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 paying more than the solution would cost.
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 the most expensive version of it.
The status quo isn't free. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates a chronically homeless person costs the public about $35,578 a year in emergency rooms, psychiatric crises, detox, and jail. Housing doesn't erase that bill, but it comes in lower, and a randomized trial lets us say by how much.
Annual public-services cost per person in Denver's randomized trial: the control group vs. people placed in supportive housing (jail, ER, shelter, and courts; 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 modest net cost increases. The honest verdict: usually cheaper, not guaranteed. Denver's five-year randomized trial is the cleanest read. Housed participants used $6,876 less a year in other public services than the control group. Those offsets covered roughly half the program's own cost, and 77% were still stably housed after three years.
This isn't charity. In a randomized trial, housing people returned about $6,900 a year in avoided jail, ER, and shelter costs, roughly half the program's price, and left far more of them stably housed.
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 to the civil engineer, and the rent outruns all of them.
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 found half of Asheville's construction workers earn less than the $59,840 needed to rent 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 regional employer survey, business owners put the cost and availability of housing at the top of their hiring problems in the mountains.
Since 2021 nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms have entered the pipeline 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" the expensive option, not the safe one.
You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix, or keep funding, at a premium, 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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