Student housing at Western Carolina University will see a massive shuffle over the coming years as university leadership looks to update old buildings while preparing for the school’s continued growth. 

The site plan submitted by developers for a controversial 200-unit apartment complex off Plott Creek Road was approved by the Town of Waynesville Planning Board July 30, but not before a marathon meeting that dragged on for more than six hours and threatened to stretch into the next day. 

When a controversial text amendment passed the Town of Waynesville Planning Board and Board of Aldermen in back-to-back public hearings almost two months ago, Mayor Gavin Brown told opponents that they’d again have their chance to oppose the development that instigated it. 

With no end in sight to rising enrollment, Western Carolina University is hoping a public-private partnership with Wilmington-based Zimmer Development Company will help meet the housing needs of future upperclassmen.

For a great example of just how important the Town of Waynesville’s comprehensive plan is, one needn’t look any further than the proposed multi-family development located off Plott Creek Road. 

Two years after Sylva leaders first cheered a proposal for a workforce housing complex across the road from Harris Regional Hospital, not a shovelful of dirt has been turned on the 17-acre property. 

As a startlingly cold winter lapses into a startlingly early spring, Jackson County leaders are pondering a question they’ve been struggling to answer for several years now: What is the best way to serve Jackson County’s homeless population? 

A years-long effort to find some use for the Historic Haywood County Hospital on Waynesville’s North Main Street appears to be moving forward with renewed vigor, as the building continues to deteriorate.

I don’t really want to go into the domestic circumstances that led up to it, but even though I had no car, no money, no work and now, nowhere to live, I walked down our darkened driveway in the middle of the cold starry night with little more than the clothes on my back.

Worse than the dearth of resources, I had no social support structure, and with no real knowledge of the resources available to someone in a short-term housing crisis, there I was, standing in a Maggie Valley gas station mere moments into Thanksgiving Day, in a short-term housing crisis.

After receiving approval from two separate boards, a proposed 80-bedroom development along Little Savannah Road in Cullowhee has the green light to move forward.