The Count Is Rising. The Money Is Already Here.

The Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care's point-in-time count for 2026, taken on February 10, found 824 people experiencing homelessness on a single night: 334 unsheltered and 490 in shelter or transitional housing. That is up about 9 percent from 755 the year before, and up from 527 in 2021, though not every year rose: the 2023 count, 573, was lower than 2022's 637.

One caveat matters before the trend gets used. The federally reported 2025 figure of 2,303 is not comparable to the rest of the series, because HUD rules required counting roughly 1,548 people in FEMA-paid hotels after Helene. That number should not be laid next to 824 or 755 as if it measured the same thing. The cleaner reading is to look at the other years: the count is still rising, with unsheltered counts well above where they sat before the pandemic.

One question in the count tests a common assumption. The 334 people found without shelter were asked where they last had housing. About 60 percent said Buncombe County, and about 74 percent said somewhere in North Carolina, Buncombe included. That does not fit the idea that most of them came from elsewhere to use services. The answers do not cover the 490 people in shelters and transitional housing. As for behavioral health, the 2026 count's own detail tables record 91 adults self-reporting a mental health condition and 62 a substance use disorder (a single source, self-reported, and almost certainly an undercount). Those figures do not describe a population that is mostly addicted or mostly mentally ill, though a visible chronic minority clearly struggles with both.

Beneath the count is a supply problem. The 2025 regional housing needs assessment estimates the area needs about 34,358 units over five years, including a rental shortfall of roughly 6,441 units in Asheville alone (these are planning estimates, so treat them as rough). The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's January 2024 national count put homelessness at its highest level since record-keeping began in 2007. Research points to housing cost. In 2020 the Government Accountability Office found that every $100 increase in median rent is associated with about a 9 percent rise in the homelessness rate, after controlling for wages, poverty, and unemployment. It added that it could not conclude housing costs were the primary factor, only that the two were statistically associated.

Locally the arithmetic is stark. By the National Low Income Housing Coalition's 2026 Out of Reach report, a worker needs about $35.29 an hour to afford a two-bedroom at fair-market rent here, one of the least affordable metros in North Carolina relative to local wages. Pay in many of the service jobs the region runs on sits well below half that. The county's median home price was about $446,000 in the first quarter of 2026.

This is where the homelessness story and the workforce story turn out to be the same story. A 2022 survey of regional employers put housing cost and availability at the top of their hiring problems. Meanwhile, 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, with little housing nearby that the people staffing those hotels can afford. Homelessness here is not separate from the labor shortage. It is the same housing market measured at the bottom rung, and supply moves both.

The national fight over how to respond has hardened into two camps, and the honest answer is that each is right about something different.

The case for Housing First is strongest on housing itself. Randomized trials and their meta-analyses find participants roughly 2.5 times more likely to be stably housed. Houston's coordinated, data-driven system has cut regional homelessness by around 60 percent since 2011. The weakness is just as real: an apartment is not a clinical treatment. Trials of Housing First, permanent housing that does not require sobriety first, all rated at high risk of bias, found no clear difference from usual care in substance use or mental health over about two years, and no clear sign of harm.

The case for Treatment First, built on campus models like San Antonio's Haven for Hope, points to genuine recovery numbers. Its weakness is methodological: those numbers come without a control group and count the people who complete the program, which builds in survivorship bias and leaves out everyone who could not meet the conditions to stay.

The critique of Housing First lands hardest where the model is weakest: the chronically unsheltered minority with active psychosis or addiction. It lands softest as a general theory, because it cannot explain why high-rent regions, not high-addiction regions, have the most homelessness. As the University of Pennsylvania's Dennis Culhane has put it, the most visible homelessness is the least typical.

The fairest way to put the two sides together is not to pick a winner. It is a division of labor: Housing First as the structure for the majority, with a treatment track that is genuinely funded and actually available for the minority the housing model does not reach. The trap most places fall into is funding neither at scale.

The cleanest evidence on cost is a randomized controlled trial, so anchor there, not on slogans. In Denver's Social Impact Bond trial (the Urban Institute, 724 people, 2016 to 2020), the control group cost about $25,544 per person per year in public services such as jail, emergency rooms, detox, and shelter. People offered supportive housing, including the one in five who did not move in, used about $18,668 in other public services, roughly $6,876 less. Those offsets covered about half of the program's own cost. Among people who moved in early enough to be followed for three years, 12 percent had died within that time. Of those still alive, 77 percent were in permanent housing.

Two honest qualifications belong here. The first is about savings. The National Academies reviewed six studies with a comparison group, two of them randomized, and found three showed net savings, up to about $33,500 per person a year, while three showed a net cost, from about $250 to about $3,100 per person a year, all 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. The fair verdict for high-need groups like these is that supportive housing can pay back part of its cost, as it did in Denver, and in some studies all of it. The second is that for the broader population the cost question matters less than the supply question.

Responding to camps costs cities money too. A study of four cities, done for HUD and HHS, found that their responses to encampments cost $1,672 to $6,208 per unsheltered person in fiscal year 2019. Across the four, outreach was the largest cost and clearing camps the second, and the totals did not include fire department or emergency medical responses, or police responding to the areas around the camps. Outreach workers in at least one of the cities said cleaning and clearing camps often made it harder to move people into shelter or housing.

The clearest local win is Compass Point Village, a $17.5 million conversion of a former Tunnel Road motel into 85 permanent supportive housing beds. It opened in September 2023 and is now full, with its first graduations on the books. It also became the sharpest local version of the national disorder debate, a hard first year of police calls and neighborhood pushback that we read straight, and that has since eased, in The 92 Percent Who Stayed. The short version: most of the strain traced back to underfunded surrounding systems, and the case management inside the building worked for the people living there.

The clearest disappointment is a 2022 plan. The city paid the National Alliance to End Homelessness about $72,974 for a roadmap to halve unsheltered homelessness. Its 116 recommendations, chiefly a system overhaul and a single low-barrier shelter, went largely unimplemented, and the count rose. That low-barrier shelter is the piece the city has repeatedly named as missing and repeatedly failed to build, stalled on siting politics rather than on any disagreement about the need.

The opioid-funded Community Paramedics Response Team gives a local example of the gap between a referral and a home. In 2023 it logged 986 overdose responses and referred 88 people to housing. It landed 9. The team's figures do not say why so few gained housing, but it is the kind of gap a housing shortage would produce.

One recent change cuts the other way, toward coordination. In 2024 the area's loose advisory committee was replaced by a formally chartered Continuum of Care, now several hundred members strong. In June 2025 it adopted its first three-year strategic plan, with goals to reduce unsheltered homelessness, increase exits to permanent housing, and expand prevention and rapid rehousing. The coordinating structure that was missing for years is now in place.

Two policy developments, both volatile and worth watching closely, frame what Buncombe can do.

At the federal level, Executive Order 14321 (July 2025) directs HUD and HHS to end support, in their homelessness programs, for Housing First policies that, in the order's words, "deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency," to the extent the law allows, and tells HUD, as appropriate, to have the groups it funds raise their requirements that people with a serious mental illness or addiction use treatment as a condition of being in their programs. HUD wrote those principles into a November 2025 funding notice that capped permanent housing at a minority of grant dollars, sending Continuums of Care nationwide scrambling. The order also told the Justice Department, HHS, HUD and the Transportation Department to look at whether their discretionary grants can give priority to grantees in states and cities that enforce bans on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, or urban squatting, among other tests.

In December 2025 a federal trial court in Rhode Island blocked that policy, and on April 1, 2026 the federal appeals court refused to pause those orders while HUD appealed the trial court's refusal to lift them. HUD said it remains committed to its approach. The FY2026 notice that followed was a $4.04 billion competition that protected renewals only to 60 percent and scored money toward treatment-conditioned projects. On June 29, 2026 a court vacated the 2025 notices outright, and on August 7, 2026 the same court set the FY2026 notice aside in its entirety, holding that HUD issued it, including its $1.3 billion set-aside, without the public comment the law requires. HUD appealed the August ruling. The trial court refused to pause its own order, but on September 16, 2026 the appeals court paused it, saying HUD was likely to win on whether the set-aside needed public comment. HUD reopened the competition on September 18, 2026, under the same notice, and applications closed on September 30. On September 21, 2026 the challengers asked the appeals court to vacate the August ruling and send the cases back to the trial court, and on September 24 it did. The cases are back before the trial judge, with new briefing due through October 14, 2026. Nothing about the merits is settled, so the threat to existing supportive-housing funding is still real. The full turn, and the roughly $1.4 million of local money in its path, is the subject of Strings Attached.

At the state level, the camping-ban approach has resurfaced after stalling once already. House Bill 781, the "Unauthorized Public Camping and Sleeping" bill, passed the North Carolina House in 2025 but stalled in the Senate. On June 10, 2026, its core language was revived in a Senate committee's rewrite of House Bill 437 (originally a measure to establish drug-free homeless-service zones), which passed the Senate in June and cleared its final House vote 73 to 40 on June 30, 2026. Governor Stein vetoed it on July 8, 2026, though Republican leaders have pledged to try an override, so it is not settled. Starting June 30, 2027, it would bar local governments from allowing regular camping or sleeping on public property, except during a declared state or local emergency. The bill's definition leaves out sleeping in a lawfully parked, registered and insured vehicle and camping for recreation, and the other exception is a state-certified sanctioned site: land the local government owns within its boundaries and designates by majority vote for up to a year. The state can certify a site only if the local government shows four things: there are not enough open shelter beds, the site does not touch land zoned for homes, it would not hurt nearby property values, safety or the safety of children, and there is a plan to meet the minimum standards. Local governments other than those on the Local Government Commission's Unit Assistance List must give such a site security, restrooms and running water, access to substance-use and mental-health treatment, and a ban on illegal drug use and alcohol use. We take the full law apart, and price what obeying it would cost Buncombe, in A Ban Is Not a Bed.

The detail that matters most for Buncombe is buried in that exception. The site the bill would allow is a place to camp or sleep outdoors, not a shelter, so it is a different thing from the low-barrier shelter the city has tried and failed to build. The state can certify one only where there are not enough open shelter beds. The bill provides no state money for such a site, and designating one would not lift the bar on camping on any other public property. Where the provider community can push is on what local government builds alongside it.

What is unusual right now is that several large pots of money are already committed. The task is matching each kind of dollar to the job it is suited for: one-time money to build, recurring money to sustain treatment, a small prevention pot to stop inflow, and a hard stop on spending more to criminalize than it costs to house.

The logic is to spend the one-time Helene money on durable assets you cannot fund twice, route the recurring opioid stream to the treatment that housing cannot deliver, use the prevention pilot to keep about 1,000 households from entering the system in the first place, and stop paying for enforcement on its own. In ranked order, the actions worth considering: