Wilmington Treatment Center plans to build apartments and a partial hospitalization program facility on Carolina Beach Road, the center’s executive director said Friday.

On Aug. 19, Wilmington Treatment Center LLC bought undeveloped tracts at 2651 and 2645 Carolina Beach Road from Zimmer Commercial Properties for $2.8 million, according to a New Hanover County deed.

Unlike the recently announced new detox beds for the center’s substance abuse hospital facility at 2520 Troy Drive, the new buildings on Carolina Beach Road will be a consolidation rather than an expansion, said Pam Stalls, executive director of the center.

Of the center’s more than 130 patients, the 92 who currently live in halfway houses throughout the community will move into two new, two-story apartment buildings on the Carolina Beach Road property, Stalls said, with each unit holding four beds, two bathrooms and a shared area that includes a small kitchen. The apartments are solely for the use of the program's patients, she said.

The new housing and partial hospitalization program main building, to be built on about 6-and-a-half acres of the land the center just purchased, will help “in a lot of ways. It helps the community in that it’s going to cut down on our traffic. We’re transporting our patients to and from the houses in the community multiple times a day with 12-passenger vans going into neighborhoods picking people up,” Stalls said.

After the Carolina Beach Road buildings, near the intersection of Carolina Beach Road and Shipyard Boulevard,  are done, “everything is going to be contained right here ... It’s definitely going to allow us to provide a higher quality of care for our patients,” she said.

Construction on the hospital building is expected to begin during the first quarter of 2017. The land is zoned RB, or regional business, where hospitals (except animal hospitals) are permitted by right, according to the city of Wilmington's Land Development Code. 

The housing would have a total of 18,400 square feet while the main hospital program building is expected to be 35,000 square feet, Stalls said. The property will be gated to help patients feel secure, with no public access, but there will be access provided for the new Wilmington Fire Department building that will be located next door, Stalls said.

Businesses surrounding the center's site include a CVS Pharmacy, A Value Place extended-stay hotel and a Family Dollar. Drivers on Carolina Beach Road headed toward Monkey Junction will likelly not be able to see the apartment buildings because they will be obscured by the extended-stay hotel, Stalls said.  

P.J. Doherty, principal of Carolina Commercial Investment Properties, represented Wilmington Treatment Center in the purchase of the Carolina Beach Road land.

“We feel like this is an excellent location because there’s going to be jobs added to the area,” Doherty said. “And that particular area of Wilmington is sort of transitioning.”

He said it’s close to the city’s medical district, and there are other drug testing and treatment facilities nearby.

“There’s clearly a demand,” Doherty said.

The center’s Troy Drive expansion, which involves the addition of 48 new detox beds, is set to begin in the summer of 2017. The center is owned by publicly traded Acadia Healthcare (NASDAQ: ACHC).

Stalls said the need for detox beds continues to increase in Wilmington.

“When I first got here, we had 15 people in detox – that was a heavy detox load. Now we’re running 30 or more in our 44 beds that are [currently] detox and probably could fill 48 pretty easily if we didn’t have to also take care of patients [with other health issues] that need to stay on this property,” she said.