The WNC Desk · North Carolina
Raleigh's first budget since 2023 puts money into a Medicaid food-and-housing pilot and Helene recovery, and cuts the civil legal aid that fights evictions.
Budget passed July 2026 · Prepared 2026-07-07
Raleigh finally passed a budget. After a year of delay, the General Assembly sent Governor Stein a roughly $34 billion spending plan in July 2026, the state's first full budget since 2023, by veto-proof majorities. Most of it will never reach a headline. But four decisions inside it reach straight into the region's housing, food, and courts. Two put money in. Two take it away.
Start with housing, because that is where the region hurts most. By the North Carolina Justice Center's read of the enacted bill, the budget puts only about $10 million in new money into affordable housing statewide, plus a one-time $35 million transfer to the state Housing Finance Agency. It adds nothing recurring to the Housing Trust Fund. It sets aside nothing for rental assistance or eviction prevention. Earlier in the session, a bipartisan House bill had proposed a $50 million affordable-housing fund; what passed came in well under that.
The low number is partly a choice about tools. Instead of a check, the state's main housing move this year was a rule change: the same session repealed local parking minimums, on the theory that cheaper building rules will add more homes than a small fund could. That bet has a case behind it, and it also works on a slower clock. On the spending side, for a region still short tens of thousands of homes after Helene, this budget is close to standing still.†
On food and health, the budget reopens a door it had shut. The Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which lets Medicaid pay for non-medical needs like food and stable housing, restarts at about $25 million: roughly $9 million in state money drawing down about $16 million in federal match. The pilot is not a shot in the dark. A UNC evaluation of its first years found it cut Medicaid costs by about $164 a month per enrollee, more than the food, housing, and transportation help cost to deliver. So the restart is well short of the $80 million the program asked for, but it is money the evidence says pays for itself. In the mountains it is expected to reach on the order of 14,000 residents.‡
The harder food number is one the budget only begins to face. The 2025 federal law shifts part of SNAP's cost onto the states for the first time, and North Carolina's share could eventually run to about $420 million a year. The state has started to put a number on that cost. Nothing in this budget makes it go away.
Now the part that quietly takes money away. For nearly forty years, the interest on lawyers' trust accounts, known as IOLTA, has paid for civil legal aid: the lawyers who fight evictions, foreclosures, and domestic-violence cases for people who cannot afford one. This budget bars that money from civil legal aid and redirects it to indigent criminal defense. Lawmakers who backed the change say the money should go toward the state's constitutional duty to provide a defense for people charged with crimes who cannot afford a lawyer.
| Who loses the IOLTA money | Per year |
|---|---|
| Legal Aid of North Carolina (statewide) | ~$6,500,000 |
| Pisgah Legal Services (Western NC) | ~$1,900,000 |
Pisgah Legal's executive director, Jackie Kiger, has put the loss at roughly 15 percent of the group's budget. These are the lawyers who most often stand between a family and an eviction order.
The same session that advanced a statewide camping ban also redirected the money behind civil legal aid. The two bills are separate, with no shared sponsor or stated connection. But read side by side, one measures the cost of the response to homelessness while the other trims a service that helps prevent it.
One more line matters for Western North Carolina. The budget sets aside about $700 million for Helene recovery, including roughly $40 million for temporary relocation. It is real money. It is also not close to the full repair bill, and much of the largest housing pool for the region, the federal disaster-recovery dollars, sits outside the state budget entirely.
A few cautions. The housing figures are the North Carolina Justice Center's read of the enacted bill. Independent outlets confirm the budget's overall size and its Helene funding, but have not separately itemized the housing lines, so treat the exact housing dollars as close, not final. "Net" affordable-housing money can also hide larger gross numbers moving in and out. And a state budget is a snapshot: federal money, local budgets, and later adjustments all change what actually reaches a household. The direction, though, is clear enough to name.
Buncombe County sits under every one of these lines. About 29,000 county residents buy groceries with SNAP, roughly one in nine of us, and because North Carolina runs SNAP through its counties, part of the new administrative cost lands on the county's own budget, not just the state's. The IOLTA cut has an Asheville address: Pisgah Legal Services, the group that loses about $1.9 million, is the WNC provider whose lawyers fight evictions and protective-order cases across the mountains. The Healthy Opportunities restart flows back to the same region, reaching an estimated 14,000 WNC residents. And the housing math is hardest here, in a county still digging out from Helene, short tens of thousands of homes with little new state money to build them.
Read together, the four decisions pull in two directions. New money for a Medicaid food-and-housing pilot, and a down payment on Helene. Less money for affordable housing than the shortage demands, and a real cut to the legal aid that stops evictions. A budget is a set of choices. This one held the line on some things and gave ground on others, and the ground it gave is where housing and food insecurity lives.
Sources: NC Newsline, "$34 billion NC budget wins final passage" (2026-07-02); North Carolina Justice Center budget analysis, ncjustice.org/ncbudget2026 (2026-07-01) for the ~$10M net affordable-housing appropriation, the $35M one-time Housing Finance Agency transfer, and the absence of any recurring Housing Trust Fund, rental-assistance, or eviction-prevention money; NC Health News, "NC's first budget since 2023 reflects transformed health policy landscape" (2026-07-01) for the up-to-$420M SNAP cost-share exposure (15% of the state's ~$2.8B in benefits) and the Healthy Opportunities restart; WLOS (2026-07-03) for the $9M state / $16M federal Medicaid non-medical split (~$25M total) and the ~14,000-resident WNC estimate; the $80M program request per WLOS/NC Health News; WRAL, "NC budget takes aim at Legal Aid" (June 2026) for Legal Aid of North Carolina's ~$6.5M reduction and the redirect of IOLTA money to the indigent-criminal-defense fund; WLOS (2026-07-02) and WFAE (2026-07-02) for the Pisgah Legal Services figure (~$1.9M, ~15% of a $14M budget, per executive director Jackie Kiger); Blue Ridge Public Radio (2026-06-30) for the ~$700M Helene set-aside and $40M temporary-relocation program; WUNC (2026-04-29) for the earlier bipartisan House proposal of a $50M affordable-housing fund; NCDHHS / UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center (2026-06-02) for the Healthy Opportunities evaluation finding ~$164/month per-enrollee Medicaid savings; and the 2026 repeal of local parking minimums (HB 162) per WCTI (2026-07-06). The Justice Center is a policy-advocacy organization; its housing line-item figures are confirmed against its own published analysis of the enacted bill but are not independently itemized by a neutral outlet. Figures are hedged where the reporting is a single source or an early estimate. Independent summary; not affiliated with the State of North Carolina.