Miracle Hill Looking for Location for Facility in Anderson
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In Anderson, the question is not whether more help and services are needed for a growing homeless population. The question, for the moment, is where it can live.
Miracle Hill Ministries, the Greenville-based Christian nonprofit that operates residential shelters, addiction-recovery programs, transitional housing and foster-care services across the Upstate, has been working toward an Anderson location since local leaders formally invited the organization to explore the possibility in August 2025.
Ryan Duerk, Miracle Hill’s chief executive, said the organization received board approval several months later to pursue the Anderson project.
Anderson County Councilman Chris Sullivan has been involved in the efforts to get Miracle Hill to come to Anderson.
“I met Ryan a few years ago on a tour of Miracle Hill in downtown Greenville,” said Sullivan. “After spending the day touring their facility and hearing their plan for addressing homelessness, I came away convinced that Ryan and his team were exactly what we needed here in Anderson.”
Sullivan said it is part of the active effort to work with Miracle Hill to increase the number of beds available in Anderson County and to build a real pathway that takes people off our streets and helps them build full, productive lives.
“Not everyone who is unhoused wants to be rehabilitated, but for the local citizens who've fallen on hard times and want a path back, Ryan and Miracle Hill will be part of our solution," said Sullivan.
The search has been to find the right fit in the real-estate puzzle to find a building large enough to house people, safe enough to meet code, close enough to the city’s jobs and services, and adaptable enough that the cost of converting it does not overwhelm the effort before it begins. Some locations considered earlier, including the South Fant School building and the old Carolina Mop Manufacturing building, didn’t pan out, so the search goes one. One of the goals is to find somewhere not located where most of the current services for the homeless reside just west of downtown.
“We’re trying to find a path there as hard as we can,” Duerk said.
The ideal building would be more than 30,000 square feet, equipped with sprinklers and bathrooms, and situated near Anderson rather than far out on its edges. In a city, location is key for someone trying to reassemble a life after homelessness, and proximity to a bus stop can mean access to a job interview, a medical appointment, a counseling session or the ordinary, and stabilizing routines that are easy to take for granted when housing is secure.
“We could go really far outside of the city center and find a facility,” Duerk said. “But that’s not where the people are. And it wouldn’t make sense when people are trying to rebuild their lives from employment and services and medical needs.”
A shelter built from scratch would be prohibitively expensive, so Miracle Hill continues looking for an existing property that can be renovated, preferably one already suited to residential use. Those buildings, he has found, are scarce.
“We’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Duerk said.
The organization has recently begun considering a shorter-term site that could open for a year or two while it continues to pursue a permanent home. The approach reflects the tension built into nearly every effort to respond to homelessness: the need is immediate, but the infrastructure required to address it is slow, costly and difficult to assemble.
Miracle Hill describes it as the largest provider of residential services for people experiencing homelessness in the Upstate. On a typical night, Duerk said, the organization houses roughly 650 to 700 men, women and children in shelters, recovery programs, transitional housing and workforce-development settings.
Its Anderson proposal would add shelter capacity in a county where beds are few, meaning one in four people experiencing homelessness can access safe shelter.
The arithmetic is stark, but Duerk sees the work as intensely personal. While some in the public often view homelessness as a single failure with a simple solution: get a job. But poverty and housing instability have a way of spreading through every part of a person’s life.
“When homelessness and poverty become a part of your story, it seeps into every part of your life — financially, medically, education, employment, transportation,” he said.
Miracle Hill is more than a place to sleep. Residents can remain during the day, meet regularly with counselors and case managers, and develop plans intended to move them toward housing, employment, better health and more stable relationships.
“When somebody checks into Miracle Hill, that’s their home,” said Duerk. “We’re linking arms with that individual and helping them to help themselves.”
The organization frames that approach as a “hand up rather than just a handout,” a phrase that can sound familiar in civic discussions about poverty, but at its best it describes something concrete, a shelter while a person applies for work, transportation while a person receives treatment, a mailing address, a case manager, a chance to rest without wondering where the next night will be spent.
Duerk emphasized that Miracle Hill does not intend to duplicate work already being done in Anderson, poiting to organizations such as Hope Missions and The LOT Project, which focus on transitional housing, as partners in a larger continuum of care.
The proposed shelter would be a place for people to stabilize before moving on to transitional housing or other services. Miracle Hill also expects to work with local medical and mental-health providers rather than attempting to supply every service itself.
The organization already partners with New Horizon Family Health Services and other providers in the communities it serves. Mobile medical units and mental-health counselors visit Miracle Hill facilities, an arrangement that recognizes the simple reality that a shelter can offer safety, food and clothing, but it cannot by itself resolve the medical, psychological and economic pressures that often accompany homelessness.
“We don’t pretend to be all things to all people,” said Duerk.
That reliance on a network may be especially important in Anderson, where a shelter’s success will depend not only on a building but also on volunteers, churches, local businesses, government leaders, nonprofit partners and residents willing to support an operation that can be politically easy to praise in the abstract and more complicated to place on a map.
Duerk said the organization has been encouraged by its reception from city, county, nonprofit and business leaders, but that lasting success will require the broader community to remain involved.
“This problem won’t get solved by the usual suspects,” he said. “We need everybody in the community to be a part of it.”
Duerk has spent 18 years with Miracle Hill and seven as its chief executive. His connection to the work predates his job title.
Twenty-four years ago he entered a rescue mission while struggling with addiction, a criminal record and a life that had come apart. There, he said, he found faith, returned to school and eventually entered ministry himself.
“Our guests can’t ever look at me and say, ‘You don’t know,’” he said.
Miracle Hill will mark 90 years of service soon, and the organization continues to measure its work not only in meals and beds - though it provides hundreds of thousands of both - but in what happens after people arrive: employment, housing, physical health, mental health, community and sustained recovery.
In its addiction-recovery programs, Duerk said, about four out of every 10 people are healthy and moving forward 18 months after entering the program, an encouraging contrast with a national recovery rate of about 10 percent. In the past year, he said, hundreds of shelter residents found jobs, and about 150 moved into affordable housing.
For now, though, the Anderson effort remains at a stage before statistics with the search for a workable building, a temporary or permanent place where the organization’s model can take root.
The need is already present, the service network is partly in place, the invitation has been extended. What remains is the hard, unglamorous work of finding a suitable building close enough to opportunity that they can become, for someone in crisis, not simply a shelter but a starting point.
