and was asked to pay $750 per month to keep the room after her first three months were up, which she did. 

When the letter came in early April, Givens had nowhere to go. The power was shut off in her room after the April 11 deadline and the locks were changed when she left with her kids one afternoon. 

A hotel manager eventually let her back into the room, but when Queen City Nerve visited on April 21, Givens was outside with her children in the family’s minivan, as the power was still out in the room. She said she had to go from her third-story room to the hotel lobby every time she needed to heat up food or warm up her baby’s milk. 

On the day following our first visit, Jackson followed through on a promise he had made to move Givens and her children into the nearby InTown Suites. He paid for a week and then she said she never heard from him again. She couldn’t afford to stay after that. 

“[Brookwood] management came to my door and told me we have not spoken to [Jackson], so we don’t know what happened,” Givens said. “So I had to leave.” 

When we followed up with Givens in May, she had moved into a friend’s home. She said she was sometimes sleeping with her children in the car if they came home too late to be let into the house. She said she had sent emails to city officials and organizations such as Crisis Assistance Ministry but hadn’t heard back. 

“I think [the city] should really just take their time to hear us out and please try to help us with housing or funding or anything they can at least try to help us with,” Givens pleaded. “It’s a lot of people that are really still struggling out here.” 

Heal a Home program sees success

In September 2023, Charlotte City Council approved a $2.2 million grant for Heal Charlotte to take out a master lease on the entire Baymont by Wyndham site for a single year, April 2024-April 2025, transforming it into the Heal Charlotte Community Campus. 

According to Jackson, when the organization moved in, about 120 of the 127 rooms at the hotel were operable. A maximum of about 80 rooms were ever occupied at any given time during Heal Charlotte’s time there, he estimated. 

Listen: Nooze Hounds: Heal Charlotte’s Greg Jackson and Judge Kim Best on the Housing Crisis (2020)

About 20 to 25 homes were used for free emergency housing while 35-40 were dedicated to the organization’s Heal a Home program, which “allows families to remain together as a unit while addressing stability and reducing the traumatic experience of homelessness.” Those families were charged $750 a month in rent. 

Another 20 programs were sublet to tenants from Heal Charlotte’s partner organizations such as Freedom Fighting Missionaries, Family Forward Charlotte, and Charlotte Family Housing. 

Launched in 2020 at the old Economy Inn across I-85 where Heal Charlotte originally operated, the goal for the Heal a Home program is to help families find more permanent housing solutions through case management and support services. In its first year, the program housed 85 people — 21 families and seven individuals.

While they aim to get participants into housing within 90 days, that wasn’t always possible at Baymont. With so many people taking part in the program in a city experiencing a housing crisis, plenty of participants stayed at the hotel beyond their 90 days, Jackson explained. 

The lease deal funded by the city’s grant ended in April. Jackson said he began informing tenants of the situation “as early as February 2025.”

When Queen City Nerve spoke to Jackson on May 3, he said only the families who had been staying at the hotel for free would be made to vacate. 

“We gave a lot of people grace periods, and we let them know when the master lease was coming up [to its close] that we wouldn’t be able to do free rooms no more,” Jackson said. “Without that funding from the city, it’s impossible for us to keep that up. 

“We have a partnership with the Baymont, and when they took over the building they kept it at $750 a month for our clients, and those clients have stayed,” he continued. “It’s the families that can’t pay anything — business wise, [Baymont] just can’t do that.”  

Jackson worked with community partners and the city’s displacement team to find housing for 10 families who had been staying at Baymont. Others, such as Givens, Jackson moved into nearby hotels for one or two weeks, depending on their situation, he said. 

“I had 12 months to get them free housing; that’s what I did and I can’t do that no more,” he said. “That’s all I can say. I can help as much as I can and I could get them resources as much as I can, but that’s all I can do.” 

While he’s seen talk in news stories and on social media blaming him for the displacement at the hotel, he said he’s proud of the work Heal Charlotte has done at the site in the time that they operated there.

“This year was a wonderful learning experience. We had a lot of victories, a lot of people moved out in permanent housing, and I really don’t want this project to be dampened by the loudness of this [displacement],” he said.

He added that the response from tenants only goes to show the need for the city to fund more projects of a similar nature. 

“We’ve operated for a whole year and these problems only are arising now because we’re at the end of it,” he said. “That speaks volumes to how important it is, because the people that can no longer have that program are making a lot of noise, which means that they need it. They do need a hotel that is open, that is able to take free rooms, and a nonprofit organization that has given them an opportunity for up to 11 months to be able to get there. They do need that.”

Cedric Dean takes over

When Queen City Nerve spoke with Jackson on May 3, he said Heal Charlotte would continue to host Heal a Home families in 40 rooms at the hotel, charging $750 a month for rent. Two days later, however, plans changed when Cedric Dean took over operations at the site. 

Launched in 2018, Cedric Dean Homes (CDH) is an emergency housing organization with a focus on reentry and behavioral health. A Charlotte native, Dean is a licensed peer support specialist who has worked in the trauma support field for more than 25 years. 

CDH provides supportive living services to people who have been displaced and unhoused, focusing on serving people with traumatic brain injuries, intellectual developmental disabilities and severe mental illness.

According to Dean, when he took over operations at Baymont, Jackson told him he had a plan to rehouse the 40 or so families still living in the hotel under Heal Charlotte programming. 

“I obliged their request … then I started having conversations with the residents,” Dean told Queen City Nerve. “It became more and more evident that they didn’t have a plan. Greg didn’t even have a plan.” 

Dean was moving participants of his own program into the hotel — some of whom from local CDH halfway homes and others from a hotel he had recently shut down in Fayetteville. Many of Dean’s clients struggle with mental illness of some sort, so he decided it wouldn’t be safe for the families that lived there already to cohabitate with his tenants. 

He gave those who remained two options: move from the hotel into one of his transitional homes or accept $1,000 in cash and be on their way. 

“I was really trying to come and be a solutionaire that solved the problem,” Dean told Queen City Nerve. “And understanding that Heal Charlotte didn’t even have the funding to help these families move somewhere, I came in and allocated the funding from my own budget. 

“This situation was difficult because there was zero communication,” he continued. “Ordinarily, there’s a plan in place and we just execute the plan. Well, Heal Charlotte didn’t have no plan for these families. They didn’t have nowhere for them to go. They didn’t have no funding for them — nothing. So it was my personal responsibility to at least make sure that they’re left with something. And I tried to help them transition in a way that provided some safety and security for them and their children.” 

He said that, at the time we spoke on May 22, he had successfully moved all of the Heal Charlotte families out of the hotel, spending $30,000 of his own money to do so.

Nowhere to go

Jasmine entered the Heal Charlotte program as someone facing homelessness after escaping an abusive relationship. 

When Queen City Nerve first spoke to her following the April 11 deadline, she said she was staying at the hotel because she had nowhere to go, but the power and hot water had been shut off in her room. 

“I really don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said then. “I am a mother of two, they’re 5 and 3, they have to experience this too.” 

When Cedric Dean and his team took over, Jasmine gained some hope. According to her, new management told her she’d be allowed to stay free of charge using Medicaid while continuing to seek out more permanent housing. 

She began to worry about her future there when someone informed her she would have to share a room with another tenant family, which she refused to do. Then late at night on May 12, management began telling everyone who was still living there to pack their stuff, as they’d be moving into the CDH properties.

The night of May 12, Jasmine said she was brought to a CDH house with four other families, around 20 people in total, and told she would be sleeping in the basement with another woman who was already there with her baby. 

There was no bed or couch to sleep on, so Jasmine brought her children back upstairs and tried to sleep on the couch. There was no opportunity to sleep with her own children continuously crying and people moving in and out of the house. She left at 11 a.m. and didn’t go back. 

“Everyone needs to get out of those houses, it’s not a safe environment for those of us with children,” she said later. 

For his part, Dean admitted that there was some overcrowding in the houses at first, as they weren’t designed to host as many people as moved into them on the first night. 

“They really weren’t designed for families like that,” he said. “It was just a situation where, versus just putting them out on the street, it was an alternative. I told them one family per room … because it was an emergency-type situation. My hands were tied as to what other resources I could offer, because the ones that didn’t want to take money, they said, ‘Can we just go to one of your places?’ I said, ‘If y’all are willing to share.’ So that’s how they got to the houses.” 

Jasmine convinced a family member to let her and her children move in for a short time and has been given until the last week in June to find permanent housing. 

“She doesn’t want us to go out on the street, but we really can’t stay past then, and I understand that,” she said. “So I really need help. I’m really hoping and praying that something comes up.” 

Dean would later be charged with breaking-and-entering into one of the rooms on the night of May 12. He claims he did not enter the room in question, only stood in the doorway and talked to the woman inside. He said he came to an agreement to pay her $2,000 and she left later that week on good terms. 

Queen City Nerve spoke to the woman listed as the victim on the police report, who told us Dean and others on his staff pushed her door open at around midnight that night and stood in the doorway trying to intimidate her and her 11-year-old son into leaving until 12:30 a.m. 

She said she never asked police to press charges against Dean but they did anyway based on video she took of him pushing her door in as she stood behind it. Dean turned himself in for processing when he learned of the charges. 

The woman, who asked that she not be named in the story, told Queen City Nerve she had a good experience living at the hotel as part of Heal Charlotte’s Heal a Home program but was taken aback by the “inhumane and unethical” ways Dean treated tenants who remained there after he arrived. 

After learning the sordid histories of the new tenants that Dean was moving in, she accepted the $2,000 from him and left.

“But how long does that really last when you’re forced to move out of a place that has been a healthy and stable place for you and your kid?” she asked. 

She refused to go to a CDH home because of the stories she had heard from the women who did go. She remains in an unstable living situation at the time of this writing. 

Searching for solutions

Apryl Lewis became involved with anti-displacement work in 2019, when 177 households were forced to vacate their homes in the Lake Arbor apartment complex on Tuckaseegee Road in west Charlotte. Since then, she has worked with residents facing mass displacement at Tanglewood Apartments, the Lamplighter Inn, and Econo Lodge, among other similar occurrences. 

Lewis, who has been working independently with some of the displaced residents from the Baymont hotel, said this situation has differed from others she has dealt with because corporate landlords aren’t responsible for this situation. 

“This is a program or programs that are supposed to help homeless families — the most vulnerable populations that are already being traumatized by just trying to survive and then being retraumatized by organizations that are supposed to help,” she told Queen City Nerve. 

“And I’m not just speaking of Heal Charlotte or [Cedric Dean Homes], I mean any program in Charlotte,” she continued. “There are plenty of programs that are not actually doing the best work that they claim to do and we don’t have a way to actually even combat that because nobody’s really talking to the people that they serve — good, bad and ugly — to understand what is happening.” 

She said she’d like to see the city enact an “accountability metric scorecard,” which would provide a rubric for city leaders to consider when approving funding for certain projects to see how that organization has carried out work in a certain field in the past. 

More tangibly, Lewis wants the city to fund the development of stabilization centers throughout the city that will serve as resource centers and emergency housing shelters when mass displacement events occur. 

She said it’s been hard for her to even reach the people she’s been trying to help in this situation because they’ve all been spread across different hotels and homes or are unaccounted for completely. 

“I can’t organize people that are not at least stationary in housing because that means they’re focused in survival mode,” Lewis told Queen City Nerve. “I can’t help them if they’re still in survival mode because I need them to show up somewhere and they can’t because they’ve got to survive.” 

A stabilization center with rooms for the most vulnerable and desperate residents affected by a displacement like the one at Baymont would allow organizers to have them in one place, making it easier to provide resources and find them permanent solutions. 

“At the end of the day, we have leadership at these organizations that are being called various things but nobody’s talking about how these families are impacted and being shuffled from one bad situation to the next bad situation,” Lewis said. 

“Nobody’s talking about the kids and the mental health toll that it’s taking on these babies, and these parents are still expected to make sure their kids get to school but now they don’t even know where they’re going to wake up tomorrow because people are not communicating effectively or coordinating their services,” she continued. 

Inspired by last year’s mass displacement events at Tanglewood and Lamplighter Inn, the People’s Budget Coalition has asked the city to fund a pilot program to cover families earning less than 30% of the average median income who are forced out of their homes, though that program would help residents displaced only by unremediated housing code violations. 

Read more: Mass Displacement at Tanglewood Apartments, Lamplighter Inn Shines Light on Negligent Landlords (2024)

For his part, Dean said he believes the city should have stepped in to help rehouse every resident displaced from Baymont because they funded the program that put the people there. 

“The city does have a financial obligation to help these families because that program there was city-funded,” Dean said. “They promised these families that they would help them transition to their own homes, affordable housing options and whatnot. For whatever reason, they terminated the program, but they still had an obligation to those families. The city is sitting there quiet now while Cedric Dean is spending his money and taking all the heat.” 

He said he would be willing to kick in $10,000 to start a fund to help victims of mass displacement as long as the city and some other local corporations would commit to match it. 

“I need you all to help these families,” he said. “The city got resources, they got property. You know what I’m saying? So for the city to just sit back like it’s not their issue, that’s crazy.” 

Read more: Council Quickies: City Manager Proposes Fiscal Year ’26 Budget

The grant that originally funded Heal Charlotte’s work at Baymont was allocated by Charlotte City Council using funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which is no longer available. In fact, the arrival of the new Trump administration has only made things harder for the community partners that Lewis works with, she said. 

Not part of any organization herself, she has seen funding get cut from a number of those that have in the past stepped up to help with emergency housing. 

“When I started this work, it was hard, but today it’s harder because now there are fires left and right of people getting put out and organizations running out of money,” she said. “And we understand that we are definitely being impacted by the decisions of the administration that the majority of the country actually wanted, so now we’re feeling the brunt and the pain of these cuts, these holes in funding, this messing around with trying to be efficient. 

“I know the city is in the hot seat right now but I need the community to understand that the city is a government that is supposed to be run by the people, and we elected these individuals in and they came from us as the people,” she continued. “So that’s where we need to make sure we’re applying the right pressure. People need to show up. The community needs to show up. You need to speak up.” 

*Name has been changed per request to remain anonymous.