By February 2024, nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms were planned or under construction in Asheville, counted from the end of the city's hotel moratorium in 2021. The workers needed to run them cannot afford to live here. That's not a labor-market quirk. It's the same housing shortage that puts people on the street, seen from the employer's side of the ledger.
In a 2022 survey of nearly 800 employers in 10 Western North Carolina counties, the cost and availability of housing came out at the top of the hardest problems in hiring. That's not a complaint about morale. In January 2023 the head of the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board said candidates were passing on jobs because they couldn't afford Asheville rents.
Your hiring problem and the person sleeping outside aren't separate stories. They're the same housing market, measured at two different income levels.
You can finance the building. Staffing it is the part that quietly fails, and it fails for the same reason people end up on the street.
The shortfall runs the entire pay scale, not only its bottom. Follow the wages up and the housing stays out of reach the whole way.
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-area construction site with 13 kinds of jobs. In 2024, seven of them, from laborers and roofers to carpenters and electricians, paid a median wage below the $59,840 a year it took to afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in the metro area.
It no longer stops at the lowest-wage jobs. In 2019 a civil engineer's median pay in the Asheville area was enough to buy a typical home there. By 2024 that pay had risen to nearly $100,000 but fell more than $45,000 short of what a typical home there required.
The capital came quickly. The workforce to operate it cannot afford to live where the work is.
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, according to city records reported by Asheville Watchdog, but the workforce to operate that expansion cannot afford to live near it.
Every employer in town is bidding for the same shrinking pool of people who can actually afford to show up, and that pool gets smaller every time rents climb faster than wages.
The harder it is to staff, the more you pay in turnover, overtime, and unfilled shifts: costs that never appear on the housing ledger but come straight out of the same pocket.
Nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms planned or underway by early 2024, and a workforce that can't afford to live near them.
This isn't a bad year that corrects itself. When a market is this tight, there's no slack at the bottom, and the people with the least room in their budgets fall out first. That's where the hiring shortfall and homelessness become the same line item.
Here's the part that should land for anyone watching a budget: leaving someone on the street is not the cheap choice it looks like. In Denver's five-year randomized trial, homeless people with long arrest records who got only the usual services cost the public about $25,500 a year each in the jail, court, police, shelter, emergency-care and other services the study counted. Offering them supportive housing cost more overall, but it won back about half of its per-person cost in savings on those services. The full cost math is in our companion briefing: The Business Case for Housing Has Nothing to Do with Charity.
You can open the rooms. You can't staff them out of a workforce that can't afford to live in town.
The hotel boom shows how much a city's own rules decide. During the moratorium, from September 2019 to February 2021, Asheville revised its zoning code to steer new hotels into chosen parts of town, and it set up a point system that rewards developers for, among other things, paying into city funds for low-income housing and reparations. Rules that can steer hotels can steer homes, and communities that rebuilt their housing drove their numbers down.
For Asheville the incentives line up unusually well. The same investment that lets you staff your business, fill those new hotel rooms, and keep your workers in town is the investment that keeps people from falling onto the street to begin with. You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix or keep paying for the problem.
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