Set aside compassion for a moment. Assume you feel nothing for the person sleeping outside the bakery on Biltmore Avenue. The case for solving homelessness and the housing shortage still holds. Because you are already paying for the problem, and in a randomized trial in Denver, offering people supportive housing paid back about half of its cost per person in bills that never came due.
A person cycling through homelessness doesn't cost taxpayers nothing. They cost a fortune, and you don't get to decline the bill. It lands on hospitals, the county jail, and EMS regardless of what anyone chooses to feel about it.
You're already buying homelessness. The only question is whether you keep buying it one emergency at a time.
The status quo isn't free. In 2017 the National Alliance to End Homelessness put the cost of a chronically homeless person to taxpayers at an average of $35,578 a year, as people cycle through emergency rooms, hospital stays, psychiatric centers, detox, and jail. Housing doesn't erase that bill, but it brings it down, and a randomized trial in Denver, among homeless people arrested again and again, measured how much less those offered housing cost in jail, courts, police, shelter, emergency-room and ambulance services.
Annualized public-services cost per person in Denver's randomized trial, among homeless people with frequent arrests in Denver: the control group vs. everyone offered supportive housing, whether or not they moved in. Both bars count jail, courts, police, prison, shelter, other housing assistance, EMS, 911 and detox, and emergency room and ambulance costs billed to Medicaid; the program's own cost sits outside these bars and was roughly half covered by the difference.
A National Academies review of six controlled studies found mixed results. Three showed net savings of up to about $33,500 per person a year. Three showed net cost increases, from about $250 to about $3,100 per person a year in 2015 dollars. The review's own verdict: policymakers should not expect net savings, though some savings could show up in specific studies, such as those focused only on persistently heavy users of emergency medical services. Denver's five-year randomized trial is the cleanest read. People offered supportive housing, including the one in five who did not move in, used $6,876 less a year in other public services than the control group. Those offsets covered roughly half the program's own cost per person. Of the people who moved in and were alive three years later, 77% were still housed.
This isn't charity. In a randomized trial, offering people supportive housing returned about $6,900 per person a year in avoided jail, ambulance, and other costs, roughly half of what the program cost per person.
Here's the part that should worry every Asheville employer, because it's already costing you in hiring: this shortage is not a problem of the lowest-paid alone. It reaches from the housekeeper, who can't afford the rent, to the civil engineer, who can't afford to buy.
A Buncombe County worker needs to earn $35.29 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent, the 2026 Out of Reach housing wage for metro Asheville. Median housekeeping wages run about $15 an hour, well under half that.
A 2025 National Housing Conference report pictured a typical Asheville construction site and found that in 2024, 7 of its 13 occupations earned a median wage below the $59,840 needed to afford a one-bedroom.
It isn't confined to the lowest-wage jobs. Even civil engineers making nearly $100,000 struggle to afford a home here.
In a 2022 survey of employers across 10 Western North Carolina counties, business leaders put the cost and availability of housing at the top of their problems hiring and keeping workers.
As of February 2024, nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms were under construction or in the development pipeline, counted since the city lifted its hotel moratorium in February 2021, while the workforce to run them is priced out. That story is told in full in 1,700 New Hotel Rooms. Nobody to Staff Them.
This squeeze is structural, not a down year that bounces back on its own. Squeeze a market this hard and the workers with the least room to absorb a rent hike are the first to go. That's where the hiring problem and homelessness become the same line item.
Some costs never reach a tax bill. Unpaid ER visits become hospital bad debt that works its way into prices and the premiums employers fund. To be straight: economists disagree on how large that pass-through is. It runs well below dollar-for-dollar and depends on a hospital's market power, so treat it as real, but modest.
The costs you can't dodge are the visible ones: the downtown your customers walk through, the staff hours, the emergency calls. Those are what make "leave it alone" an expensive option, not a safe one.
You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix, which in Denver paid back about half of its cost per person, or keep funding the problem.
The shortage that drives your hiring problem and the homelessness downtown took shape over fifty years of choices: housing torn down, budgets cut, hospitals emptied. None of it is a fixed cost of doing business here. Communities that put the units back drove their numbers down, and Asheville can run the same math.
For Asheville the incentives line up unusually well. The dollars you already lose to jail, ER, turnover, and unfilled shifts are the same dollars that, put into housing, keep your workforce in town and keep people from falling onto the street to begin with.
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