One downtown building, affordable housing for low-income seniors, was just gut-renovated top to bottom. A few miles away, the city's public housing is rundown and waiting on repairs. Both sit under the same federal umbrella. So why the gap? It isn't the worth of the buildings or the people in them. It's how each one has been financed over the decades, and that's a policy choice.
Battery Park Apartments, a 1920s hotel converted in the 1980s to affordable housing for low-income seniors, in the heart of downtown, was just rebuilt unit by unit: new kitchens, baths, electrical, HVAC, accessibility. A short drive away, units in the city's public housing are, in residents' and reporters' words, rundown and in need of repair.
Both are "HUD housing." Both serve low-income residents, though not the same households: Battery Park is restricted to seniors, while public housing serves families and individuals of every age. That difference is real, but it is not what rebuilt one building and left the other waiting. The condition gap traces to how each one has been financed, not to the people inside.
The gap you can see with your own eyes is a gap in how two buildings are financed, not a gap in who deserves a decent home.
“HUD funding” is not one thing. For most of its life, Asheville's public housing ran on a different system from Battery Park's, one built around yearly federal repair grants, where borrowing against its buildings needed HUD's written approval. Nearly all of it moved onto the Section 8 platform through RAD in 2016, but moving is not the same as being repaired.
When you walk into a worn public-housing unit, you're looking at the physical residue of a federal repair fund Congress chose not to keep whole. The national numbers are staggering.
The most recent nationwide assessment puts the bill to preserve the country's roughly 899,000 public-housing units at $169.1 billion, about $188,090 per unit, with the buildings aging at roughly $3,597 per unit, per year.
A prior HUD study in 2010 estimated the backlog at $26 billion. That figure covered short-term repairs and replacements; the 2025 figure comes from a report on the cost of modernizing over a decade. Construction costs have also climbed, and the buildings have kept aging.
The federal Public Housing Capital Fund has been funded at about $3.2 billion in every federal budget from 2022 through 2026, against a backlog the newest estimate puts at $169 billion. NAHRO, the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, has asked Congress for at least $5 billion a year.
HUD estimated in 2010 that roughly 10,000 public-housing units were lost every year to demolition or sale. NAHRO put the backlog at $90 billion in 2024, on an older count. Either way, a gap Congress has never closed.
Two per-unit figures, side by side: measuring two different things, shown together for scale.
Battery Park: loan money set aside to renovate. Public housing: money still needed to catch up.
Battery Park's figure is derived: about $13.4M of loan money set aside to renovate its 122 units and common areas (~$110,000 a unit). The national figure is the average estimated cost to preserve each public-housing unit ($188,090). They are not a like-for-like comparison: one is money set aside, the other is money needed. The honest point isn't the exact spread. It's that one building got fully funded while the system is still owed its own repairs.
Because public housing was starved, HUD built a workaround: a way to move it onto the same platform that lets Battery Park borrow. The local agency has already used it.
RAD lets a housing authority convert public housing onto the Section 8 platform, so it can borrow and use tax credits, exactly the tools that rebuilt Battery Park.
HACA's former public-housing units are now RAD Project-Based Voucher units. Nationally, of the ~87,000 units converted under RAD (2020–2024), about half used tax credits to fund the rehab.
RAD doesn't supply the capital. You still have to assemble a tax-credit-plus-private-debt recapitalization building by building, the way Battery Park did. The legal structure is in place, and HACA has closed a tax-credit deal before, rebuilding Lee Walker Heights as Maple Crest. What's missing is deals for the rest of the portfolio, and the financial stability to pursue them.
This gap is a question of which programs got capital and which got starved, and the same fix can close it. Roughly in order of realism and impact:
Apply the Battery Park playbook to the public-housing portfolio: stack tax credits (via the NC Housing Finance Agency) with private debt to gut-renovate specific communities, often by partnering with a mission-driven developer-operator. This is the single most proven path, and the legal structure already exists.
You can't close a tax-credit deal from a position of financial free-fall. Keeping HUD's rent abatements down and bringing vacancies down, 144 empty units at the end of April 2026, is the precondition for everything above it on this list.
Asheville's plan for a $225M federal Helene grant put roughly $31M toward housing, leaning toward new multifamily construction. In June 2026 the city council voted 6 to 1, subject to HUD approval, to move $19.2M into single-family home repair and reconstruction, $9.2M of it from new multifamily construction and $10M from infrastructure.
The “right” fix is a federal recapitalization sized to the backlog, which the newest estimate puts at $169 billion. A 2024 Senate bill from Elizabeth Warren proposed $70 billion. It is the root cause, worth naming in advocacy, but not something to rely on in the near term.
The gap you can see with your own eyes isn't about the residents. It's about how a building has been financed, and whether anyone has put the repair money in yet.
One building was recapitalized at exactly the right moment on a platform that could raise capital. The other spent decades in public housing, waiting on federal repair money Congress underfunded, and it is still waiting for its own deal. That is policy made visible, and so is the way out.
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