A Ban Is Not a Bed

The bill began as House Bill 781 and is now 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 more than 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. Reporting on the Senate version notes it adds no funding for local jurisdictions, while a sponsor pointed instead to existing federal grants. It is a mandate without a state 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 230 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. A 2025 executive order is pulling federal money away from permanent housing. We covered that shift, 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 statewide version in 2021. In Austin, the first year of enforcing the city's own voter-approved camping ban produced about 325 citations and a single arrest, and homelessness rose about 20 percent. Cleanups there have since run as high as $150,000 apiece. 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 cleared a Senate committee but never got a floor vote. The law that was supposed to fix the street is simply gone, and the street is unchanged.

Be fair about the evidence. The one nationwide study to test this, a difference-in-differences look at the hundred largest cities, found no measurable effect on homelessness either way, if anything a small and statistically insignificant rise. And where a sweep comes with real outreach it does move some people inside. Austin's housing-focused effort relocated more than 900 people from camps over four years. But that is the outreach and the beds doing the work, not the ban. What stays documented on the ban's own side is the cost and the citations. The drop in homelessness is the part no one has been able to show.

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, and the squeeze is about to tighten. In July 2026 the Salvation Army said its downtown Center of Hope would pause shelter services on October 1, the first time in nearly fifty years. That takes about 65 beds a night off the board at $90,000 a month it could no longer raise. Losing beds does not lower the count. It means the shelters fill sooner, and the one condition the bill sets for a sanctioned camp, that shelters be full, trips faster. So the county would face a hard choice: set up a state-approved camp, or wait to be sued for not clearing the tents.

Set 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 that is $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 what keeps people housed: across Homeward Bound's permanent supportive housing, more than nine in ten stayed housed in 2025. Homeward Bound puts the cost of that program at under $15,000 per resident a year. A sanctioned camp would cost roughly twice that and deliver none of it: no apartment, no caseworker, no treatment, no way out, just a serviced tent. You would pay more to hold someone in a tent than to put them in an apartment with a caseworker.

Two honest caveats keep this from being too clean. Supportive housing is not only cheaper per person than the camp; it pays part of itself back, in fewer emergency-room visits and jail nights, which a camp does not. And it is not a fix for everyone. For the hardest cases, serious mental illness or active addiction, an apartment by itself is not enough; it has to come with treatment, which is exactly the help a camp leaves out. Neither caveat saves the ban. Both point the same way the numbers do: put the money into the housing and the care, not into managing the street.

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.

If the point is really to clear the sidewalks, there are things that do it, and a ban is not one of them. Fund the shelter beds the bill only assumes are already there. Let builders put up the smaller, cheaper homes our rules mostly prevent, so people stop falling into homelessness faster than anyone can house them. Put treatment alongside the housing for the people who need both. And if a county is going to set up a sanctioned camp anyway, fund it for real and build a way out of it, a path into housing, not a year-long lot with a sign on it. Every one of those costs money. So does the ban. The only question is what the money buys.

One move from the same legislature runs the other way, and it is worth naming. Eviction defense is one of the cheapest ways to stop homelessness before it starts, because a lawyer who keeps a tenant in their apartment costs far less than a shelter bed or a sanctioned camp later. Yet the same General Assembly advancing this ban also wrote its 2026 budget to bar the State Bar from using its lawyer-trust-account interest to fund civil legal aid. It steered that money to criminal defense instead. That strips about six million dollars a year from Legal Aid of North Carolina and squeezes Pisgah Legal Services, the group that represents low-income Western North Carolina tenants in eviction court. One hand criminalizes the shortage; the other defunds the lawyers who keep people out of it.