Set aside compassion for a moment. Assume you feel nothing for the person sleeping outside the bakery on Biltmore Avenue. The case for solving homelessness and the housing shortage still holds. Because you are already paying for the problem, and paying more than the solution would cost.
A person cycling through homelessness doesn't cost taxpayers nothing. They cost a fortune, and you don't get to decline the bill. It lands on hospitals, the county jail, and EMS regardless of what anyone chooses to feel about it.
You're already buying homelessness. The only question is whether you keep buying the most expensive version of it.
The status quo isn't free. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates a chronically homeless person costs the public about $35,578 a year in emergency rooms, psychiatric crises, detox, and jail. Housing doesn't erase that bill, but it comes in lower, and a randomized trial lets us say by how much.
Annual public cost per person in Denver's randomized trial: the control group vs. people placed in supportive housing (the housing itself included).
A National Academies review of six controlled studies found mixed results. Three showed net savings of up to about $33,500 per person a year; three showed modest net cost increases. The honest verdict: usually cheaper, not guaranteed. Denver's five-year randomized trial is the cleanest read. Housed participants cost $6,876 less a year than the control group, with 77% still stably housed after three years.
This isn't charity. In a randomized trial, housing people cost the public about $6,900 less a year, and left far more of them stably housed.
Here's the part that should worry every Asheville employer, because it's already costing you in hiring: the housing math breaks at every rung of the income ladder, not just the bottom.
A Buncombe County worker needs to earn $29.08 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent, the 2025 Out of Reach housing wage for metro Asheville. Median housekeeping wages are about $15.18, roughly half that.
A 2025 National Housing Conference report found half of Asheville's construction workers earn less than the $59,840 needed to rent a one-bedroom.
It isn't confined to the lowest-wage jobs. Even civil engineers making nearly $100,000 struggle to afford a home here.
In a regional survey, 60% of business owners said the cost and availability of housing were by far the hardest issues to hiring in the mountains.
Roughly $250 million in hospitality investment is entering the market across 2025–26, including 1,200 new hotel rooms, but the workforce to operate that expansion cannot afford to live where the work is.
The squeeze isn't a bad year that corrects itself. When a market is this tight, there's no slack at the bottom, and the people with the least margin fall out first. That's where the hiring problem and homelessness become the same line item.
Some costs never reach a tax bill. Unpaid ER visits become hospital bad debt that works its way into prices and the premiums employers fund. To be straight: economists disagree on how large that pass-through is. It runs well below dollar-for-dollar and depends on a hospital's market power, so treat it as real, but modest.
The costs you can't dodge are the visible ones: the downtown your customers walk through, the staff hours, the emergency calls. Those are what make "leave it alone" the expensive option, not the safe one.
You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix, or keep funding, at a premium, the problem.
Modern homelessness was built over roughly fifty years by policy choices: torn-down housing, slashed budgets, emptied hospitals. The hopeful corollary is that what policy built, policy can take apart, and communities that rebuilt their housing drove their numbers down.
For Asheville the incentives line up unusually well. The same investment that lets you staff your business, fill those new hotel rooms, and keep your workers in town is the investment that keeps people from falling onto the street to begin with.