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A dilapidated gem will yield to housing

The News & Observer BY JOSH SHAFFER AND SARAH OVASKA - Staff Writers   RALEIGH -- In its time, the Water Garden stood as a shrine to modern design: a complex of low-slung, hill-hugging offices surrounded by tall, ivy-covered pine trees and ponds topped with lily pads. You'd never guess from the car dealerships and furniture warehouses that such a gem stood hidden off Glenwood Avenue. And for the last three years, the complex has slowly rotted and gathered squatters' trash.   But now the site of the 11-acre Water Garden campus, home and life's work of master landscape architect Dick Bell, is being put to use. Starting next spring, its lush and rolling hills will be converted to low-income housing in a northwest Raleigh neighborhood where it is sorely needed. Quantcast   The roughly $6.1 million project by Downtown …


DHHS to move most operations from Dix Hospital

by Bruce Mildwurf and Gerald Owens WRAL.com   August 24, 2010   Raleigh, N.C. — The state Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday that it would move most operations from Dorothea Dix Hospital to other facilities by the end of the year to save money.   State lawmakers didn't include any money for Dix operations in the 2010-11 budget, DHHS Secretary Lanier Cansler said, so the department had to find ways to cut $28 million in operating costs.   Shifting services from Dix to Central Regional Hospital in Butner and Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro would save about $15 million while maintaining needed capacity for inpatient mental health treatment, Cansler said.   Sixty adult inpatient beds, 11 long-term beds, 54 forensic beds, 12 clinical research beds and pre-trial evaluation outpatient and inpatient services will be moved to Central Regional. …


Wake OKs grant for new shelter

From Staff Reports RALEIGH -- With as many as 85 homeless families on a waiting list for shelter in Wake County, county commissioners took a new Salvation Army facility for "fragile families" a step closer to reality Monday. Commissioners agreed unanimously to provide $500,000 in federal community development block grant money to the $4 million redevelopment of a 40,000-square-foot building inside the Beltline on Capital Boulevard.   The charity operates a homeless shelter near Moore Square in downtown Raleigh but wants a larger facility to give more services to families. The city of Raleigh is considering a separate $500,000 request; it is expected to come before a Sept. 7 council meeting.   Construction on the building - supplied with everything from a computer center to play centers to a full-service commercial kitchen - is expected to start in October and …


Bush program curbs chronic homelessness

WASHINGTON - On a cold January morning in 2001, Mel Martinez, then the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was headed to his office in his limo when he saw some homeless people huddled on the vents of the steam tunnels that heat federal buildings.   "Somebody ought to do something for them," Martinez said he told himself. "And it dawned on me at that moment that it was me."   So began the Bush administration's radical, liberal -- and successful -- national campaign against chronic homelessness. "Housing first," it's called. That's to distinguish it from traditional programs that require longtime street people to undergo months of treatment and counseling before they're deemed "housing ready."   Instead, the Bush administration offers them rent-free apartments up front. New residents, if they choose, can start turning their lives around with the …