ASHEVILLE – The wind whipped through the tent as Emily Witherspoon danced under the white awning outside the nearly completed apartment building, dubbed Lady Gloria Ridge Community. She and dozens of others gathered Oct. 21 for the building’s consecration, celebrating the 41 permanently affordable apartments, the culmination of years of work by Haywood Street Congregation. The building is expected to be ready for move-in by the end of the year. Witherspoon, 47, said she is slated to be among its first residents. Her liturgical dance was one of several event performances, along with remarks from those involved. She has spent time living Asheville streets and in public housing. She is a breast cancer survivor, and now lives in a house where she pays “a lot of money for a little room.” To live at Lady Gloria Ridge would be “like heaven on earth,” Witherspoon said she told a pastor at Haywood Street. “They saved my life, over and over,” she said of Haywood Street. “I’ve been praying for a safe place where people want us to grow, not to just survive, where I’m not going to be scared." The apartments sit on West Haywood Street, with a view of the mountains beyond, on the north end of the West End Clingman Avenue neighborhood. The 1.2 acres are on the edge of downtown, overlooking the confluence of Interstate-26, I-240 and Patton Avenue. It’s the first project of the Haywood Street Community Development, an affordable housing nonprofit created by nearby Haywood Street Congregation. The congregation began in 2009 as a “ministry of radical inclusion,” often a sanctuary for people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of “relationship, above all else.” It hosts a midweek Downtown Welcome Table and is home to a 12-bed respite, slated to more than double its capacity in an ongoing expansion. Lisa Powell, 57, another future resident, said she was homeless when she first came to Asheville from Hickory. She stayed at Western North Carolina Rescue Ministries’ shelter, and later ABCCM’s Transformation Village, which provides transitional housing for women and children. She spent time moving from place to place, staying at other people’s homes, or in hotels. She has her own place in Asheville now, but said Lady Gloria Ridge will offer a supportive setting that will be better for her health. “I can’t wait,” she said. More: An Asheville respite supports the unhoused after hospital stays. It is now expanding.