Lot Project Breaks Ground for New Transitional Housing
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The first shovelful of red clay turned over easily, as if the ground itself had been waiting for this moment on G Street. At the edge of the Alphabet Streets, where the old Appleton Mill once dictated the rhythms of work and worry, a crowd in winter coats had gathered Tuesday morning to watch a small rectangle of earth become something larger than its footprint: a fourth “Village Home” for The Lot Project, another modest attempt to bend Anderson’s housing story toward mercy.
“Well folks, good morning,” said Nate Knox, the executive director of The Lot Project, his voice carrying over the barking dog and the muffled wheeze of a passing truck. He began not with blueprints or funding totals, but with his staff, a ritual naming of people who, in the invisible hours between ribbon cuttings, make sure the washing machines run, the case notes are updated, and the kids in the neighborhood do their homework and, as Knox put it, “don’t break windows.” There was the services director, the community engagement director, the services coordinator—an unglamorous trinity of roles whose work, like most of poverty’s paperwork, rarely appears in photographs.
For 16 years, The Lot Project has been tinkering with a deceptively simple proposition: that if you give people who have cycled through shelters and streets a small, dignified place to stay, and orbit that place with case management and community, something like stability can take root. The organization started with free plates of food and donated clothing downtown; it now operates transitional “Village Homes” in the Alphabet Streets, short-term dwellings where residents pay rent, sign program agreements, and meet regularly with staff who ask intrusive, practical questions about debt, employment, and estranged family members. Since 2019, nineteen people have moved through the Village Homes; Knox told the crowd that roughly 68 percent are now in independent housing they secured themselves, and are, in one way or another, giving something back. In an era when metrics often stand in for meaning, the number felt less like a boast than a proof-of-concept, a percentage attached to a fragile human experiment.
The Alphabet Streets—A through at least H, tucked in the city’s east side—were once regarded less as a neighborhood than as a problem set. They sit in what planners call a “focus area,” a geography of old mill houses and vacant lots that have been surveyed, mapped, and slotted into revitalization plans. In the last decade, the city and its nonprofit partners have tried to replace blight with incremental beauty: pocket parks, a community garden, repainted facades, the occasional new build framed against the hulking memory of the mill.
The Lot Project’s Village Homes are among the more conspicuous interventions, small houses quietly insisting that people who once slept under bridges belong on front porches within walking distance of their old haunts, not in distant complexes at the edge of town.
“This newest home will be our fourth village home, adding four more beds for individuals and families to rest, heal, and transition back into the community,” Knox said. On paper, four beds are an asterisk in a county where unsheltered homelessness remains stubborn and proportionally high. But the house, Knox told the crowd, was meant to carry more than its square footage. It would be dedicated to the memory of Joseph S. Geer III, a young man whose life had been circumscribed by disability and enlarged by stubborn joy.
Knox unfolded several pages written by Joseph’s family, and the cold morning took on the peculiar intimacy of a living room after a funeral. Joseph, he read, had “a smile that could light up the room” and a laugh that made bad days bearable. He was a twin, a built-in best friend, the kind of brother who loved tacos and fried chicken, wrestling and Buzz Lightyear, Pokémon and “anything that went fast”—the last clause underlined, in the family’s telling, in all caps. He used a wheelchair, but refused the corresponding narrative. “He was disabled, but he was capable,” his family had written, a sentence that sounded both cliché and, in this particular mouth, like an act of defiance.
There was a story about the McDonald’s PlayPlace, back “when McDonald’s was actually cool,” with its plastic tubes and vertiginous slides that were, as everyone over a certain age knows, not remotely accessible. Joseph, confronted with this labyrinth of exclusion, simply decided that if other kids could climb it, so could he—even if it meant being hauled up the platforms by his sister, getting “whacked in the head” in the process, and emerging bruised but triumphant from the slide’s mouth. His family remembered his “never-ending appetite for fun,” his refusal to be “the boy in a wheelchair” rather than just another kid in a crowd.
The litany of his accomplishments—high-school graduate, water-skier, summer camper, beach cruiser, lake paddler, video-game savant, bike rider—had the slightly incredulous tone of people who had spent years marveling at someone and still felt, in retelling it, a little surprised.
“It never ceased to amaze us the many barriers he knocked down,” they wrote. The house on 8th Street, directly diagonal from where the crowd stood, would now bear his name, a fixed point on the neighborhood’s map of grief and grit. The family, in their letter, imagined it filled with Taco Tuesdays and late-night video games, WWE and Dragon Ball Z posters stapled to the walls—domestic details that turned a “unit” into a plausible home in the mind’s eye.
Knox’s theology is practical, almost bureaucratic. “We cannot control other people,” he said, “but we can give individuals opportunities to succeed.” The difference between a shelter cot and a Village Home bed, in his view, lies in the texture of the expectations attached to it: rent due, appointments kept, goals named and revisited. The Lot Project calls its approach “relational case management,” a phrase that, stripped of jargon, means that someone will notice if you don’t come home for two nights in a row and will ask, not in the voice of a parole officer, what happened. “When a person is given an opportunity to take a step forward, have an affordable and safe place to call home, and a community that wraps their arms around them,” he told the crowd, “beautiful restorative things can happen.”
If Knox represents the granular face of Anderson’s homelessness experiment, Mayor Terence Roberts serves as its civic narrator.
“I think probably more so than anything is when I look out in the crowd, it’s just the tapestry of Anderson,” Roberts said when he stepped to the microphone, shivering in a jacket he admitted was too light for the morning. For Roberts, whose long tenure has been marked by a patient, sometimes plodding reshaping of old industrial blocks, the Alphabet Streets are an “important part of our city,” a corridor he insists “we’ll continue to grow this way.”
“We believe that everybody has the right to live in a safe neighborhood,” Roberts said. “We believe that they should have housing. We believe that they should have employment.” It was the sort of civic creed heard at countless groundbreakings, but here it carried the weight of a city that has, in recent years, been forced to confront the limits of emergency shelter as a standalone strategy. Anderson has one of the Upstate’s highest percentages of people experiencing homelessness who sleep outside rather than in shelters, a reflection less of individual preference than of bed shortages and the geography of services. The Lot Project’s decision to put its transitional homes within walking distance of its meals, clothing closet, community garden, and makeshift arts space is, in that context, less philosophical than logistical.
“Sometimes in government, it seems like it takes a long time,” Roberts told the crowd. “But you blink an eye and it’s five years and we make progress and we continue to make progress.” Behind him, the old mill site loomed—both a relic and, in redevelopment plans and PowerPoints, a promised future. The mayor asked residents and nonprofit partners to “keep holding their hands together, keep pushing forward,” as if the city itself were a stubborn object that required steady pressure to move.
If the morning had the trappings of municipal ritual—officials lined up with shovels, a cluster of Chamber of Commerce staff, the obligatory group photo—it was also, peculiarly, a reunion. Carol Burdette, the long-time civic operator who once lured Roberts into politics, stood with Brandi (or Brandie) Greer, the CEO of the Anderson Area Chamber of Commerce. Leadership Anderson, the Chamber’s flagship program, was marking its fortieth year, and this house, on H Street, had been chosen as the commemorative project—an echo, intentional or not, of the first Village Home built through a Leadership Anderson partnership on E Street several years earlier.
“When I say the term house, it really is going to be a home,” Burdette said, leaning into the semantics that often separate well-meaning charity from something more durable. Leadership Anderson could not, she admitted, pull off the project alone. The committee she co-chaired with an AnMed administrator would, in the coming months, hunt for cash, in-kind materials, donated labor—anything that might stretch the gift from the Geer family across multiple lots. The Lot Project already owns three parcels in the neighborhood; every donated two-by-four and waived fee inches it closer to a fifth or sixth Village Home.
“I’m not going to come pick your pocket,” Burdette told the crowd, “But I’m hoping that you will recognize that this is a project that is going to benefit people who need it.” In a city where development dollars often chase breweries and boutique hotels, it was a reminder that there are quieter forms of capital, measured less in sales-tax projections than in the number of nights someone spends indoors.
Brandi Greer, the executive director of the Anderson Area Chamber of Commerce grew up on these same streets, and provided the morning’s most personal geography.
“These are the streets that I ran rampant as a child,” Greer said, laughing at her own grammar. “I’m a child of the 80s, so essentially these streets raised us.” She described pickup trucks prowling the Alphabet grid at dusk, rounding up kids who had overstayed their freedom, teenagers zigzagging through backyards and grandparents’ houses in an attempt to avoid being found. Taco Tuesdays and stay-up-all-night video games were not policy aspirations for her; they were memories.
“I’m going to look way, way ahead and hope that one day there’s somebody building another house and another house, and this whole entire community turns back into what I remember it as,” she said. The nostalgia was not for an idyllic past—it was, after all, a mill village with all the attending inequities—but for a density of relationships, a thick sense of knowing and being known that is hard to reproduce once it has thinned. In The Lot Project’s theory of change, housing is less an end point than a platform from which such relational infrastructure can be rebuilt.
Transitional housing, in the literature that now surrounds it, is sometimes described as a “bridge” between crisis and market-rate stability. The word suggests a clean linearity: first the shelter, then the Village Home, then the apartment lease, then the conventional life. The reality, as case managers in Anderson and elsewhere will say when the microphones are off, is closer to a looping road with multiple exits and reentries. Residents arrive having completed addiction recovery programs or mental-health treatment, only to collide again with debt, family conflict, or the slow violence of low-wage work. The point of a place like Joseph’s house is not to guarantee a straight line, but to make sure that when someone stumbles, they do so in proximity to people who have promised, formally and informally, not to look away.
On G Street, as the speeches wound down, Knox returned to the language of character. He told the Geer family that he believed “it’s the choices we make in spite of the things that we cannot control that reveal our character,” and prayed aloud that the new home would be “a place where people are able to overcome the things they can and make peace with the things that they cannot control.” In another context, the invocation might have sounded like bootstrap rhetoric. Here, on a slab of land where the city’s structural failures were plainly visible in peeling paint and boarded windows, it felt more like an acknowledgment of shared limits—of what nonprofits, municipalities, and neighbors can and cannot do for one another.
When the crowd finally drifted back to their cars, the lot looked mostly unchanged: a scraped patch of earth, a foundation, the lingering fog of breath in cold air. The Alphabet Streets do not turn themselves around in a single winter morning. But somewhere between the mayor’s talk of momentum, the Chamber’s spreadsheets of in-kind donations, and a family’s insistence that their son’s appetite for “anything that went fast” be translated into drywall and linoleum, a small, stubborn claim had been staked. In a corner of Anderson long defined by what it lacked, four more beds were coming, with room, on the walls, for WWE posters.
