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. In a randomized trial in Denver, offering supportive housing paid back about half its cost per person in bills that never came due. The people in the trial were homeless and had been arrested at least eight times in three years.
A person cycling through homelessness costs taxpayers a fortune, and you don't get to decline the bill. It lands on hospitals, the county jail, and EMS.
The only question is whether you keep buying homelessness one emergency at a time.
In 2017 the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated that a chronically homeless person costs taxpayers an average of $35,578 a year. That cost adds up as people cycle through emergency rooms, hospital stays, psychiatric centers, detox, and jail. Housing doesn't erase that bill, but it brings it down. A randomized trial in Denver studied homeless people arrested again and again. It measured how much less the public spent on jail, courts, police, shelter, emergency-room and ambulance services for those offered housing than for a control group.
Annualized public-services cost per person in Denver's randomized trial, among homeless people with frequent arrests in Denver: the control group vs. everyone offered supportive housing, whether or not they moved in. Both bars count jail, courts, police, prison, shelter, other housing assistance, EMS, 911 and detox, and emergency room and ambulance costs billed to Medicaid; the program's own cost per person sits outside these bars and was roughly half covered by the difference.
A National Academies review of six controlled studies found mixed results. Three of the studies showed net savings of up to about $33,500 per person a year. The remaining three found net cost increases of about $250 to about $3,100 per person a year. The review's figures are in 2015 dollars. Its own verdict was that policymakers should not expect net savings. But the review also said some savings could show up in specific studies, such as those focused only on persistently heavy users of emergency medical services.
Denver's five-year randomized trial is the cleanest read. People offered supportive housing, including the one in five who did not move in, used $6,876 less a year in other public services than the control group. Those offsets covered roughly half the program's own cost per person. Of the people who moved in and were alive three years later, 77 percent were still housed.
The housing shortage is already costing Asheville employers in hiring. It reaches from the housekeeper, who can't afford the rent, to the civil engineer, who can't afford to buy.
Median housekeeping wages run about $15 an hour. That is well under half of the $35.29 an hour a Buncombe County worker must earn to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. The $35.29 is the 2026 Out of Reach housing wage for metro Asheville.
In a 2025 report, the National Housing Conference pictured a typical Asheville construction site. It found that in 2024, seven of the site's 13 occupations earned a median wage below the $59,840 needed to afford a one-bedroom.
By 2024, even civil engineers making nearly $100,000 couldn't afford to buy a typical home here.
In a 2022 survey of employers across 10 Western North Carolina counties, business leaders put the cost and availability of housing at the top of their problems hiring and keeping workers.
As of February 2024, nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms were under construction or in the development pipeline. That count included rooms that were not yet being built. It began when the city lifted its hotel moratorium in February 2021. A July 2026 CoStar report on the western North Carolina hotel market counted two hotels under construction in the Asheville area, with 208 rooms between them. The workforce to run the new hotel rooms is priced out. That story is told in full in 1,700 New Hotel Rooms. Nobody to Staff Them.
This shortage is structural, not a down year that bounces back on its own. Apartment rents here have slipped since the third quarter of 2024, but in tax-credit and public housing complexes, almost nothing sits empty. Squeeze the bottom of a market that hard and the workers with the least room in their budgets are the first to be priced out. That's where the hiring problem and homelessness become the same line item.
Some costs are easy to miss. Nationally in 2013, public funds covered most of the cost of unpaid care for uninsured patients, about two-thirds of it. Some argue that providers recover part of the rest by charging private insurers more, which would reach the premiums employers fund. The evidence for that pass-through is thin. A 2014 KFF analysis found no evidence that providers had charged private insurers more to cover the rising cost of unpaid care. It put the possible pass-through at 2.3 percent of private insurance spending in 2013, or 4.6 percent if its estimate were doubled. So treat it as small at most.
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" an expensive option, not a safe one.
The shortage that drives your hiring problem and the homelessness downtown took shape over 50 years of choices: housing torn down, budgets cut. None of it is a fixed cost of doing business here.
For Asheville the incentives line up. Employers in the 2022 survey put the cost and availability of housing at the top of their problems hiring and keeping workers. In Denver's trial, offering supportive housing to homeless people arrested again and again avoided public costs for jail, the ER and other services. The avoided costs offset about half of what the program cost per person.
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