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Winston-Salem public housing complex Crystal Towers is off the market

EDDIE GARCIA/WFDD FILE

A controversial plan to sell a large-scale public housing building in Winston-Salem has fallen through.

The plan to sell Crystal Towers was never a popular one. Some city leaders and housing advocates blasted the idea.

Deborah Watkins has lived in the downtown complex for nine years. She joined a group called Crystal Towers United to help fight the plan. She says she feels her voice has been heard.

“This is our home, you know? It's close to the bus station and it's easy to get around town, you know what I'm saying?" she says. "And I'm happy for the people that live here too, because they didn't want to move.”

Officials with the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem (HAWS) say selling the downtown building was the right plan at the time, but market conditions have changed. 

The new plan is to work with the city to keep it as an affordable housing option.

HAWS officials say the move to keep the complex was aided by federal assistance. The city received $30 million in Choice Neighborhoods funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2020.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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