DARIEN, Wis. — Twin Oaks Homeless Shelter has a long waitlist and only 12 rooms to shelter people. Walworth County's only full-time homeless shelter is fundraising to replace its building, a former motel on the Rock County line along Highway 14 built in 1939.
"Other than the basic rehab we're doing, honestly, this building has to come down," said Marc Perry, the executive director of Community Action Inc. of Rock & Walworth Counties, which oversees Twin Oaks. "This facility will last another few years, then we're going to reach a time where it's not habitable any more. We're going to reach a point where we're no longer going to be able to fix."
According to Perry, 246 people needed to stay at Twin Oaks in 2025, including 123 children. The shelter is the only one in the county that accepts women and children.
Watch: Walworth County shelter director worries about aging building, growing wait list
"We get a lot of calls from people fleeing domestic violence who can't stay there anymore," said Twin Oaks shelter manager James Stahl. "In Walworth County, we don't have a domestic violence shelter."
Stahl said the aging building's maintenance issues are starting to stack up.
"There are rooms where the sink is moving away from the wall," Stahl said, before pointing to a cracking ceiling in a bathroom. "This up here is plaster, not even drywall."
Twin Oaks is mostly funded by Walworth County community members. Perry says it raised about $350,000 in 2025, much of which went to building maintenance and repair.
The organization hopes to build a new, larger facility closer to one of Walworth County's towns so Twin Oaks can adequately serve people in need.
"Residents, if they don't have transportation, they can't get to appointments, they can't get to medical care, it's hard to get to employment," Perry said.
"If every single one on a waitlist stayed the maximum 60 days, not counting families, it would take about two years for the last person on that list to work their way to the top," Stahl said.
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