We talk about Asheville's housing shortage as if it arrived like weather. In one neighborhood it did not arrive at all. It was planned, paid for with federal money, and carried out with bulldozers. More than eleven hundred homes came down, and the people who had owned them were turned into renters.
If you have ever had a beer on the South Slope on a warm evening, you have stood more or less on top of it. The breweries and the patios and the string lights sit a few blocks from where Southside used to be, and most of the people laughing down there have no idea what was cleared to make the room. I did not either, for a long time. I live a few miles off in a small, quiet, gated place, and the past that got erased to build the present does not tend to reach you there.
Southside was the biggest hub of Black life in Asheville. About half of the city's Black population lived in it. Then, over roughly two decades, the city took it apart on purpose, with money from Washington, under a program with a hopeful name.
We argue about the housing shortage as though no one chose it. Here, someone did.
Before the program had a name, it was a neighborhood, and by most accounts a good one.
When the people who grew up there describe it, they do not describe a slum. They describe homes that were owned rather than rented, businesses where the owner taught the trade to the younger people coming up, a place that held together. Priscilla Ndiaye Robinson, who has spent more than fifteen years researching what happened to it, remembers a neighbor's cupcakes and running up the grassy hills. The consultant the city hired to survey the area called it a deteriorating district. When she actually asked the residents, most of them said it was a pretty good place to live.
The ownership is the part to hold onto. When Robinson was a girl, fifty-eight percent of Black families in Asheville owned their own homes. That is not a small thing. That is generational wealth, the slow kind, the kind a family hands down. It was the thing the next twenty years would take.
It began, the way it usually did, with a map drawn a generation earlier.
In the 1930s, federal agencies graded neighborhoods for lending risk and colored the riskiest ones red. In Asheville, the red zones were the Black ones. A red grade meant no mortgages and no credit, and a place starved of credit for thirty years will, predictably, begin to show wear. The wear was then given a name, blight, and the name became the reason to clear it. The decline was manufactured first and cited as justification second. The fault line runs under both.
In 1966 the city's Redevelopment Commission approved a slum-clearance plan for Southside, which it renamed East Riverside. The federal dollars followed. The stated goal was more public housing and a cleaner, more inviting downtown, the kind of place tourists would want to visit. The demolition ran through the 1970s and into the 1980s. James Baldwin had a blunter name for what was being done in cities across the country, where an estimated fifty to sixty thousand families, most of them Black, were displaced every year. He called it Negro removal.
The first two numbers are the size of what was removed. The third is what it left behind.
The Rev. Dr. Wesley Grant Sr., a pastor who spent seventy-five years in Asheville, counted it out near the end of his life.
His tally, for the East Riverside area alone: more than eleven hundred homes, eight apartment houses, seven churches, fourteen grocery stores, five funeral homes, six beauty parlors, five barber shops, five filling stations, three laundromats, three shoe shops, two cabinet shops, two auto body shops, a hotel, a hospital, and three doctors' offices. A whole working economy, read out like an inventory, because that is what was lost. A University of Maryland research team later counted more than nine hundred parcels acquired in that single project. Residents who lived through it put the total losses closer to twelve hundred homes and businesses. The exact figure shifts with who is counting and what they count; the order of magnitude does not.
Homeowners were promised they could return, that a lot would be held for them in the rebuilt neighborhood. It never happened. The cleared land was redrawn into new parcels along realigned streets and sold at bargain prices, some of it to white developers. The families who had owned homes were moved, a great many of them, into the public housing the project built. Robinson's own family had rented in Southside; the Housing Authority placed them in a new project, which did ease their crowding, and also, she says, destroyed the community it replaced.
They were promised a lot back in the neighborhood. The neighborhood itself was the thing that got sold.
You cannot draw a straight line from a vote in 1966 to a tent in 2026. You can draw a real one, and it runs through ownership.
Owning a home is how most American families build wealth and pass it forward. Take a neighborhood of Black owners and turn it into a population of renters, and you have not simply moved people around. You have broken the handoff. The children do not inherit the house, because there is no house, so they begin again as renters, in a market that keeps climbing away from them.
Reginald Robinson said it plainly. His grandmother bought a home on the wages of a factory job; he rents, because on today's wages against today's prices, buying is out of reach. The figures back him up. In 2020, Black homeownership in Buncombe County stood at 41.3 percent against 65.9 percent for white households, a gap of nearly twenty-five points, scarcely better than where the whole country sat in 1960. James Howard Clark was paid eleven thousand dollars for the East End house that urban renewal took from him. A median home in Buncombe County now runs around four hundred and fifty thousand.
This is not the whole story of homelessness in Asheville. It is the part we built ourselves.
Most people sleeping outside tonight were not displaced from Southside. The timelines do not line up that neatly, and it would be dishonest to pretend they do. What urban renewal did was narrower than any one eviction and deeper than all of them. It does two things at once. It pulled hundreds of housing units out of a small market, and it stripped a community of the ownership that lets a family absorb a bad year without losing everything.
A city missing both has more people one setback from the street, and fewer rungs left for them to catch on the way down. That is the inheritance. Not a single cause, but a thinner floor under everyone who came after.
The reason this history belongs in a series about homelessness is not guilt. It is proof. We tend to talk about the housing shortage as if it were weather, a thing that simply happens to a city. Southside is the receipt that says otherwise. Housing does not only disappear through neglect. Sometimes a government takes federal money and removes it, deliberately, by the thousand. The shortage was a policy. It had authors, a budget, and a vote.
And that is the hopeful half, odd as it is to say. A condition that was chosen can be chosen against. In 2020 the city and the county passed reparations resolutions that name Black homeownership as something to rebuild. Whether they come to much is still an open question, and plenty of people who lived the first broken promise are not holding their breath. But the principle underneath them is the one this series keeps arriving at. The chairs were not lost. They were taken. A city that took them can decide to put them back.