A Ban Is Not a Bed

The bill began as House Bill 781 and now rides in House Bill 437. It forbids any city or county from regularly allowing people to camp or sleep on public property: parks, sidewalks, rights of way, the grounds of public buildings. A local government can set aside its own land as a sanctioned campsite, but only for up to a year, only when shelters are full, and only if a state agency signs off within 45 days. That site has to come with restrooms, running water, security, coordination of mental-health and addiction services, and a ban on drugs and alcohol.

Then comes the part with the real force. Any resident or business owner, or the attorney general, can sue a local government that allows camping, and a winning plaintiff can recover legal fees. The city gets a brief written-notice period to clear the camp before the suit lands. So the law does not just permit enforcement. It lets a single neighbor or storefront compel it, in court, at the county's expense.

The bill carries no money. There is no state funding for the shelters it assumes, the sanctioned camps it requires, or the policing it invites. The sponsor said so plainly: there will not be additional funding from the state at this time. It is a mandate without a check attached.

North Carolina did not invent this. In June 2024, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that a city may punish people for sleeping outside even when there is no shelter bed to send them to. That removed the last legal brake. In the year that followed, more than 320 bills to criminalize homelessness were introduced across the country and roughly 220 became law.

Most of them trace to one template. The Cicero Institute, a think tank that argues Housing First has failed, wrote a model camping-ban bill and carried it state to state. North Carolina's version is a close cousin. The same push runs through Washington now, where a 2025 executive order is pulling federal money away from permanent housing; we covered that turn, and the roughly $1.4 million of local housing money caught in it, in a separate piece. This one is about the law coming to our own legislature, and what it does on the ground.

Does banning camping reduce homelessness? Where the laws have been in place long enough to judge, the answer is no.

Texas passed the first version in 2021. In Austin, the first year of enforcement produced about 325 citations and roughly one arrest, individual sweeps that ran up to $150,000 apiece, and homelessness that rose about 20 percent. The one Texas city that actually drove its numbers down, Houston, did it the other way, by housing people first; its roughly 63 percent drop since 2011 came from apartments, not citations.

Tennessee went further in 2022 and made camping on public land a felony, the first state to do it. Two years in, a public-records review found four felony arrests statewide and zero prosecutions. District attorneys would not pursue them. The penalty changed the threat on the street; it did not change the count. What it did change was the bill, by shifting the cost of cleanups and services onto local governments.

Missouri tried the same playbook and shows the last twist. Its 2022 ban was struck down by the state's high court at the end of 2023, and as of June 2026 it has not been put back on the books. A bill to revive it died in committee. The law that was supposed to fix the street is simply gone, and the street is unchanged.

Take the case for the ban at its strongest, because it has one. An encampment on a sidewalk is a real problem. It is not safe for the people in it or easy for the people around it, and a downtown that wants to stay open has a fair stake in clearing it. Being tired of tents that never seem to move is not a cruel position. It is a normal one.

But wanting the tent gone is not the same as having somewhere to put the person. That is the gap the ban never closes. Clearing a camp without a bed to move people into just relocates it a few blocks, minus whatever the sweep destroyed, plus a citation that makes the next apartment harder to rent. The honest fix for a sidewalk full of tents is a building full of beds. A ban does not add one.

Now bring it home. Buncombe County counted 334 people sleeping unsheltered in its 2026 tally, up from 219 two years earlier, against shelters already near capacity and a bed shortage that Helene made worse. Under the bill, a sanctioned camp is allowed only when shelters are full. Here, they routinely are. So the county would face a hard choice: stand up a state-approved camp, or wait to be sued for not clearing the tents.

Stand up the camp and the bill arrives with no state money behind it. A site that genuinely meets the law, with restrooms, running water, around-the-clock security, and real coordination of mental-health and addiction care, runs in line with what other cities spend on managed camps and safe-sleeping sites: realistically $25,000 to $30,000 per person each year. At the scale of our unsheltered count, that is roughly $8 to $10 million a year, every year. A bare-bones version still starts north of $3 million. None of it is funded.

Here is the part that should stop the conversation. That per-person cost is about what it costs to actually house someone, and to do far more than house them. Homeward Bound's Compass Point is permanent supportive housing, which means the apartment is only the start. It comes with a caseworker, help getting into mental-health and addiction treatment, and the steady day-to-day support that keeps a person stable once they are inside. That combination, the home and the help together, is why more than nine in ten of its residents stayed housed. It runs near $23,500 per resident a year. A sanctioned camp costs about the same and delivers none of it: no apartment, no caseworker, no treatment, no way out, just a serviced tent. You would pay supportive-housing money to keep someone in a tent.

And the lawsuits are not a side risk. The bill's private right of action invites any resident or business to drag the city into court over a camp, on the county's dime, at a moment when the City of Asheville and the county are already stretched thin from the storm. Local officials have flagged exactly this exposure.