A Ban Is Not a Bed

The camping ban began as House Bill 781, which passed the House in May 2025 and stalled in the Senate. In June 2026 a Senate committee moved its language into House Bill 437, a bill the House had passed in 2025 to set up drug-free zones around homeless services. The bill forbids any city or county from regularly allowing people to camp or sleep on public property: parks, sidewalks, rights of way, the grounds of public buildings. A local government can set aside its own land as a sanctioned campsite for one continuous year at most, but only after the state Department of Labor certifies the site. To get that, it has to show four things: that local shelters do not have enough open beds for the homeless population, that the site does not border land zoned for homes, that it would not do real harm to the value or safety of other homes and businesses there and would not harm children's safety, and that it has a plan to meet the standards below. The state has 45 days to act on a complete request. If it does nothing, the site is certified anyway on the forty-fifth day. That site has to come with restrooms, running water, security, coordination of mental-health and addiction services, and a ban on drugs and alcohol.

Then comes the part with the real force. A local government that allows regular camping or sleeping on public property can be sued by its own residents or business owners, or by the attorney general. If a resident or business owner wins, the court may award them their legal costs. Before any of that, the local government has to be told in writing and given fifteen business days to fix the problem. So the law does more than permit enforcement. It lets a single neighbor or storefront compel it, in court, at the county's expense.

The bill carries no money. There is no state funding for the shelters it assumes, the sanctioned camps it allows, or the policing it invites. Reporting on the Senate version notes it adds no funding for local jurisdictions, while a sponsor said instead that it would help state agencies be more competitive for federal housing and homelessness grants. It is a mandate without a state check attached.

One update since the bill cleared the legislature. Governor Stein vetoed House Bill 437 on July 8, 2026, calling it a job handed to local governments with no state money to do it. So the ban is not law yet, and even if the veto is overridden, the camping section, including the right to sue, would not take effect until June 30, 2027. Even then, the section would not apply during any period in which the governor or a local government has declared a state of emergency under the state's emergency-management law. Buncombe County's local emergency for Helene lasted from September 25, 2024 until June 30, 2025. Speaker Destin Hall's office has said the House will override the veto. House Republicans are one vote short of a veto-proof majority on their own, though five Democrats and two unaffiliated members voted for the bill on June 30, 2026, and the House put the override on its August 4, 2026 calendar without taking the vote. So the fight over it is not finished. A local shelter director called the veto a partial win while pressing for the beds and services the bill never funded.

North Carolina did not invent this. In June 2024, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that a city may punish people for sleeping outside even when there is no shelter bed to send them to. That removed the Eighth Amendment bar the Ninth Circuit had set in Martin v. Boise, which kept Western cities in that circuit from enforcing these laws against homeless people when there were not enough shelter beds practically available to them. In the year that followed, more than 320 bills to criminalize homelessness were introduced across the country, and 230 of them passed.

Many of the state laws among them trace to one template. The Cicero Institute, a think tank that argues Housing First has failed, wrote a model camping-ban bill and carried it state to state. North Carolina's version is a close cousin. The same push runs through Washington now. A 2025 executive order is pulling federal money away from permanent housing. We covered that shift, and the roughly $1.4 million of local housing money caught in it, in a separate piece. This one is about the law coming to our own legislature, and what it does on the ground.

Does banning camping reduce homelessness? Where the laws have been in place long enough to judge, the answer is no.

Texas passed the first statewide version in 2021. In Austin, the first year of enforcing the city's own voter-approved camping ban produced about 280 citations, and police had made a single arrest in its first five months. The Texas Tribune reported in August 2022 that homelessness in Austin had grown about 20 percent over the past year. Cleanups there have since run as high as $150,000 apiece. The one Texas city that actually drove its numbers down, Houston, did it the other way, by housing people first. Its roughly 63 percent drop since 2011 came from apartments, not citations.

Tennessee went further in 2022 and made camping on public land a felony, the first state to do it. Two years in, a public-records review found four felony arrests statewide and zero prosecutions. District attorneys' offices said no one had been prosecuted. Tennessee's one-night count did fall between 2022 and 2024, from just over 10,500 in January 2022 to about 8,300 in 2024, but a law used four times in those two years is hard to credit for that. In late 2024, 11 more people were arrested under it in downtown Nashville. By March 2025 nearly all of those charges had been dropped, and the one conviction was a guilty plea to misdemeanor trespass.

Missouri tried the same playbook and shows the last twist. Its 2022 ban was struck down by the state's high court at the end of 2023, and as of June 2026 it has not been put back on the books. A bill to revive it cleared a Senate committee but never got a floor vote. The law that was supposed to fix the street is simply gone, and the street is unchanged.

Be fair about the evidence. The one nationwide study to test this, a difference-in-differences look at the hundred largest cities, found no measurable effect on homelessness either way, if anything a small and statistically insignificant rise. And where a sweep comes with real outreach it does move some people inside. Austin's housing-focused effort relocated more than 900 people from camps over four years. But that is the outreach and the beds doing the work, not the ban. On the ban's own side, what is documented is the cost and the citations. The drop in homelessness is the part no one has been able to show.

Take the case for the ban at its strongest, because it has one. An encampment on a sidewalk is a real problem. It is not safe for the people in it or easy for the people around it, and a downtown that wants to stay open has a fair stake in clearing it. Being tired of tents that never seem to move is not a cruel position. It is a normal one.

But wanting the tent gone is not the same as having somewhere to put the person. That is the gap the ban never closes. Clearing a camp without a bed to move people into just relocates it a few blocks, minus whatever the sweep destroyed, plus a citation that makes the next apartment harder to rent. The honest fix for a sidewalk full of tents is a building full of beds. A ban does not add one.

Now bring it home. Buncombe County counted 334 people sleeping unsheltered in its 2026 tally, up from 219 two years earlier, against shelters already near capacity and a bed shortage that Helene made worse. Under the bill, a county could open a sanctioned camp only after showing, among other things, that its shelters do not have enough open beds for the people who need them. Here they do not: Asheville was already about 90 shelter beds short in August 2026, and the squeeze is about to tighten. In July 2026 the Salvation Army said its downtown Center of Hope would pause its long-term residential program on November 1, the first time in nearly fifty years. A grant covering the shelter's $1.2 million annual operating cost expired on June 30. About 65 people lived there in July 2026, on stays that run from three months to two years. By August 31, 2026 about 20 were still there. The Salvation Army says the building stays open through the winter as a Code Purple cold-night shelter, and that it hopes to restart the residential program on May 1, 2027 if it can raise the $1.2 million needed. Without that money, its local leader told Blue Ridge Public Radio in August 2026, the shelter will probably close for good. Losing that program does not lower the count. It means the shelters fill sooner on the nights Code Purple is not open. A shortage of open shelter beds is only the first of four things the bill would make a county prove before it could open a sanctioned camp; the other three are about where the camp sits, what it does to the homes, businesses and children around it, and the plan to run it. So the county would face a hard choice: set up a state-approved camp, or wait to be sued for not clearing the tents.

Set up the camp and the bill arrives with no state money behind it. A site run to the law's standards, with restrooms, running water, security (our estimate assumes guards around the clock), and coordination of mental-health and addiction care, costs about what other cities spend on managed camps and safe-sleeping sites. Realistically that is $25,000 to $30,000 per person each year. At the scale of our unsheltered count, that is roughly $8 to $10 million a year, every year. A bare-bones version still starts north of $3 million. None of it is funded.

Here is the part that should stop the conversation. That per-person cost is more than it costs to actually house someone, and to do far more than house them. Homeward Bound's Compass Point is permanent supportive housing, which means the apartment is only the start. It comes with a caseworker, help getting into mental-health and addiction treatment, and the steady day-to-day support that keeps a person stable once they are inside. That combination, the home and the help together, is what keeps people housed: across Homeward Bound's permanent supportive housing, more than nine in ten stayed housed in 2025. Homeward Bound puts the cost of permanent supportive housing at under $15,000 per person a year. A sanctioned camp would cost roughly twice that and deliver far less: no apartment, no caseworker, no way out, just a serviced tent, with access to treatment arranged through another agency. You would pay more to hold someone in a tent than to put them in an apartment with a caseworker.

Two honest caveats keep this from being too clean. Supportive housing is not only cheaper per person than the camp; it pays back part of its cost through fewer emergency-room visits and jail nights, which a camp does not. And it is not a fix for everyone. For the hardest cases involving serious mental illness or active addiction, an apartment by itself is not enough; it has to come with treatment, and a camp only has to arrange access to treatment through another agency. Neither caveat saves the ban. Both point the same way the numbers do: put the money into the housing and the care, not into managing the street.

And the lawsuits are not a side risk. The bill would let any resident or business owner take their city or county to court over camping it regularly allows, and one who wins could ask the court to make that government pay their legal costs. That would land at a moment when the City of Asheville and the county are already stretched thin from the storm. Asheville's state senator, Julie Mayfield, raised exactly this exposure while the Senate weighed the bill, pointing to lawsuits in Asheville.

If the point is really to clear the sidewalks, there are things that do it, and a ban is not one of them. Fund the shelter beds the bill only assumes are already there. Keep letting builders put up the smaller, cheaper homes, like the duplexes Asheville allowed in every residential zoning district in August 2026, so people stop falling into homelessness faster than anyone can house them. Put treatment alongside the housing for the people who need both. And if a county is going to set up a sanctioned camp anyway, fund it for real and build a way out of it, a path into housing, not a year-long lot with a sign on it. Every one of those costs money. So does the ban. The only question is what the money buys.

One move from the same legislature runs the other way, and it is worth naming. Eviction defense is one of the cheapest ways to stop homelessness before it starts, because a lawyer who keeps a tenant in their apartment costs far less than a shelter bed or a sanctioned camp later. Yet the same General Assembly advancing this ban also wrote its 2026 budget to bar the State Bar from using its lawyer-trust-account interest to fund civil legal aid. It steered that money to criminal defense instead. That strips about six million dollars a year from Legal Aid of North Carolina and squeezes Pisgah Legal Services, which stands to lose about $1.9 million a year and which represents low-income Western North Carolina tenants in eviction court. One hand would bar cities and counties from regularly allowing the tent; the other defunds the lawyers who keep people housed.