Corrections & Updates
Every piece on this site invites readers to report errors. This page records what we have corrected and what has changed since a piece ran.
The standard here is simple. A correction means a piece was wrong when it ran, or a later edit put something wrong into it: a wrong number, a misattributed source, a claim the cited study does not support, or a figure already out of date when we used it. An update means a piece was right when it ran and something changed afterward: a new count, a court ruling, a vote, a record made public. Updates are logged below with a date; corrections are recorded as the summary below describes. Typos and styling fixes are made silently.
If you find an error anywhere on this site, email admin@stepupavl.org and it will be corrected and recorded here.
Corrections
Until October 4, 2026, this section listed 46 corrections, made from June to October 2026, each in its own entry. On October 3, 2026 we re-checked eight older articles against their sources and found 131 problems, at least one on every page. We agreed with 96 of them and fixed those, which put 12 entries on this page in one day. We decided that individual entries had stopped helping readers and were crowding out what the site is for. So on October 4 we took the 46 corrections off this page, kept the updates below, and started a re-check of the site's other pages.
On October 4, 2026 we re-checked 72 more pages: 41 article pages, 10 WNC Desk pages, the home page and six other main pages, the two Grant Radar pages, the research page, the VentureAVL grant handout, and the nine organization profiles and the directory page. Nine of those pages had been checked in full when they went up, so for them we checked only the edits made since. With the eight articles from October 3 and one more article checked that day, all 50 article pages on the site have now been checked against their sources. On October 5 we also checked every entry in the research library's list of outside sources, the 3,478 it held when the check began, against its source, and corrected what we found. The WNC Desk's Helene rebuilding tracker was last checked on September 27, 2026.
On the 62 pages other than the organization profiles and the directory, we found 899 problems and rated 147 of them errors. The other 752 ranged from wording that said more than its source and a missing date or qualifier to an outdated link or a typo. 61 of the 62 pages had at least one problem, and 47 had at least one error. Of the 147 errors, 110 were in the piece when it went up and 22 were put in by a later edit. The other 15 were right when written and went out of date, which this page counts as updates.
As of October 5, 2026, all 147 errors are fixed, and 730 of the other 752 problems are fixed; we left 21 small points of style as they were and dropped 1 that no longer applied. Checking our own fixes against their sources turned up 36 more problems, none of them errors, and all 36 are fixed. A separate check of the articles by an AI model from another company, run on October 5, led us to fix 7 more problems on 4 pages.
The organization profiles and the directory, which are built from the same data, were checked against each organization's own website instead, and 17 figures, links and other details on the profiles were brought up to date.
From here on, every correction is recorded, and starting in January 2027 this page carries a summary of them every three months, with the count of what was found and fixed. A correction that changes what a piece concludes still gets its own entry on the day it is made. Updates are still logged one at a time.
The 46 entries we took down are kept in our records.
Updates
Three lines in the piece were right when they were written and have since gone stale. Its close said "North Carolina is about to spend real money to learn that the hard way"; the governor vetoed the bill on July 8, 2026, so the close now says that will happen if the veto is overridden. The September 4, 2026 update below brought the piece's opening line up to date on the veto and missed this one. It urged letting builders put up the smaller, cheaper homes "our rules mostly prevent"; on August 25, 2026 the Asheville City Council allowed duplexes in every residential zoning district (WLOS, August 28, 2026), and the piece now says so. And it said the Salvation Army "aims to restart" the Center of Hope's residential program on May 1. Blue Ridge Public Radio reported on August 31, 2026 that the organization was on its own to raise the $1.2 million needed, and its local leader said that without it the shelter would probably end up shutting down; the piece now says it hopes to restart on May 1, 2027 if it can raise the money. Found by a re-check of older pages on October 3, 2026.
The piece now uses the tourism authority's newest statement by property type, the preliminary statement dated June 30, 2026 and published in its August 26, 2026 board packet: short-term rentals sold $192.8 million in lodging from July 2025 through May 2026, about 37 percent of all lodging sold, or roughly $11.6 million in room tax at the county's 6 percent. The full fiscal year by property type had not been published when this was checked. Found by a re-check of older pages on October 3, 2026.
The piece opened by saying the national housing news "this year" showed demand softening, vacancies climbing and rents falling "across the country for the first time since 2021." That was the national reporting in the first half of 2026, and the rents in question were asking rents for professionally managed apartments. In July 2026 those rents turned up again year over year, and in August they were up 0.9 percent (RealPage). The opening now says so, and says "nationally" rather than "across the country," since the decline was not in every market. Found by a re-check of older pages on October 3, 2026.
Since October 2, 2026 the piece has said the region's food bank traffic tops 220,000 visits a month, up from more than 200,000, as a MANNA FoodBank spokesperson told WLOS on August 17, 2026. The June 11, 2026 update below notes that a pre-storm figure of 158,000 monthly visits could not be traced to MANNA. On July 22, 2026, MANNA's chief executive published it as a count of visits: before Hurricane Helene, the network's monthly visits had grown to 158,000. The piece does not use that figure. Found by a re-check of older pages on October 3, 2026.
On August 26, 2026 the piece was updated to report that the council had passed its missing-middle zoning changes the day before, but a later section still described the old rules in the present tense: that in most of the city "a duplex is illegal to build," and that "even now" the rules mostly permit one detached house per lot. Both stopped being true on August 25, 2026, when the council allowed duplexes in every residential district. Those sentences now describe the zoning as it stood before that vote. Found while checking another page's sentence on the same zoning.
The piece said that when the Senate wrote its 2026 farm bill, it "declined to delay the new state cost-shift or restore any of the cuts," and that "the chance to soften the rerun came and went." That was true of the Senate's June 2026 draft. On September 16, 2026, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed a version that would push the usual start of the new state share of SNAP benefit costs back one year, to October 2028. For the states with the worst error rates, it would also raise the top rate from 15 to 20 percent of their food bill, starting in October 2030. It would not delay the increase in the state share of the cost of running the program that the 2025 law set for October 2026. The full Senate had not voted on it as of September 28, 2026. The piece now says all of this. Found when a September 23, 2026 Stateline report on the committee's vote was checked against the piece.
The signed operations contract has been released, and one estimate on both pages changes with it. The pages said the executed contract with RATP Dev, the company that runs ART, was not public. The city released it to us on September 18, 2026 under a public records request, and the pages now draw on it. They had estimated that cutting ART back to the service hours it ran in the year to June 2019 would save between $1.65 million and $3.02 million a year, with the low end worked out from the share of costs that went to running and maintaining the buses in the year to June 2024. Under the contract, the city pays RATP Dev a fixed monthly fee plus $63.60 for each revenue hour in the first year, and buys the buses' fuel itself. At those prices the low end is $1.34 million, and the per-rider figures built on it move with it. One clause also lets RATP Dev hold off on a cut that deep until the two sides agree higher prices, so the low end is not a floor. The pages had described the contract's nonappropriation clause from what the city attorney told the council; they now give the contract's own terms, including termination for convenience.
The federal competition is running again. The September 1, 2026 update below said there is no FY2026 Continuum of Care competition. On September 16, 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit paused the district court's August 7 order while HUD's appeal goes forward, and HUD reopened the competition on September 18, 2026, with applications due September 30. The appeal is not decided. The appeals court said only that HUD is likely to win on whether the $1.3 billion set-aside is the kind of incentive the law makes it put out for public comment first. The 60 percent floor is unaffected either way, because Congress wrote it into the budget rather than into HUD's notice. The first three pieces now say so, and each carries the stay in its sources.
A shelter count needed a date. A Ban Is Not a Bed said "about 65 people live there now" of the Salvation Army's downtown Center of Hope, with nothing dating it. That was the July 2026 figure. Blue Ridge Public Radio reported about 20 residents still in the building on August 31, 2026, the rest placed. The sentence now carries both readings with their dates.
A sentence in the first piece gave the county's median home price in the present tense: a median home "now runs around four hundred and fifty thousand." That was the first-quarter 2026 figure (about $446,000, Canopy MLS via Mosaic Realty), and by the time the sentence was checked the July 2026 single-month median had moved to $485,000 (Canopy MLS, released August 28, 2026). The sentence now dates itself to the first months of 2026 rather than stating a moving number as the present. The second piece's opening line said North Carolina "is close to banning public camping statewide," which was true in June. The bill passed, the governor vetoed it on July 8, 2026, and the House put an override on its August 4 calendar without taking the vote; the opening line now says so. The body of both pieces was already correct and is unchanged. Found by a scheduled re-check of both figures.
On August 7, 2026 a federal court in Rhode Island set aside HUD's FY2026 Continuum of Care notice in its entirety, holding that HUD issued it without the public comment the Administrative Procedure Act requires. There is no FY2026 competition, and the August 26, 2026 application deadline these pieces referred to is moot. HUD has appealed in both cases the order was entered in; its requests to pause the ruling were denied in the district court on August 13 and are still pending at the First Circuit; the First Circuit granted the stay on September 16, 2026, see the September 20, 2026 update above.
The annual housing wage figures moved to the National Low Income Housing Coalition's Out of Reach 2026, released July 23, 2026. The wage a full-time worker needs to afford a modest two-bedroom in metro Asheville at fair market rent rose from $29.08 to $35.29 an hour, and the one-bedroom figure from $25.90 to $32.19. North Carolina's statewide two-bedroom figure was essentially unchanged, at $27.11.
The size of the local increase deserves an explanation, because it is not a 21 percent rise in Asheville rents. HUD re-measured the area. On April 21, 2026 HUD published revised fair market rents for seven areas nationwide, Asheville among them, based on a rent survey conducted by the local housing authority. Asheville's two-bedroom fair market rent had already been set at $1,567 for the 2026 fiscal year in the ordinary annual update; the reevaluation moved it to $1,835. About four-fifths of the jump is that re-measurement. The official number had been running behind what people here were actually paying, and the survey closed the gap.
Two sentences that compared a service wage to the housing wage were rewritten rather than renumbered. Against the previously published $29.08, a $15 hourly wage was just over half the housing wage, so "roughly half" was accurate; at $35.29 it is 42 percent, so those sentences now say "well under half" and "well below half."
The sources footer still described North Carolina's public-camping ban, House Bill 437, as sitting with the governor. The body had already been updated for Governor Stein's July 8, 2026 veto; the footer now matches it, noting the veto and the override attempt Republican leaders have pledged.
North Carolina's public-camping ban moved: House Bill 437 cleared its final House vote 73 to 40 on June 30, 2026 and sits on the governor's desk, signature or veto pending. Four pieces that described it as still moving through committee or awaiting a final vote now carry the current status.
The federal supportive-housing funding fight moved twice: on June 29, 2026 a federal court vacated HUD's 2025 grant notices outright, and the FY2026 competition had just opened ($4.04 billion, renewals protected only to 60 percent, applications due August 26, 2026). Both pieces were updated to describe the vacated cap as history and the FY2026 competition as the live terms. That competition was itself set aside on August 7, 2026; see the September 1, 2026 update above.
The piece went out saying the President backed the ROAD to Housing Act and was expected to sign it within days, which was the reporting at publication. Hours later he canceled the signing to press Congress on an unrelated elections bill. The text now reflects that. The bill was never signed: under the ten-day constitutional clock it became law on its own on July 11, 2026.
Point-in-time figures updated to the 2026 count: 824 people (334 unsheltered), conducted February 10, 2026. A note was added where year-over-year comparisons appear: the count's methodology expanded in 2024, so part of the rise since then reflects better counting as well as more people. Superseded October 5, 2026: the count's method was the same in 2024, 2025 and 2026, so the 2024 change does not explain the rise since; the pieces no longer say it does.
MANNA FoodBank pantry-visit figures updated to current reporting: more than 200,000 monthly visits as of mid-2026, the highest level in the organization's history, up from roughly 158,000 before Hurricane Helene. Superseded July 9, 2026: the roughly 158,000 pre-storm baseline could not be traced to MANNA or any published report and was retired; the pieces now cite only confirmable visit counts (the 42-year record of more than 170,000 in September 2025, roughly 195,000 that November, and more than 200,000 now).