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Hospitality House Finally Sells Old Downtown Shelter and Land Parcel on King Street

The property sold by Hospitality House is in the background and includes the white house. Photo by Jesse Wood
The property sold by Hospitality House is in the background and includes the white house. The grassy parcel in foreground is owned by the First Baptist Church. Photo by Jesse Wood

By Jesse Wood

After several years of trying to sell its old downtown homeless shelter and food kitchen on King Street, Hospitality House recently sold a .253-acre parcel for $207,000, according to records with the Watauga County Register of Deeds.

The limited liability corporation that purchased the property, which is located at 302 King St., was Mixed Use Properties, which lists Ryan Woods of 1277 Castle Ford Road as the registered agent.

The Hospitality House used the old shelter for 27 years, Executive Director Tina Krause said on Friday. The parcel sold includes the little rock house above the old shelter.

“We’re finally letting go of the old history of the old downtown shelter,” Krause said.

Last August, the Boone Town Council finally agreed to rezone the Hospitality House property and the neighboring vacant .36-acre property owned by the First Baptist Church.

The First Baptist Church and the Hospitality House filed a joint application with the town in order to rezone the property, from B-2 neighborhood business to B-1 central business, which made the property more valuable to investors or developers. The rezoning allowed for more height in future development, more flexibility in the town’s table of permissible uses and higher-density development, according to Boone Planning Director Bill Bailey at a prior meeting about the rezoning.

Both parties appeared before town boards in 2010, in 2012 and again in 2014, attempting to secure the rezoning. Each time, the Boone Area Planning Commission recommended the rezoning to council. However, in prior years some of the council members were concerned about the property becoming a parking lot and a buffer to the Wallace Circle neighborhood.

She said that nonprofit’s board of directors will decide what to do with the revenues at its next meeting. Construction crews broke ground on the new shelter off of Bamboo Road in 2009. Once that building was completed, the nonprofit moved out of the downtown facility.

Since then, the property had become a liability. The buildings were broken into, landscaping had to be taken care of and taxes paid, among other things.

“We’ve been trying to sell [that property] for several years,” Krause said. “We are very, very happy to sell it … It’s always helpful for us to have good cash flow.”

The property had an appraisal value of $475,000 – $227,400 for land and $248,000 for buildings. Asked about the difference between sale price and appraised value, Krause said that the structures were “in rough shape.”

Krause said that the buyer is chiropractor. A Ryan Woods owns Marathon Chiropractic Clinic in downtown Boone. He wasn’t immediately available for comment on Friday morning.